Booshka

» see ameba.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The name only works as a joke if you say it out loud. Buu is the common Japanese word for the noise a pig makes, and Matryoshka is the nesting doll, so Booshka is a pig-shaped doll about the size of your palm. It stood permanently upright and hopped when it wanted to get anywhere. You gave it a name of its own, deliberately separate from the handle your Ameba blog account used, which meant the pet was a character you had made rather than a second label for yourself.

CyberAgent launched it on 13 September 2009 as a browser game for Japanese mobile phones, back when that meant a feature phone running Flash Lite inside a carrier's browser. Playing required an Ameba account, and later you could reach it through mixi as well. There is a doll called Booshka sold by Atelier Siesta in Yokohama, on the market before the game existed, and the game's own encyclopedia entry opens by disclaiming any connection to it.

On 24 January 2014 the staff blog posted that the service would end that March. Enough players wrote in asking for it to stay that on 6 February the same blog reversed the decision and said the game would continue. The 2014 reversal was not a stay of a few months, it was eight and a half more years of a pig hopping on a screen.

~ the case file ~

~ what you actually did all day ~

The core verb was ijiri, poking. Poking your own Booshka raised its mood toward a ceiling and credited you roughly ten to seventeen points a go, with a pudding or a newly learned trick turning up now and then. Poking somebody else's Booshka credited you nothing at all and only nudged their pet's mood partway up. Pudding ran the other half of the loop, fed only to your own pet and in unlimited quantity.

Then there was eduke, feeding other people's pets, and this is where the design got strange. An onigiri handed to a stranger's Booshka could change that pet's personality, and you could hand it over whether or not the owner wanted you to, which is why the settings let you refuse feeding altogether. The competitive version was the eduke battle, the event the game was known for: teams of up to twenty, several days to ten days long, no leaving once you joined. The high-scoring foods cost about 2,400 accumulated points per ten, or about 200 AmeGold, which came to roughly 210 yen. By 9 January 2012 there were 237 tricks to learn, split between ones your pet did alone and ones it performed with a visitor.

A game whose central mechanic is letting strangers feed your animal without asking needs a dense local population to make sense of it, and Booshka's was a population with a membership requirement I could not meet. The login came from an Ameba blog account, the screen came from a Japanese carrier's browser, and the reward for turning up daily was that the same few people had poked your pig while you were asleep.

~ when flash took the phones ~

Adobe's end of support for Flash is the thing that finally separated Booshka from the hardware it was born on. On 30 November 2020 at 23:59 the feature-phone version shut off, and the notice came from an Ameba director who listed it alongside two other feature-phone games, Mog and Farmy, plus the feature-phone build of Ameba's sticker feature. Flash Lite went away, so the games drawn in it went away with it.

What survived was the version that ran outside the old browser, and it lasted another twenty months. The final notice went up on 24 February 2022 and the service ended on 21 July 2022, twelve years and ten months after a palm-sized pig first hopped onto a Japanese phone screen.

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