Author's note: I am assuming you are somewhat familiar with PC games such as TF2 and SC2 but somewhat unfamiliar with the Japanese Touhou and Vocaloid community.
Introduction
Games and other works of entertainment, whether made by a company or casually by an individual, has the potential to attract large amounts of fanbase. The interesting part is watching that single seed of work flourish into an immersing environment as talented and skilled fans add their own work to the artificial world.
Touhou
For those who are unfamiliar with what Touhou is, it is a Japanese, doujin (I guess you could roughly call it Indie in English) game created by this guy called ZUN. His real name is Junya Ota and you'll hear him referred to sometimes as Team Shanghi Alice even though he's the only one in this "team." While the game itself consists mostly of bullet hell PC games (think Invaders on steroids with anime style characters and professional-grade fireworks mixed together), there is a very active and large fanbase centered around Touhou. ZUN is quite popular because of the quality of the games he produces, roughly twice a year, in which he composes the music, writes the code, writes the story, and designs the characters of Touhou (all this he does in his free time). The fanbase has sprouted several offshoots and fanwork, from artwork, remixes, games centered around the Touhou storyline, to full blown animes (well maybe not full blown). ZUN is very open with Touhou's intellectual property and is heavily opposed to corporate interference. As such, pretty much everything related to Touhou is fan-produced. The quality and quantity of these productions are high enough that there is a fairly large convention held every year for the sole purpose of sharing Touhou related entertainment.
I want to say the world of Touhou has been growing both vertically, as ZUN comes out with more bullet hell games, and horizontally, as the fanbase contributes to the Touhou world, since the release of EoSD a decade ago (2002).
Here is a comical yet somewhat accurate Cracked article if you want some more quick info on Touhou.
Warcraft, DotA, Starcraft, and Source Simplified Rundown
- Warcraft is a RTS game developed by Blizzard. It currently has three major installments (WC1, 2, and 3). Warcraft (and Starcraft) each run on an engine that Blizzard has opened up for third parties to develop their own games on.
- Defense of the Ancients (DotA) was developed by an individual on Blizzard's open Warcraft engine.
- Starcraft is like Warcraft, a game also developed by Blizzard. It currently has two major installments (SC1 and 2).
- Team Fortress 2 (TF2), an FPS game, runs on the Source engine developed by Valve.
- DotA2 is DotA's successor. While the original DotA was made on Blizzard's Warcraft engine by a third party, DotA2 was made by Valve on Valve's Source engine.
DotA and Valve
When looking for a similarly made game and similarly enthusiastic fanbase in the U.S., I would probably have to say the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) and Valve playerbase (think Garry's Mod, HL, and TF2) come close (but not nearly as close enough, which I will explore further on in the article). Before I continue though, let me get Starcraft 1 and 2 out of the way.
Starcraft 2
I don't really want to touch on SC2 much in this article because of a few factors:
SC2 is viewed as an ESport, centered mostly around competitive gameplay and commentary. SC2 is a finished product, and no matter how popular SC2 custom games are, fans do not really contribute to expansion the Starcraft world. That's why it's called an ESport - it has commerical viability in the stadium and fans play it casually while they watch pros play it professionally, much like athletic sports such as Baseball. Maybe some friends will occasionally get together and watch SC2 streams at the bar. For the most part, SC2 is and has always been corporatized, with fan's contributions having mainly being monetary, whether directly or indirectly.
Back to DotA and Valve
Valve's fanbase and the fanbase's approach to expanding the Valve world as well as Valve's approach to expanding its own world has a distinctively American flavor. Here are three main components in how Valve's world is expanded:
- Steam Workshop: Here, fans can submit third party, cosmetic, in-game items as well as map mods for certain games for approval by fellow users. Once both Valve and those on the workshop approve an item, it is added into the Valve system, available for purchase or download by fellow Steam users. These items (which appear in TF2, DotA2, and Portal) have monetary value and can be traded, while game mods function like patches to a particular game.
- Source Filmmaker: Is analogous to the MikuMikuDance that is sometimes used to recreate and animate Touhou characters. Both SFM and MMD users tend to focus on casual fanbase based humorous works or music videos.
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Basically, in the U.S./Valve, there is concrete infrastructure and is somewhat official. The difference is not only that SFM videos get posted onto YouTube and MMD videos get posted onto NikoDou, or that the U.S. fanbase is found primarily on 4chan or Reddit while Japan's is found on 2ch. There's an oddly different way in how the respective communities reach their fantasy and how their fantasies reach out to them. Both U.S. and Japan audiences work on expanding their fictional worlds, both in similar but different ways. In the U.S., Valve backed Dota 2 is gaining momentum with Starcraft like competitive scenes, while Japan focuses more on the entertainment than competitive aspect through events like Miku's virtual performances.
