How do you kill the player and resurrect them as a spectator? This question haunts those charged with adapting video games from their interactive form to one that puts an insurmountable barrier between media and the individual – an impossible translation taking place on the most basic structural level. The dilemma surrounding the adaptation of interactivity is visible within the Japanese otaku industry, where media forms must be constructed to survive fluid translation from one media form to another.
An adaptation between forms tends to function within a hierarchy of mediums: a book is usually awarded more artistic significance than its film adaptation, the film more than its licensed video game form (Hutcheon 4). Yet, in some ways, the Japanese otaku industry works outside of this paradigm, with narratives easily and repeatedly crossing the seemingly impermeable barriers between print, film and digital forms without much respectability lost or gained – manga, for instance, carries little more or less cultural significance than anime or the ‘light’ novel. But as the medium specificity that defines how a form functions and is received cannot be smoothly overcome, one of the innovations of the Japanese otaku industry is the way creators either consciously or unconsciously anticipate the inevitable adaptation of their properties on levels of structure, narrative and aesthetic. 07th Expansion’s Higurashi When They Cry (Higurashi no naku koro ni, hereafter Higurashi), a major multimedia franchise in the Japanese industry, exemplifies this trend and also reveals ways in which the creators driving the otaku popular culture industry manipulate narrative and structural elements to ease adaptation.