Category Archives: Digital

Lavender Town Syndrome

Nationality: United States
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/17/13
Primary Language: English
Language: French

The informant is a college student from Reno, Nevada.

This supposed “syndrome” is a piece of online lore which comes from the Pokemon video games for Gameboy. The informant first stumbled upon a website about it while he was in high school. However, he played the games when he was seven or eight years old. In the game, the player travels from town to town, advancing towards the end. One of the towns is called Lavender Town. In it, there is a tower full of ghosts of wandering souls of Pokemon who have been murdered. When the player enters a new area, the music changes. Each town has its own song, and the informant recalls Lavender Town’s being particularly creepy.

This song is central to the lore which has become an online legend. According to the legend, when the first prototypes of the game came out in Japan in February of 1996, there was a spike in illness of children who bought and played the game. These “illnesses” supposedly made them mentally unstably, resulting in a spike in suicides and violent behavior. According to the legend, the high frequencies used in the song resulted in these physiological changes. The informant does not actually believe the legend is actually true, mostly because it is posted on a page called “creepypasta Wiki”, a page for stories that are generally made-up internet hoaxes. Still, there are entire forums filled with lengthy theories about missing frequencies and ghosts in the machine. The following is a link to the song, as heard in the final, U.S. version:

 

Japanese girl’s suicide drawing

Nationality: Korean-American
Age: 23
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 3/23/13
Primary Language: English

My informant tells me this story of a teenage girl in Japan who drew a drawing Japan shortly before she committed suicide. The story and drawing went viral in Asia. In the forums online, it is said that you can see the girl’s sadness in the eyes of the girl in the picture. Forums warn against staring into the girls eyes for longer than 5 minutes, telling me that people have committed suicide after doing it. According to my informant, people say the picture changes,as you view it there is a hint of a growing taunting smirk appearing on the girls lips or a dark ring grows around the girl or her eyes.

Me: “Have you looked into the picture for five minutes?”

Informant: “No! I thought it wasn’t a big deal, but it’s really scary when you actually try it! I can’t meet the girl’s eyes for more than a few seconds because I’m afraid of what I will see!”

Me: “Do you believe that people have committed suicide from looking at the picture?”

Informant: Not really… I don’t think they did. But it’s a freaky story, so I don’t know.

Analysis: Through my research, I could not find any solid news articles to support the claim that people have committed suicide after looking at this drawing, though many people claim there are hundreds. Furthermore, I found some forum posts that claim a video-game designer in Japan was the real artist of the portrait and that he was still alive and well. Some forum posts claim that because the image has a blurry quality to it, if you stare at it for too long, your vision will get blurry as well and you are under the illusion that the picture is changing before your eyes. This also has to do with the image being seen on a digital screen.

Because of the context of the story and the atmosphere in which it is often read, this will help induce fear and influence a person’s response. This most likely is an elaborate internet hoax, much like a chain email letter. People enjoy being scared because it provides an adrenaline rush which can be extremely addicting.

My informant is 23, Korean-American, and currently studying at USC (expected graduation 2013). She first saw the picture and heard the story when she was in high school, approximately 16 years of age.

The Hitler/Jesus Game

Nationality: Caucasian/White
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/26/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese

(This entry is presented as a transcript of my informant’s answers during our interview. Interviewer input/clarification is put in brackets[] for the duration of the interview.)

“It is the uh it’s always hard to call it by something. I guess you could call it “The “Hitler/Jesus Game” ugh that’s such an odd name for it. Some people call it the Hitler Game, some people call it the Jesus Game. Uh basically it’s a uh Wikipedia game. It’s not, obviously the game isn’t on Wikipedia. The game was created by people who use Wikipedia.”

“The goal is to pick something at random or make a list of random things for somebody to pick from and then try to get uh through the hyperlinks on that Wikipedia page to try and get to Jesus or Hitler in as few clicks as possible.

“I play it Jesus or Hitler, some people play it with just Jesus, some people play it with just Hitler, umm but uh it’s a very amusing game. Like, my record is two clicks, I went from pineapples to Hitler in two clicks. Uh on Wikipedia. From Pineapples to Hitler in two clicks. The, I think, the intermediary was actually World War 2. The pineapple industry exploded during the 1940s during World War 2 because uh soldiers needed…see you actually do learn things from this game, um, which is interesting, like you learn random facts that are totally useless but entertaining nonetheless. Uh, but yeah, no, apparently the pineapple industry blossomed during World War 2 so that was an easy click. World War 2 then, straight after, Hitler. So yeah.

“Some people will restrict you by the number of clicks, like you have to get to Jesus or Hitler in six clicks, uh specifically, that’s both the maximum and the minimum, like you have to use that many to get there. Sometimes you’ll have to circle around the topic before you finally enter it. That’s a very challenging way to play that game. Um, the other rules, uh, it’s kinda just decided upon by the person playing the game. It’s a very loosely based rules system that, you know, I kinda came up with with a group of friends in high school. But I mean, other people play it too, so I’m wondering how it was first created. It’s kind of this urban legend, that, uh, all of, you know, my friends happened to know about, I mean, you even know about it and you’re from the east coast, right?

Somebody mentioned it to me, like, we didn’t just invent the game, I heard about the game from a friend of mine, and then we just kind of created the rules out of that. At first it was just, let’s get to Hitler in as few clicks as possible, and then somebody said, uh, somewhere along the line, I don’t remember who, um, ‘maybe we should try doing Jesus. Jesus might be easier, because we were having such a hard time trying to get to Hitler in as small number of clicks’. So that ended up being entertaining.

“Mainly in high school was when I played this. [Was that when you first discovered it, in high school?] Yeah. Generally afterschool, uh I think that was when I first heard about it was afterschool, and uh from occasion to occasion. And you know a random subject would come up or we’d start talking about something and somebody would say ‘hey that was actually, that would be a pretty good word to try on Wikipedia for the Hitler game, uh, yeah’.

“[Would you mind playing a round?] Sure, let’s do it.

“Give me a word. [Let’s just do a random, uh, just random article…so what did we get?] Huntingdonshire Regional College. Okay. And you can play with friends, too, that’s another side detail I forget to mention. Yeah, so, I might need some help. This is really obscure.

“Okay, so let’s see here. Huntingdonshire…Further Education? Or England! England will definitely get us there…if we don’t get something related to World War 2 or Hitler I will be absolutely shocked. Okay. Like the bombings or something.

“(Looking through the England Wikipedia entry) History…[Once you hit a country it’s basically over.] Yeah. Oh my god goes all the way back to the Paleolithic Era. That’s kind of cool. Celtic culture…we’re moving up through the ages guys! Middle Ages, Hundred Years’ War, Late, Modern, and Contemporary. Industrial Revolution, Duke of Wellington, Victorian Era, we’re getting there guys!

“What? This is why we just can’t assume in two clicks. Okay the Blitz!..there’s one that says Winston Churchill, the Allies. Do we go with Churchill or the Allies? Let’s go with the Allies, we’ll have more success with the Allies.

“[Are we allowed to go back? If we need to?] Uh, I don’t go back. We might be able to get Hitler somewhere in here…like if we could get to Germany. (Sigh of frustration) Well I know it could be in here somewhere…After the German Invasion of Poland, Invasion of Poland, we could do…If Hitler isn’t in here…he isn’t, which is just embarrassing, quite frankly. Um, okay. Second World War then.

“No, will we have more success with Second Wolrd War or Axis powers? I’m thinking Second World War thinking of how much of a failure Allies was. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Collapse of the German Reich, come on now, well there’s Germany. Commanders and Leaders, there’s Adolf Hitler! We’re there.

“We went from the Allies to the Second World War. And before that, let’s see here, that was one, two…three…five clicks. That’s not too bad!”

 

Analysis:

I originally asked my informant to conduct this interview because the Hitler/Jesus Game just happened to come up in conversation the previous week, and I was intrigued that this person (who grew up on the opposite side of the continent from myself) knew about this game that I also encountered in high school. When interviewing him, I made sure to investigate all the possible differences between our versions of the game, to which I found a surprisingly large amount. For example, my version of the game only used the Hitler Wikipedia page as an end goal, and one always had to start from a random page. In addition, the rule set I used did not allow for the use of Wikipedia pages for countries, cities, or World War II specifically. I was surprised to find my informant’s version to have none of these rules, and instead to be much more of a free experience. It is not necessarily better or worse, though I think it speaks to how we came upon the game. I discovered it by myself online, while my informant developed the game with friends after hearing about the basic ruleset. He also had a much more social version, allowing for input from a group, while the thought of playing the game with other people never crossed my mind. Even with such a simple, silly game, the kind of game that would be spawned by an internet culture that often looks for any kind of distraction from boredom, there can be so much variation to be discovered.

The Wadsworth Constant

Nationality: American; Half-white, "an amalgamation"
Age: 20
Occupation: "Student, I guess"
Residence: Pasadena, CA
Performance Date: 4/26/13
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, Latin

“To determine is a video is worth watching, skip a third of the way into it and you can see if it’s worth watching. If it’s not interesting then, it won’t be for the rest of the video.”

My informant says this rule, which he knows as the Wadsworth Constant, applies “to any internet videos, like Youtube videos or Vimeo videos”. He learned the rule from Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internet” that aggregates and ranks user-submitted content. He discovered the Wadsworth Constant about a year ago, when he had it described to him by another Reddit user, though he believes it has existed in this form “for a while”.

 

Analysis:

At first this rule might seem absurd to anyone who has a basic understanding of the sort of video content popular on the internet. Most internet videos are not very long, perhaps only a few minutes, and shorter videos are often spread around more than longer ones. With content that’s already so short, it seems unnecessary to find shortcuts for determining the worth of this kind of content. A rule like this could only come from a community that places a premium on time, and ponders the value of the content the consume in this limited time seriously.

It’s telling that my informant first learned of the Wadsworth Constant on Reddit, a page with hundreds and thousands of entries, all vying for a user’s time and attention, adding hundreds more every hour. As “the front page of the internet”, the side acts as a metaphor for the internet as a whole, as this place where millions of different things draw our attention, and it is literally impossible to view every one. The Wadsworth Constant, as it has been developed, tries to stymy the paralysis that could overwhelm one when trying to view all this content. With time held at a premium, internet users want to make sure they are using their time to the fullest, even when just watching internet videos.

Godwin’s Law

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/13
Primary Language: English
Language: Latin
“Godwin’s Law is one of the so-called laws of the internet.  It states that the longer a forum thread goes, the more likely a comparison to Nazis or Hitler will appear.  On most forums, mentioning Nazis in such a way means that the poster’s side is invalid, because they cannot come up with relevant arguments and must instead turn to name calling and hyperbole.
This is a “law” you will hear about just from existing on the internet long enough.  Almost any forum or message board mentioned it in their “code of conduct” or similar document, especially around 5-10 years ago.  At this point, it is just considered as a given of the internet.
As for where it came from, I have no real solid idea (though i’m sure a glance at Wikipedia could give me several leads…).  My guess is that before it was called codified, it was more an informal rule on forums.  No Idea who Godwin was, though i suppose it could be the administrator or moderator of one of the first forums to officially post the rule.”
Analysis:
This is the second item I came across in my folklore collection that related to an idea of “rules” for the internet (the first being my entry on the Wadsworth Constant). For a medium so vast with a user base so multifaceted, the medium is quickly developing a standardized set of rules and characteristics of user behavior. In a slightly less significant connection, this is also my second entry that just happens to deal with the internet and Hitler (The Hitler/Jesus Game), which could be a sign of a problematic leaning towards troubling figures, though I think that is something that would have to be researched further, to prevent bringing attention to a problem that does not actually exist.
As the internet becomes further integrated into everyday life, I predict more folklore will deal with the workings of the internet, as these entries are beginning to show. The world will become more connected online, making the digital just as important as the physical. My informant joked that his knowledge of folklore dealt with the digital so much because he was “a white nerd growing up in a family of white nerds”, but the elements of his upbringing will become more widespread as technology becomes cheaper and more accessible, bringing us into an age of digital folklore.
Concerning the Law itself, the observation it makes speaks to the nature of argument that often emerges as a debate continues and continues without any real end. As logical arguments lose their effectiveness, we often resort to personal attacks to win favor with those we try to impress (see: attack ads), and a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis is probably the worst parallel one can make to another. It’s a sign of desperation that many people will resort to, and as this Law shows, the Hitler insult is probably the easiest and most effective one to resort to.