Well, time to revisit this, namely that on Anime News Network, someone asked about why in Japan, comic book artists and writers tend to go to great lengths not to have their faces seen in public. (In fact, this is the norm among them.) The comments, meanwhile, have people replying essentially with, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “Why WOULD people want toget their pictures taken in public?” Here are some quotes from within those comments.
I… don’t know why people don’t get this.
I’m a writer/artist and I don’t want my photo taken. It’s not because I’m ashamed of my looks or anything. I just… don’t want to be recognized when I’m walking down the street. Why is that hard to understand?
Uh, I don’t think it is hard to believe that certain people valued privacy. Hell, I’m a nobody and I don’t want my picture to be spread online at all. All those answers given in the article spoke for themselves as well.
Of course, there are also people out there who enjoy being famous, or dream of being famous, who can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be famous. But that mindset is as alien to me as I’m sure mine is to them.
It does not matter why someone doesn’t want to be photographed. That they don’t should be reason enough not to photograph them.
It seems I have found myself in two different worlds here…though maybe not as much as it may seem, as there are people here who are like me and really would not like getting their pictures taken. Still, what constitutes as the majority opinion seems to be quite different among anime/manga fans and of pinball fans.
That’s the thing though: It should be extremely easy to program something in that tells the player, before they start playing, that this machine has a camera and will take their pictures unless they choose to opt out in some way. As was mentioned earlier, there are some countries where Dialed In! would be outright illegal, as it stands currently, because it doesn’t have a warning that the player will be put on camera.
There are many video games, particularly motion control games and touch screen games, that have a left-handed option, for instance, even though left-handed people only make up 10% of the world population. Do you really think the percentage of people who are nervous on camera is less than 10%? (As a lefty, I can play video games the right-handed way because this is only a recent thing, but I still appreciate the extra mile these game companies go through to make sure that people who are very left-hand dominant can still play the games to their fullest.)
I also don’t think there are quite as few people who are camera-shy as you might think. It sounds like you are an extrovert. Something I’ve repeatedly encountered through my experiences is that extroverts tend not to notice introverts for the simple fact that introverts don’t like having attention drawn to themselves, but extroverts notice people based on their self-directed attention and charisma. (Consider that the most common phobia is glossophobia, the fear of public speaking. It is a natural thing for people to choke when all eyes are on them.)
That sounds like a great idea, really. Do you mean the prompt appearing the moment a game begins?
“In game” experience? Do you mean the machine taking photographs of yourself? If you’d rather the game not have any options whatsoever to disable the camera as someone plays, then I’d rather not play Dialed In! at all. That you’re addressing only the issue of persistence is missing the point. Those of us who don’t like having our pictures taken, even temporarily, are stressed out not simply by photographs of us being available, but by the attention drawn to ourselves. It’s the attention that’s the source of our stress, and stuff like that Selfie frenzy mode is incredibly stressful and embarrassing, as the screen then gets filled up with the player’s mugshot the entirety of when it’s played.
This is why we tend not to have issue with stuff like security footage: That’s not going to be displayed in public for everyone to see (with the exception of those TVs hung from the walls for demonstration or to indicate that the camera system is present in a store). It’s also why we usually don’t have issue with pictures of us in large crowds, as it’s unlikely we’d be identified.