I Am Part-time Worker!! Is Another Reminder That The Meme Game Is Not Exclusive To The English-Speaking World

There's No Denying That This Game Shot Up To The Top Of The Steam Charts Thanks To Vtubers

Vtubers. They are a cherished commodity these days.

The "Meme Game." We all know what it is and don't doubt they exist. Our relationship with them often depends on whether our favorite streamers or YouTube personalities play them and provide a parasocial snapshot into how to enjoy them. Even then, you might still find them to be a blight in the industry that makes searching for more serious titles on digital marketplaces like Steam, Epic, GOG, PSN, Nintendo eShop, or the Xbox Games Store a complete hassle with you needing to wade through pages of bullshit before you can find the game you've been following for months. To me, that's more on the storefront's end, but there's no denying that these meme games rarely represent anything long-standing or substantial in the industry or gaming hobby. One week, you'll see everyone playing the same joke game on Steam or Twitch, and then the next week, it's gone. They are formless aberrations like an electrical current. Their presence is nigh-omnipotent, but their fleeting existences place them perpetually in the periphery of your mind. Also, if you can see them physically manifest before you, something has gone horribly wrong.

So, as someone who follows their fair share of Vtubers, I was not taken aback when virtually every Vtuber on this planet decided to play I Am Part-time Worker!! It's happened with so many cheap, jump-scare-based, indie horror games that I couldn't help but find myself initially rolling my eyes and dismissing the game and these streams outright. Eventually, I watched Fuwamoco play the title, which inspired me to check out an archive of Inugami Korone playing the game. Watching these streams resulted in me playing the game itself, which essentially confirmed my suspicion that there's more to "I Am Part-time Worker!!" than what you might think. Sure, the game is bog standard and compares unfavorably to the incredibly crowded field of joke simulation games. After a brief prologue and tutorial on the game's two mechanics, scanning items and bonking nuisance customers with a crowbar, there's not much to it. As a convenience store worker, you survey items using a swimmy-feeling cash register scanner for customers wishing to buy things without issue. You defeat problematic ones that disrupt your ability to work or create a bad atmosphere at your store by striking them with a crowbar. And while there is some replayability in that not every possible type of customer will spawn in a single campaign, even when you select the longest session type, you'll likely get them all by your second go and without leaderboards or all that much variety to its encounters, this is very much a "one and done" affair unless it gets additional content which doesn't seem likely.

Not the best Unity take on a Japanese store alleyway, but not the worst, either.

So, why was this game so popular with the Vtuber streaming community? It was quick and not demanding on computers while allowing them to cover all of their bases. The often surreal customer encounters, whether the standard grumpy or impatient customer or a more exotic one involving a superhero descending from your store's roof, allow these streamers to do their typical streamer thing of acting over the top and overly excited when things get whacky. In the realm of Vtubers, wherein you are, in theory, gravitating to a digital idol with a distinct personality, even if you have a dozen Vtubers playing the same game, each provides a unique response to the events they experience. Even if you know a guy carrying a mallet is bound to break through the store's back wall around the game's ten to fifteen-minute mark, the reaction you see from the person you are watching will undoubtedly be different from others. There is something undeniably gratifying about waiting in anticipation to see how someone you enjoy watching will react when you know a crazy event is about to happen. Maybe you don't like Vtubers, but let's not deny the fact that many of you reading this blog feel this way about at least a dozen videos on this very website.

The Real World Events That I Am Part-time Worker Seeks To Convey

Thoughts about the normalization of people taking things from store shelves, opening them, eating from them, and finally paying for them but they are partial consumed?

But enough about the world of Vtubers and me justifying my habit of having them increasingly fill my game stream watching time. I suggested earlier that there's more to "I Am Part-time Worker!!" than you might expect. With this title, you can't entirely call it a simple meme game quickly made using Unreal character models and art assets and call it a day. As indicated on such trustworthy sites like TVTropes or by YouTube essayists, the game's namesake, premise, and underlying justification on why the player character shouts "I AM PART-TIME WORKER" every time you deal with a disruptive customer steams from a real-world incident in Japan. In 2008, a Japanese convenience store or konbini worker was accosted by a would-be robber, and rather than hand over the money in their register, they proceeded to jump on the store desk and shout, "I'M A PART TIMER," which caused the robber to flee the scene. The documentation on this specific incident is spotty, and there were questions about the veracity of whether it was a legitimate event or staged. Nonetheless, the event went viral, but maybe not for the reasons you might suspect.

Being a convenience store worker is an unofficial right of passage in Japan. It is one of the most ubiquitous first jobs teens and young adults often get, as these positions rarely ask about years of experience and have generally flexible hours at the cost of the pay being dogshit and the rigamarole involving a ton of drudgery. The way Americans talk about Walmart or McDonald's or Europeans about Shell gas stations or Aldi as bedrocks for gaining early job experience is what the konbini represents in Japan. Working in one is far from glorious, but it's always an option, even when you are down in your luck. Nonetheless, the reputation of Japan as a more "polite" society must mean that convenience store workers there deal with much fewer customer complaints and disputes than those in Europe and the United States, right? Indeed, I Am Part-time Worker!! has to be a fantastical take on the tedious but stable work of being at the register of a 7-Eleven, but its customer-based frustrations must be pure fantasy! Well, not to burst your bubble, but the times are changing, and that includes retail workers being treated like absolute dogshit, even in Japan. Part of this stems from a recent shift in which convenience store workers have increasingly become foreign temp workers because the supply of easily exploitable teenagers isn't what it once was twenty years ago in Japan.

Don't lie. We have all had this boss. Some of you have this boss right now.

In 2014, a convenience store clerk batted a knife out of the hands of someone trying to rob them using nothing but their barcode scanner and then shouted at them to go away. In 2015, a Lawson clerk faced a would-be robber brandishing a box cutter and, when asked to empty their cash register, blankly stared at them and replied, "Why?" They responded this way again, and the frustrated robber ran away in shock. In 2017, a 54-year-old woman grabbed a knife-wielding would-be robber by the hand and dragged them out of their store. Another famous story from 2023 that went viral involved a retail worker blankly responding, "We don't," when a robber asked them, "You've got money, right?" Retail workers in Japan deal with as much ridiculous shit as the ones in the United States or elsewhere deal with. Whether you interpret this as a sign of Japan's societal struggles to provide people with genuine economic opportunities or a crumbling of traditional values due to social media or immigration depends on the meat bag between your office chair and computer keyboard. Nonetheless, things are getting dicey for retail workers in Japan, and when you add social media trends to the mix, you have a recipe for burnout and everyone in the country feeling like convenience store work is a trap.

Additionally, there is a Karen effect in retail outside of the English-speaking world, and "I Am Part-time Worker!!" has a nuisance customer who immediately asks to see your manager upon entering your store. Your correct recourse is to hit them in the face with a crowbar. To call this an exercise of catharsis for Japanese retail workers playing this game would be an understatement. However, an impatient customer throws their items at you and immediately comments about you being slow as you scan them on the ground. Thwacking them results in a penalty because the game enforces a version of the adage "the customer is always right." It's a completely arbitrary point of contention, and that's the point. This game is NOT entirely a sandbox power fantasy to those misaligned in retail. Instead, it simulates their most common frustrations with their work with a surrealist undercurrent. A customer that demands the manager must be eliminated because that would be "inconvenient" to the manager. A customer generally being an asshole but still wanting to do business? Well, that's just part of the job. But wouldn't it be more satisfying to hit them regardless? There's another example of the game's "inside baseball" humor that leads me to believe one of the people who worked on it was a retail worker at some point in their life. When regular customers place their items on the table to be scanned, there's a chance one of these articles can roll over and land on the floor, and the customers do nothing to help you. Instead, you must move from your normal working position to find the missing articles and haplessly scan them on the floor. I felt that as someone who once bagged groceries at a Safeway. Outside of its final minutes, the gameplay is usually defined by awkward booms and busts of activity. You have a few minutes with little to no action and then a deluge of nonsense followed by another lull of nothingness. Even if it is a cheap, surreal joke, it perfectly nails certain aspects of working retail.

The Snapshot Into Japanese Meme Culture The Game Provides

Stupid anime-inspired hijinks in the real world? Oh the humanity! Whatever shall we do?!?!

I sometimes get frustrated when I see people bemoan the presence of gaming-related memes in indie or AAA games and present them as being a Western game-only problem. That's so far from the truth, and I don't know where to start. I know this isn't exactly "breaking news" to most of you, but memes happen in any country or population with access to the internet. What's more, I Am Part-time Worker!! is one Japanese title in a LONG line and tradition of making throwaway pop culture references to manga, anime, video games, and more. There's a problem customer who does the Hanma splits from Baki The Grappler in a parking lot, and you need to hit them with your crowbar. One of the deeper cuts involves a nuisance customer putting up a flag depicting their own image, which you need to remove, which is a callback to a one-off scene in the Higanjima manga. The game also has you deal with Sadako, which parody media in Japan has been taking the piss out of for well over twenty years now, and there's a person that transforms into the Tyrant from Resident Evil. There's even an Avengers reference with a customer attempting to break into a freezer with a hammer and complaining about their hammer not working. No media, regardless of where it comes from, is safe, and that's always been the case with parody works in the Japanese doujin and indie game scene.

This game truly gets its mileage when it uncomfortably blends reality and memes. You might look at the weird customer that you catch replacing bicycle seats with broccoli as a reference to a similar scene from Nichijō, but what if I told you that this happened in real life in Japan? In 2011, at the highly revered Tokyo University, a security guard found dozens of bicycles with their seats replaced with broccoli and the grounds where the bikes were parked covered in red paint. Also, this incident was the second time students decided to try and make a silly gag from Nichijō. Likewise, you might be aware of prank streamers getting arrested or their asses kicked when they pushed social boundaries in Japan with their appalling actions. However, streamer culture annoyingly blending into real life also happens domestically in Japan. Go to Akihabara, Disney Seas, or Universal Studios and bask in how commonplace and ubiquitous Japanese streamers and selfie photographers are. That shouldn't be surprising considering worldwide TikTok trends like NPC streams started in Japan or that this year, Japanese people fell in love with Trader Joe's tote bags as much as communities did in the United States.

People in other countries getting excited for things you can live without? Say whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

Yes, this game is a pop culture delivery vehicle at times, but there's more to it than that. "I Am Part-time Worker!!" perfectly conveys how exhausting it is when social media takes foot in your workplace. When someone does attempt to whip their phone out to stream your character-scanning items, there's something deeply satisfying about the correct recourse: hitting them with a crowbar. When you hear a person doing parkour on the side wall of your store, you can't help but loudly sign and say, "Give me a break." What is equally effective is how the game, either by hook or crook, manages to convey that sense of overwhelming we all felt the first time we were given a job and expected to perform functions with insufficient support and guidance. We all have felt a sense of uneasiness about not being able to get something done without catching flack, even though we were not given enough tools or assistance to make what we were called up to do possible. It doesn't matter if you've never worked retail. That minute when your co-worker and manager leave and expect you to attend to the affairs of your convenience store in the game by yourself on your first day is a profoundly relatable moment that works across cultural barriers. And even when zanier things happen, like when two bozos drive their car into the store, there is a brief moment when you can't help but think, "Shit, the manager is going to be pissed."

The Meme Game Is Worldwide And Always Has Been, And That's Not Bad

Cone guy is surprisingly a chill dude that never causes problems.

There's been a lot of flack and negativity sent Steam's way in terms of how its storefront puts one-offs or meme games like this to the forefront over legitimate scrappy indie developers trying to get their passion project off the runway. Much of that criticism is legitimate, but at the same time, it's hard to fault Steam for being unable to fight universal and worldwide behaviors in gaming. The streamer meme game is not being exploited by a few bad-faith actors from one nation or community. It's also not just horror games or VR porn titles, even if that's what it might seem like at times. Developers, whether in the English-speaking world, Europe, Japan, China, the Middle East, or Australia, are churning out works meant to get famous with streamers. And it's not just American teens or tweeners that are snatching up these games and furthering this. It's happening everywhere. If Valve can't even be bothered to stop a fraudulent banana clicker game, can they do anything to stave off gaming memes? I don't think so!

At least when it comes to "I Am Part-time Worker!!" there's an opportunity for introspection. Even if all of its pop culture references fly past you, there's an underlying truth to its wacky hijinx that "works." While most people are generally understanding and kind to retail workers, the ones that can't get with the program are an absolute fly in the ointment. And once you go beyond the tip of the iceberg and realize the game is surfacing real-world experiences and life lessons from another country, it immediately separates itself into a bucket of wheat instead of chaff. It's no Moon Base Alpha, Garry's Mod, Octodad, or Among Us, but the fact that there's something more to it than "lol, look at this anime shit, isn't that funny," is a welcomed change of pace. It's a fascinating snapshot into 2010's Japanese meme culture, and if you missed that internet subculture when it happened, the game acts as an oddly compelling time capsule. Do you need to play "I Am Part-time Worker!!"? No, probably not, but that doesn't mean it deserves to be categorized as comparable to the absolute dreck on Steam these days.