, a contraction of the words costume play, is a performance art in which participants called cosplayers wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character.

Cosplayers often interact to create a subculture and a broader use of the term "cosplay" applies to any costumed role-playing in venues apart from the stage.

Any entity that lends itself to dramatic interpretation may be taken up as a subject and it is not unusual to see genders switched.

Favorite sources include manga and anime, comic books and cartoons, video games, and live-action films and television series.

are comics created in Japan or by creators in the Japanese language, conforming to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century.

They have a long and complex pre-history in earlier Japanese art.

is Japanese hand-drawn or computer animation.

The word is the abbreviated pronunciation of "animation" in Japanese, where this term references all animation.

Outside Japan, anime is used to refer specifically to animation from Japan or as a Japanese-disseminated animation style often characterized by colorful graphics, vibrant characters and fantastical themes.

Arguably, the culturally abstract approach to the word's meaning may open up the possibility of anime produced in countries other than Japan.

For simplicity, many Westerners strictly view anime as a Japanese animation product.

Some scholars suggest defining anime as specifically or quintessentially Japanese may be related to a new form of orientalism.

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide.

It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.

The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and peer-to-peer networks for file sharing.

A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or computer monitor.

The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device, but as of the 2000s, it implies any type of display device that can produce two- or three-dimensional images.

Some theorists categorize video games as an art form, but this designation is controversial.