My favorite video arcade, in Kyoto's Teramachi-dori mall. These
guys are all playing martial arts games in the Tekken/Street Fighter
vein. You would think the arcades would be packed with all the top
of the line stuff, cutting-edge graphics and so forth, and I certainly
did see some impressive displays of technology. But there's also
a lot of touchingly old-school stuff. Street Fighter II, for instance,
a twenty-year old game, is still beloved of Kyoto's teenagers. They
also have a really big thing for computerized mah-jongg, with graphics
reminiscent of Windows solitaire.
On the more technologically advanced front, there are big networked
multiplayer strategy games that you control with a deck of magnetized
cards, similar to Magic: The Gathering, except the game reads the
cards' content and location when you slide them around on the magnetized
table. So for instance, in the medieval Japanese warfare game, each
card is a battalion of samurai that you're maneuvering on the battlefield.
In the soccer game, each card is a player on your team. So you're
shuffling these cards around, competing against five other players,
doing the joystick and buttons, talking on your cell phone, drinking
energy drinks and chainsmoking Marlboro Lights, all at once. To
me, this looks like about as much fun as being an air-traffic controller,
exciting in its way but stressful above all else. I consider myself
a gamer, and I can hold my own among casual American Nintendo and
PS2 enthusiasts, but I didn't last thirty seconds against some of
the games in this arcade. The level of discipline these guys (and
girls, in steadily increasing numbers) bring to bear even on their
afterschool timewasting is humbling indeed, and I shudder to imagine
the pressure they're under at school, work, etc.
