This morning a videogame literally forced me to say âI love youâ, enunciating every syllable perfectly, clearly enough for a computer program to register, before it would allow me to progress.
I donât use that word lightly. Maybe thatâs why I have all this money and no one to use to make it happy. Iâm not going to lie: I had to close my eyes in order for the words to come out. It was that creepy. Eyes closed, lips pressed close to the microphone so as to minimize the already-minimal chance that the girl sleeping in the other bedroom sixty feet away wouldnât hear me and think I was talking to her, I said âI love youâ to my Nintendo DS. (In Japanese: âa-i-shi-te-ruâ.) My god; I shuddered. That was the first god damn time I ever said those words to anyone, real or not. The sickening implications of this â the causes, the effects, the explanations â made me suddenly dizzy.
The girl in the DS then said, âNow say it 999,999 more timesâ. The microphone icon displayed again. Was this a bad dream? Well, certainly, in the game I was playing â Konami Digital Entertainmentâs Love Plus â it was being presented as a bizarre nightmare of the main characterâs. I had been living out the simulated life of a high school student for 81 days â ten hours or so in the real world â and the game was just starting to recognize that I had preferred this one girl from the start. The thing is, she was finally starting to like me. The main character realized this, in much grimmer terms, minutes after I saw the figures and crunched the numbers from the comfort of my giant oak bed, here on a beautiful, crisp October morning. Hence the nightmare. The master bedroom in my current palace-like apartment doesnât have a lock. If it did, I would have done like the time the âEyes on Meâ scene came up in Final Fantasy VIII. Back then, I was a college student living in a dormitory, and there was a football game on TV. I could have been decapitated.
I told the game âI love youâ one more time, finally feeling like I was doing the second worst and terriblest thing I have ever done in my life. The worst was way too terrible. I have occasion to remember it, maybe, once a week. It took maybe three years after doing the worst thing I ever did in my life to even realize how terrible it was to say such a thing to someone, so unthinkingly. With Love Plus, the guilt came immediately. We can get into that part later, if youâd like.
Thankfully, it let me off the hook at the second âI love youâ.
2009! More than a decade after I experienced the âEyes On Meâ scene in Final Fantasy VIII and eight years after I did the worst thing I ever did to another person, I live soft and work hard in Tokyo, Japan (not to be confused with Tokyo, Nebraska), and I have developed something of a reputation for being a guy who writes things every once in a while. After eight years of doing pretty much exactly the same thing in pretty much exactly the same way, people have started offering me money for it. Hell if I know why! I will say, however, that life feels something like a vintage arcade game. You know, like how in Altered Beast, all you have to do is keep putting money in the machine and youâre basically guaranteed to see the ending sooner or later. In the past, the proposed writing assignments were utterly inane. To paraphrase one (which Gmail search makes it so easy to just quote): âWe hear thereâs this popular comedian on TV who sometimes dresses up in a schoolgirl outfit and acts like a girl. Can you interview him? Itâd make a great âWHOA JAPAN IS WACKYâ story.â When did I become the âwhoa, Japan is wackyâ guy? Iâve even been asked to write about âNinja and samurai in modern Japanese pop cultureâ. When Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball was released, I got asked to interview Tomonobu Itagaki in a no-nonsense just-the-facts fashion, refraining from putting âany cynical spinâ on the proceedings. A couple years ago, this game called Gakuen Heaven: Boyâs Love Scramble! was released, and someone asked me to write a âlifestyle pieceâ about that. Gakuen Heaven is a game where you play the part of a young boy who receives a golden ticket in the mail in the form of an acceptance letter from the most esteemed all-boys boarding school in Japan. Of course you accept the invitation. Unlike, say, Harry Potter, where all the boys would be wizards, in Gakuen Heaven, all the boys happen to be really, really gay. So yeah, I played that game, interviewed the director, the whole shebang. Eventually, the magazine didnât use my article because the director â a woman â used the word âgayâ too much, too suggestively, and flat-out admitted that the game is intended mainly for girls who think gay guys and the things they do in the name of being gay are âfunnyâ. They figured it would probably offend some people. They figured it wouldnât really offend anybody, however, if, you know, the game was by gay people and intended for gay people. I think they were thinking too deeply about a couple of things. Of course, there are plenty of gay dating simulations in Japan â they didnât want me to write about them, though, because they werenât being released on the PlayStation 2. Anyway, after that â what was there? Oh, there was that Doki Doki Majo Shinpan game, where youâre supposed to use the stylus to touch little girls on all kinds of parts of their bodies, to find their most ticklish spots, forcing them to reveal that they are, in fact, witches. Someone asked me to write about that, and at that time I was so inundated in riches that I didnât bother. Then there was this game called Duel Love, where you play the part of a girl who develops deepening relationships with Hot Guys during the precious seconds it takes you to (using the stylus) towel them off between rounds of bare-fisted combat. Both Duel Love and Majo Shinpan are rooted in fetishes so specific that youâd never expect to see them so cutely presented, grinning up at you from a game shop shelf. Neither of them set the world on fire. Well, here I am, in the future, told to write about whatever I want to write about, and Iâve chosen to write about âwacky Japanese dating gamesâ.
I have started and stopped and deleted this question maybe ten times, now. Letâs revert to the first phrasing: What the fuck is wrong with Japan?
I wonât dare say that theyâre morally bankrupt or sick or perverted or whatever. In fact, I find it refreshing that theyâre so open about things like pornography. I am thirty for-godâs-sake years old, over here. I carry a Louis Vuitton wallet and wear Dolce and Gabbana jeans. My glasses contain studs made of actual solid gold. I pay $200 for my haircuts. If I want to pick up a menâs lifestyle magazine from a convenience store newsstand and flip it open to the Boobies Page, Iâll go right the hell ahead, and I will do so completely unconcerned about the stares of the people standing to my right or left, whether they be angry old males or attractive young females. Being comfortable about oneâs sexuality is part of being an adult. Being comfortable about oneâs fetishes (Iâm genuinely attracted to girls who look like guys who look like girls, for example) is part of being a successful adult.
The thing is, the majority of âdating simulationâ games are positioned as the same kind of escapism as, say, Gears of War. Gears of War is a game that satisfies the typical fourteen-year-oldâs impossible fantasy of being the size of a yeti and shooting mini-mountain-like alien freakbastards with a machine gun that has a chainsaw attached to the end of it. Gakuen Heaven is a game about being a straight boy forced to choose which of a myriad of very gay (and very tall) young men from whom he least minds a super-platonic molestation. The Gakuen Heaven Boyâs Love Scramble series is escapism, into the world of straight boys being harrassed by gay boys, for straight girls who canât even muster up the wherewithall to be harassed by straight boys. Majo Shinpan is a game for men who would maybe very much not mind touching a four-year-old girlâs bikini area and are merely afraid (or simply wary) of the legal consequences.
The trend in modern video game development has seemed to be that every genre decides, every once in a while, that they have to widen the entrance and invite a few new fans in. Konami (arguably) created the dating sim genre with 1994âs Tokimeki Memorial (written and programmed by none other than later Castlevania director Koji Igarashi). Tokimeki Memorial was a breakthrough for many reasons. It combined the absorbing atmosphere of a graphic adventure game without the pesky spector of death, murder, or whatever Immediacy McGuffin the writer had chosen to slop in there. Adventure games of the âJapanese, Graphicalâ variety had always tended to be mysteries of some sort or another. Thereâs a dead body at the beginning of the game, thereâs a gun on the mantle in act two; by act five, the killer is unmasked, and the gun has been fired. The only âmysteryâ of a game like Tokimeki Memorial is âWhich of these girls do I, personally, like most, and how do I get her to like me?â At their cores, early dating sims required you to solve the mystery either by growing some common sense or exercising your existing common sense by jumping through hoops of varying heights and sizes. In short, thanks to the âsolutionâ being rendered a âgoalâ, the games played more like . . . games than âinteractive fictionâ. Your own choices drove the action forward.
Remember âSeinfeldâ? In season four of âSeinfeldâ, the main characters â Jerry and George, based on the real-life series creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David â begin writing a television series that is nearly as different from their fictional lives as their fictional lives are as different from the lives of the real-life creators. Have you seen âThe Sopranosâ? (If not, see it. Itâs the greatest work of Western art of the 21st century, so far.) Near the end of âThe Sopranosâ, a character dies in a car accident while listening to the song âComfortably Numbâ, which figured into a poignant scene of the film âThe Departedâ, which had just won best picture. The car accident occurs near-immediately after the character says, âMan, this âDepartedâ soundtrack is fucking killerâ.
The thing is, anything explosively successful enough to change or impact the real world on any meaningful level simply canât continue to present a version of the real world without some representation of their pop culture event. Itâs dishonest. I had half-expected some television drama series representative of âThe Sopranosâ â a television show starring characters as informed of mafia stereotypes in pop culture as the characters within âThe Sopranosâ itself â to show up at some point in the last season of âThe Sopranosâ. That didnât happen, though the awareness was certainly there. (Aside: for some fun, try looking up âWikipediaâ on Wikipedia.)
As far as I have ever been able to tell, Japanese culture seems blissfully, deliberately unaware of itself in the places where Western pop culture would enjoy such awareness. Itâs not the case that Japanese would-be art-pieces donât copy one another; itâs that they pretend theyâre not copying anything else. If one Japanese comic featuring a character who dresses like a maid finds popularity of any measure greater than mediocre, you can bet that fifteen hundred other comics are going to appear within a yearâs time that also feature maids. Iâve touched on this before, in previous columns â The Everything Disease: those tasked with assessing why something is popular will merely write down a list of adjectives that describe the thing and then dash off a conclusion that all of these are reasons why the thing is popular. Maybe I didnât enunciate clearly enough in my previous description of The Everything Disease. Hereâs a metaphor. Say you have found a way to make a drug that produces the same euphoric feeling of invincibility that cocaine produces, only with none of the side effects. Itâs not addictive and it poses no threat of killing the user instantly if he snorts too much. If every marketing person in the world thought like a Japanese entertainment executive, youâd possibly have top brass telling you to make sure that your drug can also kill the user, because cocaine can too. Somewhere in another company, someone would produce a drug with none of the good effects of cocaine â it would just come in a powder and kill every user instantly. This is the kind of thing you have to deal with if you exit your house, seeking entertainment, on a Saturday night in Tokyo, Japan!
With videogames and Japanese animation, the self-awareness exists near-entirely in winks, nods, and elbow-nudges that only true fans will pick up. Like, maids are popular, so the game has to have a maid in it. And girls who are meanest to the guys that they like are also popular with some guys. And also, girls with glasses are popular with some other group of guys. Maybe the game doesnât have enough budget to make these three separate characters, and none of these three groups of guys are exactly the core target audience, so they combine the three traits into one character: a mean maid girl with glasses. This character, thanks to maybe one signature line of dialogue, becomes popular with people who like her because no one else likes her. Be honest: Have you ever liked and / or mastered a character in a fighting game because none of your friends ever plays as that character?
Meanwhile, in the real world, some girl who finds she doesnât have much luck with guys suddenly finds that a certain selection of not-unattractive males (of maybe questionable hobbies) will devote to her their undivided attention should she start wearing glasses and a maid outfit. This is how a fetish becomes a fashion. This kind of thing â not just this specific thing â happens all over the place in pop culture.
Escalation is another key principle. In the West, for a while, female pop starsâ breasts were getting bigger and bigger, prompting many water-cooler comedians to ask âHow much bigger are they going to get?â In Japan, it went kind of the other way. Pop stars getting younger and more juvenile-looking. The more-than-ten tweens of Morning Musume gave way to the, uhh, forty-eight girls of âAKB48â. âAKBâ stands for âAkihabaraâ. By all indications, none of the girls involved in this pop music corporation are involved begrudgingly. They all seem to be having a good time. Being popular among and ogled by the types of men who ogle them was a hobby of theirs before they became pop stars. This is (maybe) a key point.
On the other side of another coin, we have hostess clubs. What is a hostess club? A lot of you guys out there carrying Kotaku Readerland passports hear âhostess clubâ and you think âOh, they have those in the Yakuza games.â Thatâs one way of putting it. A lot of people only know hostess clubs from modern videogames, and relatively few of those people have actually played the game, or â even worse â when they do play the game, they assume that the representation of hostess clubs is a somehow quite toned-down version of a real-life hostess club. You might presume that real hostess clubs invariably involve prostitution. They donât! In fact, your chances of getting laid at a hostess club are significantly lower than your chance of scoring a girl at, say, any given bar for Normal People.
A hostess club is a place to go to pay a lot of money by the hour to talk to girls. Thereâs a vicious cultural cycle involved: The girls in hostess clubs look like girls who would work in hostess clubs. They have magazines devoted to hostess girl fashion â like Koakuma Ageha, which recently had a âHave Toshihiro âYakuzaâ Nagoshi be your customer for the dayâ contest. The weirdest thing is that, unlike the wider-scope world fashion trendsphere, hostess fashion seems to thrive by incorporating every âsuccessfulâ trend simultaneously. Though some variation is of course allowed, and though of course clubs can be excused for wanting to look a certain way, itâs curious how similar the girls look: They must all have the same ash-blonde hair, teased up into hundreds of finely ironed ribbons, they must all have the same white eye-shadow, the same gaudy glittery nail implant-baubles. Whether itâs the industry or the community that imposes such requirements is irrelevant: Iitâs obvious that no one tries to be âcompletelyâ original. What happens is more like this: Until one day, no hostesses wore white eye shadow. Then one girl decided she was going to. She didnât get fired, and none of her customers threw up for any reason other than extensive inebriation. Two days later, âwhite eye shadowâ was a requirement for all girls at that particular hostess club. Three weeks later, after that hostess club fails to go bankrupt, every hostess club on the street has assimilated the New Trend.
Why are there so many hostess clubs on one street? Well, it goes like this. Hereâs Japan Urban Folk Wisdom Lesson #1: In many major towns, you will find a âramen shop streetâ. How did one street come to have so many ramen shops? It goes like this: A man who happens to be a pure culinary genius builds a ramen shop in the cheapest place his starting budget will allow. His ramen is delicious. The people have never had such a delicious ramen. He puts lots of extra garlic in his soup. Maybe he throws more steamed bamboo whatevers on top of the finished soup than any of the other ramen shops in the city. Anyway, word travels fast in an urban atmosphere: The people genuinely love this ramen. They start to line up. Luckily for some skeazy jerky ramen-cooking loser, the real estate in the area surrounding this little ramen miracle spot is exceptionally cheap. Within weeks, another ramen shop has opened up. Maybe some people lined up for the ramen genius decide to just give up and eat at this other ramen shop. Or maybe all theyâve heard is âthereâs this ramen shop on this street in this town; check it outâ. Accidental sales are enough for some businesses to keep their heads over the water. So now we have two ramen shops on one street. Maybe a ramen chef with great confidence in his ability decides to challenge the market microcosm on this little street by putting up a shop close to the genius. Maybe he does pretty well. Maybe people see this third ramen shop on their way to the first ramen shop and after eating the first shopâs ramen, they say âthat was greatâ, and then they say, âmaybe that other shop is good, tooâ. In general, some people just arenât pitch-perfect judges of quality. They might try the other ramen shop a week after trying the genius ramen, and a week removed, they might not be able to tell the difference. Eventually, as the reputation of these two ramen shops grow, so does the number of customers lining up outside them. Then another shop opens. Maybe the second shop goes under. Another hack ramen shop pops up to take its place. Maybe, one day, a ramen shop comes that everyone genuinely agrees is better than the first ramen shop. By this point, this particular corner of the city has already earned a reputation as a âplace for ramen shopsâ. Youâd have to be a real connoisseur to tell the difference between two bowls of miso ramen beyond just listing the toppings. More often than not, a âgeniusâ bowl of ramen is declared when someone takes the chance to add a different topping, or add a standard topping in a different way. If it looks immediately different and yet produces familiar sensations, it must be brilliant.
What we see in the hostess club example is a âmediumâ that, unlike âSeinfeldâ or âThe Sopranosâ is entirely wrapped up in itself without a scrap of irony. As far as I can tell, the majority of Japanese pop culture evolves in the same way as hostess club fashion. Trend-aeons transpire until, eventually, âfashionableâ human beings / bowls of noodles in soup are so loaded down with clicking plastic cell-phone trinkets or chopped onions that they have essentially become indecipherable katamaris. At this point, consumers start to back away. The industry recognizes decreased revenues and everyone unanimously agrees, hey, itâs time for a reset.
This happened to videogames â pretty recently, even. Itâs just that this concept of going back to square one is so foreign in a culture like Japan, where everyone creating any kind of entertainment is considered part of some all-encompassing âteamâ, basically working toward the noble goal of finding a way to fit everything in the world into every single twenty-minute slot of television. So when a reset comes, and the resetter finds great success â the way Nintendo did with the DS and the Wii â everyone is bizarrely surprised. On another hand, did you know that Square-Enix apparently thought that Kingdom Hearts was a terrible idea? Combining and then cutely fetishizing two things that two maybe-different groups of people love with terrifying intensity seemed like a bad idea. How can that be a bad idea? I mean, if you like money.
Love Plus is a reset of the genre of video dating sim game. The fascinating part is how. Here in this modern world, âloveâ is complicated for an adult. We have cellular phones, text messages, voice mail, email, Skype, et cetera. The birth rate is declining in Japan for a variety of reasons. If itâs declining in the rest of the world, maybe itâs not as apparent as it is in Japan. In Japan, many of the reasons are visible to people willing to give in to a little conspiracy-theorizing. The ramen shop street phenomenon has led to more than enough installations of particular need-satisfying instutions centered around geographic locations. The âlove hotelâ industry has been simplifying infidelity for decades. The âhealthâ industry has familiarized prostitution the way âGokiburi Hoihoiâ (âCome On In, Cockroachesâ) cockroach traps have familiarized cockroaches (by displaying the courtesy to make them into cartoon characters). Rent a hotel, call a Health Girl, go home to your wife, tell her you have a headache, go to bed. If you need to genuinely satisfy the need to interface intellectually with a female, you can go to a hostess club, and sit and talk to a plastic-looking princess. In the name of keeping the content ratings low enough to prevent sales droppage, the makers of dating sims have to pay mind to the hostess clubs and ignore the prostitution. However, more than enough men grow up playing dating sims â it wasnât very hard to find a hostess club with the word âMemorialâ in its name, written in the same font as âTokimeki Memorialâ â to be genuinely ignorant of the finer points. Dating sims have created a group of fans, who now allow themselves to be defined as people who play dating sims.
Surely the idea of a hostess club wasnât inspired by dating sim games. Ever since the twelfth century Japanese men have been paying money merely to drink alongside women. In the modern age, itâs easy to see how the two have evolved in parallel. Just as there are entire niche dating sims centered around a certain painfully specific type of girl, so there are hostess clubs that do the same. If you want to talk to a girl who looks like a âstereotypical college studentâ because she is a stereotypical college student, you can, for the right price. Next thing you know, thereâll be a sub-genre of girl-get games about girls with broken front teeth, and a hostess club to match.
People in the West talk a lot about girls being oppressed or whatever here in Japan. No one really talks about it over here. Maybe itâs the Western, puritan views of sexual relations. As far as I can see, many Japanese women are doing pretty well for themselves, flaunting their sexuality whenever they stand to gain from it. It genuinely doesnât bother them when they do this, either. The stereotypical view of a woman is that she doesnât know much about âman stuffâ. The stereotypical view of âman stuffâ is that itâs boring, itâs complicated, and it makes the man enough money to support his family. Girls at hostess clubs sit with boring older men who try their hardest to act like theyâre having fun. Part of the employeeâs job description is to make the customers have fun. This involves pretty much zero effort: A boring Japanese man will try very hard to at least pretend to be having fun around what he perceives to be a pretty girl. Girls are expected to be reserved and calm. All a girl has to do is smile and say sheâs having fun, and the typical hostess club customer can and will âfall in loveâ with her. Love doesnât mean heâs going to marry her â maybe heâll just bring her chihuahuas. The typical hard-working hostess club girl earns maybe double what your typical section manager earns every month, and she doesnât even have to wake up early in the morning.
I used to âdateâ a girl who worked in a hostess club. She said that, lots of times, conversations with guys would go like this:
âWow! Iâm so tired!â
âYou must have worked hard today.â
âI did! Wow, I worked so hard!â
âWhat did you do?â
âYou know, guy stuff. You wouldnât understand!â
âOf course I wouldnât.â
âHey, letâs drink some alcohol!â
âYay, alcohol!â
Of course, the girlsâ drinks are pre-watered down. How can a man enjoy this? I donât know. Then again, I donât smoke. When I was working in a Large Japanese Corporation many years ago, there was a twenty-two-year-old man, just out of Tokyo University, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life. The section chief got up to smoke, and all the guys got up to smoke with him. They invited the new kid. He shivered. He went into the smoking room â a veritable hot-box packed to window-buckling pressure with smoke â and emerged thirty seconds later, vomiting water onto the carpet. My impression of Big Business in Japan has built up slowly out of that particular experience.
Where was I? Oh, Love Plus. I view Love Plusâs particular method of resetting its genre as noble. It hearkens back to the earliest days of the genre â and the earliest days of its playersâ existence as sexual beings: High school. Sure, most of these games are about high school. Though few of them are nearly as un-weird as Love Plus. Itâs breaking the genre down into its essence.
In Love Plus, you assume the role of a mostly-blank slate, a high school boy whose methods of courtship you mostly choose by your own tact. When the game needs to make a girl mad at you for whatever reason, of course, the control slips out of your hands, your guy says something that makes him look like an asshole, and it gets kind of depressing. You actually have your choice of three girls â one, your age, is a boring princess; one, a year older than you, is somehow mature enough to resign herself to the lifestyle of a workaholic waitress; the other is a year younger, cute, with short boyish hair, big fan of rock and roll music and fighting games. Of course I chose the third girl.
Works in the dating sim genre are typically referred to as âGirl Getâ games. The emphasis is on the âgetâ. Once you âgetâ the girl, typically, the game is pretty much over. âGirl Getâ is a much better genre distinction than âdating simâ. Love Plus is a dating sim. Once you âgetâ the girl via ten or so hours of grueling menu-mashing, you earn the option to flip the game into âreal-time modeâ. The game gives you âaction pointsâ to use to perform actions of your choosing â you have a wide variety of options, from calling your girl to sending her a âwhatâs upâ email to scheduling a date. You can even choose the location of the date: zoo, movie, park, shopping mall. Then you have to make sure to turn the game on at the right time to attend your date. Turn the game on before bed and give the girl a phone call to tell her goodnight, et cetera.
This raises so many interesting points that one man, even one such as myself, is hardly enough to summarize them.
For one, this game is billed as a âsensational new typeâ of dating sim. As such, itâs actually attempting to widen the entrance of the genre by inviting in new fans. This makes it, by default, a âcasual gameâ.
However, why should a dating sim have ever been anything other than a casual game? This point really interests me. What are some historically successful âcasualâ games? Super Mario Bros. and Gran Turismo are amazingly successful, and were loved by millions of newcomers, despite their not being precisely easy. Most players, itâs not a stretch to say, really loved Super Mario Bros. without even nearly completing it. Effectively, this means that Super Mario Bros. doesnât âendâ. So itâs possible to say that people like games that donât end.
These days, we have a split between âcasualâ and âhardcoreâ games. How did this happen? âCasualâ gamers are ânewcomersâ to the idea of gaming, or people who didnât play games very much before finding their own personal gateway drug.
I am pretty sure that the âcasualâ distinction only exists in the heads of the âhardcoreâ gamers, the people devoted to completing and bragging about the bigger, louder, faster, more cinematic experiences pumped out on the next-gen consoles. Anything that doesnât feature better graphics and the same general game mechanics is âcasualâ. To âhardcoreâ gamers, casual games are weak and small and technologically inferior.
Upon hearing that âcasualâ games are finding a whole new audience, many software developers began flapping the âcasual gamesâ banner. They produced a lot of pretty bad pieces of software under that distinction.
Still, maybe the âhardcoreâ donât have all their priorities straight when it comes time to bash the casuals. Casual is a good thing. More gamers means more games, means more money being spent on making the big games. Many hardcore gamers were casual gamers, once.
Recently, itâs become increasingly apparent that longtime hardcore favorites such as Dragon Quest are, in fact, casual games. When Dragon Quest IX was announced as both a âmajor installmentâ in the series and a game for a portable system (the Nintendo DS), many a series fan felt something like a kid whose parents are getting divorced. The game had appealed to both casuals and hardcores for the longest time, and now that it came time to choose between one or the other, the fans felt like the developers had chosen the casuals. Dragon Quest IXâs release for the Nintendo DS seems to be part of an industry-wide acceptance that more people donât play videogames than do, so letâs try to appeal to those people.
This brings us back to Love Plus. Itâs a âcasual dating simâ. Itâs âcasualâ because it appeals to people who donât play dating sims for various reasons, like: itâs not creepy. Itâs not weird. It has clean presentation and somewhat tasteful marketing visibility.
Why should a game genre that seeks to educate young men on the moods and behaviors of young women be something only for freaks and closet pedophiles? Why canât this genre be a kind of mainstream entertainment? Did you realize that there are entire films where not one person dies, where the only thing to happen by the end is two people fall in love, break up, and remember each other fondly? âAnnie Hallâ won best picture over âStar Warsâ, you know. People like this sort of thing. âWell, gamers donât like this sort of thingâ. Who said so? You?
The modern âcasual gameâ is a very vague idea. Weâve got human-productivity software like all those brain-training games, which arenât really games so much as theyâre series of challenges that do have incorrect solutions. These âgamesâ probably shouldnât be counted in the software sales charts. Theyâre something else altogether. For a while, it was seriously creeping me out when people on the internet would celebrate Nintendoâs âdominanceâ over all other consoles because Brain Training was selling more copies in Japan than Halo was selling in the US. These are two completely separate audiences. Well, thatâs not to say that some of the people who played Halo might also be enjoying Brain Age. Itâs just that the games serve two completely different functions. I propose that we stop calling things like Brain Age âcasual gamesâ or even ânon-gamesâ. Just call them âsoftwareâ, maybe prefixed with the name of the console theyâre published for.
Actually, letâs stop calling games âcasualâ or âhardcoreâ. Iâm pretty sure that the best games in the world are those that can be enjoyed by both âcasualâ and âhardcoreâ game-players alike. When PR people, like that one Nintendo woman (not going to look her name up on Wikipedia because that would be pretentious of me), declare in press conferences that theyâre going to make an effort to release âmore hardcoreâ games in any given financial quarter, all youâre doing is pissing people off. The devoted fans will immediately speak up: âSee, theyâre acknowledging that theyâve been ignoring usâ.
You know whatâs a game that appeals to both casual and hardcore players? Tetris. People can enjoy it deeply without even being good at it. I see them playing it on their cellular phones every time I ride the train. Most of the time, they donât know what the hell theyâre doing. And then there are the virtuosos. Seriously, there are some people who have built up lifestyles around that game. Have you ever watched a Tetris virtuoso play?
Similarly, Iâve run into a lot of people over the years who talk about how much they loved Super Mario Bros. as a kid, and then I get them sitting around my living room and we fire it up on the Virtual Console, and man, they suck. I ask them, did you always suck this much as a kid? Usually, they go, âYeah!â Sucking at a game is fun. Why do we assume that because a game is âfun to playâ the player will invariably want to win? I think that somewhere early in the evolution of the post-Super Mario gaming medium, too many introverted people were jumping in and making games. Like, do you remember the old Ridge Racer games? You could be in fourth place and still be allowed to continue to the next race. Now, in the PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 generation, we have Ridge Racer 7, where you start every race in last place and you must finish first to continue to the next race. The base assumption among game makers seems to be that people want to win, or theyâre not having fun. Somewhere along the line they stopped considering the possibility that people generally felt that it doesnât matter who wins or loses, itâs how much fun you have when playing the game.
Iâve always thought that Tetris doesnât get really, deeply studied enough as a game design. This game, post-Super Mario, turned housewives, of all people, onto the idea of slaving over a computer screen. The game is never about winning. In fact, you canât win Tetris. Tetris is entirely about how long you can survive before you die. The only action you can perform to prevent your collapse in a game of Tetris is rotating blocks. If the blocks fall in the right shape, they complete a line. Hereâs the intriguing part: all that happens when you close up a complete line is: The line disappears. Your reward for success is that your accomplishment immediately vanishes. All thatâs left to stare you in the face is your failure. Eventually, the failures stack up until you canât breathe, and you fail. Thatâs kind of sick! Thatâs kind of grim!
And then you mention Tetris in front of a Normal Person â a ânon-gamerâ, if you must â and they say, oh, I used to love that game so much. You ask them what they liked about it and they say, âI donât know, reallyâ. Sometimes they say the music of the NES version was âmysteriousâ. Or theyâll hum the music from the Gameboy version. Many times, theyâll suggest that it made them feel a certain way that they canât put their finger on.
The thing about something like Tetris is, everyone has a time in their life when it resonates deeply with them. The best part is that the time for Tetris to resonate with you is probably created the moment you first start to experience Tetris. Itâs lighting up new parts of your brain, and making new parts of your âsoulâ feel this new, weird feeling. Thereâs something half-terrifying and half-lovely about that.
Tetris is near-untouchably abstractly perfect. Future puzzle games attempted to add characters. Youâve got Puzzle Bobble with the little dinosaurs from Bubble-Bobble, with in-game graphically represented contextual explanations for how your line-clearing tools are able to reach and deal with the crushing death. Youâve got the death descending from above instead of rising from below because, hey, we donât want to make it too much like Tetris. Puyo Puyo gives all the blocks faces, effectively anthropromorphizing them. Also, Puyo Puyo has a story, explaining that the blocks you are making vanish by connecting them to other blocks are tools of some kind of magic duelling practice, and that you arenât just clearing blocks to keep yourself alive, you are clearing blocks to defeat someone else who is trying to clear blocks and also trying to defeat you as you try to clear blocks. How much explanation do we need in a game like this? In Tetris, all we had was a cold background, music evocative of Soviet Russia, and this immediate, direct reaching out of the game straight to our brains. If youâre like me, it might be hard to imagine your childhood without all the hours you grinded against the void in Tetris. It changed all of us in ways we canât understand, because weâve never been anything else.
Where are games like this, these days? Why canât atmosphere be everything? Why are we obsessed with narrative? Why do games have to tell stories, to talk my ear off? Iâd rather be dropped in a world with no explanation of where I was or why Iâm there. Like, one of my pet peeves is when Iâm listening to a record and a friend comes in and says, after hearing less than ten seconds of a song, âHey, this is pretty great. Who is this?â Why donât you try listening to the song some more before you worry about the name of the band? Mainstream entertainment seems to do this a lot â neither a âcasualâ nor a âhardcoreâ thing â and it bugs the hell out of me. I want to listen to the song, and then be told afterward, by a smooth radio announcer voice, if possible âYou just listened to . . .â Put the experience before the exposition. This isnât the newspaper, this is entertainment; these arenât earthquake death statistics, this is a story about a world that isnât real: Let me form my own opinions before you tell me the facts. Please.
In short, there is a narrative in Tetris â it just doesnât have any characters in it, and it isnât âaboutâ anything. The atmosphere is the narrative. The playing of the game is the narrative. Somehow, in the time spent playing this abstract little software program, you grow . . . weirdly intimate with some kind of emerging pseudo-consciousness.
The original Super Mario Bros. is totally the same way â for that game, too, the atmosphere was the narrative. The little pop-song-miracle of the theme music (which I will argue heatedly is yet the âBest Thing Ever To Emerge From The Video Game Industryâ) and the iconic graphics, together with the personable physics with which Mario skids to a stop after running, all meld together in this beautifully chemical way. No matter of scientific assessment and fetishistic adulation could produce a better game. The only better game than Super Mario Bros., as far as Iâm concerned, is Super Mario Bros. 3. Super Mario World added more . . . shit to the game. Well, to be fair, it took some shit out, and then put some other shit in. If you ask me, the game got too friendly. Itâs weirdly apparent to me that Nintendo suddenly got concerned with people liking their games. I guess it had something to do with wanting them to shell out money for a new console.
âcan videogames be our friends?â
I donât know. Can they? Can robots love humans? The robot in the film âA.I.â didnât really love humans. Or is that kind of dumb persistence the same thing as love? Whoa, Iâve grown all woozy with wondering. Letâs Investigation:
Love Plus. The director of Love Plus says that the game was designed to make the players feel, and subsequently develop a deep appreciation of âReal Loveâ. When the game forced me to say âI love youâ, I must say, I did feel something. To be perfectly honest, it was something I have never felt in my entire life. Was that âreal loveâ? Iâd feel terrible if it was. For me, the feeling was very ugly, muddy and weird.
Hereâs how you play Love Plus: Your character is a teenage boy, a nearly blank slate. You are a student at a high school. You live alone for reasons unexplained. Or maybe we just never see your parents. It is definitely not a boarding school, because two of the girls talk about their family lives a great deal. At your school, none of the students have faces or names except for three girls to whom your character is immediately attracted the first time you meet.
Your character has four statistical attributes you are free to grind at your leisure. They are âfitnessâ, âsmartsâ, âsenseâ, and âcharmâ. You grind these by carefully choosing your activities every day. You can only choose four activities a day. You can go running to build your fitness, or study to build your smarts. You can work to gain âsenseâ, or you can âfashionâ (trying on clothes at home, maybe?) to gain âcharmâ. Some activities serve as means to talk with the girls in your life. Work at the local family restaurant to talk to the older girl, play tennis in the tennis club to meet the girl your age, or go to the library to talk to the younger girl.
Each girl has different criteria for her future boyfriend. The tennis girl would like a guy to be physically fit. Of course. The library girl would like a guy to be smart. The girl who works in the family restaurant is boring, so how the hell should I know what she wants? The more you grind your physical attributes, the more dangerously close you get to a girl confessing her love for you. When it happens, it happens.
Maybe this highlights a problem Iâve had in real life: I kind of liked both the tennis girl and the library girl. I liked the library girl more, and if someone would have put a gun to my head, Iâd have chosen her in a heartbeat, before telling them to kindly put the gun away. However, I kept seeing those numbers crunching on the left screen (you hold the DS vertical for this game, by the way), and my gamerâs instinct kept telling me to just keep grinding, to get the numbers as high as I could get them. When you highlight a daily activity during the schedule-planning phase (scary hint: the default activity choice is always âstudyâ) you can see its effects on your stats on the left screen. I was trying to get each of my stats to increase every day. How sick is that? The girl I wanted only cared if I had âsenseâ (built by practicing music and/or going to the convenience store at night, of course) and a reasonable amount of smarts. Why didnât I just polish those, meet her at the library every afternoon without fail, text her âgoodnightâ every night and âgood morningâ every morning? When tennis girl started waiting on the road near my home, asking if I wanted to walk with her to school, the dialogue box stared me right in the soul: âSure, letâs go, yayâ or âSorry. In a hurry.â How could I choose option B? Why should I blow someone off in a video game?
This has happened to me every time I play one of these modern games with a âmoralityâ system or whatever. Like, in Fable II, a man is dying by the side of the road, and itâs the same number of button presses to save the guyâs life as it is to kill him and then make your on-screen avatar laugh about it. Why should I bother to, you know, be a jerk in a video game, given the choice? Why was Peter Molyneux actually surprised that people more often than not play the part of the good guy? As Matt Damon said in âThe Talented Mr. Ripleyâ, no one ever considers himself a bad person. You have to actually try to be âbadâ in a game. You have to try pretty hard, sometimes. You have to willingly detach yourself from the game. In a way, maybe this makes you and the game best buddies. Or maybe it makes you worst enemies. Itâs a coin toss.
I didnât want to say no to the tennis girl. I let her keep being my friend. I kept talking to her. I hoped that the game would gradually realize I liked library girl more, because I was choosing to spend my afternoons in the library instead of on the tennis court. Tennis girl kept waiting for me after school. Eventually, one day, library girl was waiting for me after school. I walked her home and that was pretty much it. She asked if I wanted to go out on the next pseudo-real-time Sunday. I said why not. Two in-game weeks later, my character had a dream about her. The game forced me to say âI love youâ. Twice.
This was the first (and second) time Iâd ever told anyone I loved them in any language, and I did it to get to the next level in a fucking video game. Fucking thirty years old, over here.
Minutes later, one in-game afternoon, library girl met me in the library, asked if I would come up to the roof, and then asked me formally to be her boyfriend. Wondering for a half-second if the game would try to wrap up things with tennis girl, I sighed clicked âYesâ, finally thinking, âabout time I beat this stupid gameâ. The âfinal bossâ was the mere act of saying âYesâ. And then I realized: Doesnât that just say it all?
The guilt came immediately. After trying very hard to polish my guyâs stats to perfection on all fronts, to make him a real Renaissance Man, I gave up and started stacking the activities purely in favor of âsenseâ and studies. I told tennis girl â precisely once â that I was too busy to walk to school. Me and library girl were sliding into a relationship soon after that. It felt ridiculous. In real life, my strategy for sex usually involves much self-effacing, to the point where, after weeks or possibly months of listening to me talk, the girl is finally psychologically worn down to the point where she basically tears my pants off. Itâs not that I donât want her to tear my pants off. Iâd love it if she did it immediately after I said âHello; youâre pretty hotâ. Iâd love it if life worked that way. It doesnât, though. Weâre not all yeti-sized chainsaw-gun-wielding marines a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. There comes a point in every terribly failed sexual relationship Iâve ever known where I start to exercise what I believe is a psychic power. Maybe Iâm just laying the hints on thicker. Maybe Iâm making jokes about my penis more often, talking about how I canât jerk off because I canât raise my hand far enough above my head, or whatever. It felt like that with library girl. Only, in this game there would be no getting laid. I have gotten laid â oh my god â so many times in real life, just because I can play at least three musical-sounding notes on most instruments (most recently learned a couple notes on the cello (thanks for the lesson, American McGee)). Iâve done this all without a single âI love youâ. And now hereâs a game, telling me to tell it Iâm in love, and it wonât even show me any virtual fornication because Nintendo doesnât allow that on their consoles. How weird.
âReal loveâ is the feeling of settling for something because itâs there. Well, thatâs how it felt to me. I felt like a dunce. Maybe thereâs something wrong with me. Iâve seen too many charismatic Jewish guys (Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld) find flaws in any relationship, and I always figure I can do better. What weird courage it takes to say those words that centuries of literature have built up as so holy! It felt like attempting to practice profanity as a six-year-old in front of a mirror Sunday afternoon after church. The top teeth close down on the bottom lip, the âFfffffâ escapes the mouth, the rest sticks in the throat. It felt that kind of weird, futile, introverted, religion-like event.
What is this game, to me? Are we friends? Are we in love? I donât know if weâre either. What is love? Who the shit knows? Love Plusâs designers seem adamant that Love is 95% showing up, 4% choosing the right date spot to match your remaining number of activity points and your girlfriendâs mood, and 1% knowing which six parts of your girlfriendâs body she likes you to touch. (Hands, hair, shoulder, arm, forehead â oh, shit, what was the other one? Oh. Ears. (She hates it when I touch her breastlets. Or her, uhh, inguinal area. (The swimsuit region unfortunately falls just beneath the bottom of the screen (canât delete âThe Hot Folderâ from my hard drive just yet))))
You know what, though? Hereâs where I close my eyes and remember that Tokyo University Kid, who threw up water right onto the carpet after barrel-rolling out of the smoking lounge on his first day, his first cigarette, at that Huge Japanese Corporation all those years back. The moment that happened, I wasnât even thinking that years later I would consider the event some kind of cosmic revelation. No, in the moment, I was remembering and in-head-quoting âThe Matrixâ: âHeâs gonna pop!â Years later, the revelation is this: Maybe love really is just persistence. Maybe thereâs really no damned difference. You just keep throwing yourself at that wall of ocean, ice, fire, wind, whatever color of Pokemon you bought on puberty day.
I was watching an episode of âDexterâ â a show about a serial killer who lives by a code (he only kills other killers) and tries to blend into society. He thinks, when about to comfort his step-daughter re: some bullshit thing that happened earlier in the episode, âI wish I was like everyone else; I wish I knew what to sayâ. How canât you? Canât the knack for rote memorization that allows you to be a virtuoso at concealing murder evidence also provide you with a plethora of pre-prepared responses to everyday situations such as these? Iâve already tooted this particular horn of mine once in this particular piece; letâs toot it again: I am a not-completely-normal, game-playing kind of dude, and even I have had sex before. Not only that, Iâm pretty good at it!
Apparently, Love Plus is the source of a controversy in Japan. Or maybe this is something the viral marketers made up. You never know anymore, man. Like, apparently there are some girls complaining that men are acting creepily close to their Love Plus girlfriends. Theyâre putting their DSes under their pillows, theyâre doing the little free-conversation âmini-gameâ mode in the bathtub, theyâre interrupting real-life Sunday dates with their real-life girlfriends to switch on the DS and give their fake girlfriend the gift that they bought for them earlier in the week.
Thereâs an urban legend that still spins today on the hot pavement of Tokyo like a shell casing just discharged from a machine gun: a woman was driving a car when her Tamagotchi beeped. âTamagotchiâ is a mash-together of the Japanese words for âEggâ and âwristwatchâ. It was the first âvirtual petâ released in Japan. It caused a huge fad. Tamagotchi was like a Chia Pet with a button to reset it if you screwed up. If you were attentive, and fed and played with the Tamagotchi enough times a day, it would eventually evolve and grow into something bigger, neater-looking, and even tougher to care for. Anyway, this womanâs Tamagotchi was beeping while she was driving her car. She got tired of the fucking thing beeping and reached over to take a good look at it. Anyway she got hit by a truck and killed.
It turns out, actually, that this isnât just an urban legend, like that thing about Jamie Lee Curtis being born a hermaphrodite (no, Zak, that is not true). It actually happened.
I got the idea to play Love Plus and maybe write something about it when I saw it reported in various publications that women in Japan were jealous of âvirtual cheatingâ. Might this be a viral PR stunt? Or might it be something else even more sinister? If itâs a PR stunt, then doesnât it fly in the face of everything the gameâs director says it stands for â this is a game about teaching men about âreal loveâ. And if itâs not a PR stunt â if these reports are true â then I guess the game wasnât very successful at teaching men who to love for ârealâ. Or does the âA.I.â question go both ways? Is it easier for a human to love a robot than it is for a robot to love a human? (Getting a head rush over here. Should probably sleep. Soon.) That said, if a man already has a girlfriend, and Love Plus is meant to teach him to appreciate her more, in this scenario, itâs doing a terrible job. (Alternately: maybe the girlfriends of Japan should try becoming schoolgirls that fit into one of three clearly defined stereotypes.)
A Tamagotchi is addictive and interesting, again, partly (mostly) because itâs so enigmatic, alien, weird. The instruction manual that comes with an old-school Tamagotchi literally spells it out: The little plastic egg in your hand is a vessel containing a creature. The creature comes from a planet where all beings literally exist only as computer data, however, he feels real pain, real hunger, and real love. Please care for him. A Tamagotchi immediately engages us because we cannot, and never will be able to, prove that he does not feel pain when he dies, hunger when heâs hungry, or love when we appreciate him. Though we look at a Tamagotchi and initially wonder âWhat is this thing?â eventually, we answer that question with âsomething that relies on me to surviveâ. We have defined a creatureâs existence based on the sole fact that it relies on us.
What is Love Plus? Well, hereâs the sad part: Love Plus is a video game for the Nintendo DS. It has a goal: Donât make the girl mad. Nothing you can do will make her die, or make her hate you so completely that you never talk to her again. The girl inside the game is very clearly a slightly abstracted artistic rendition of a female human being.
Rather than explore the possibilties and implications of âvirtual cheatingâ, which I suddenly find about as exciting as the idea of skipping breakfast, Iâm going to instead pass judgment on the guys who would rather give presents to and/or punctually honor date times with their virtual girlfriend than say one kind word to their real-life significant others or family members: Fuck you.
However, the lady who died caring for her Tamagotchi: Thatâs sad. Thatâs a real modern-day tragedy, is what that is. Iâm not even being sarcastic. Maybe she didnât have a husband or a child. Maybe all her friends were girls who decided that with the equivalent of three hundred dollars and six hours they could look just like the girls in the magazines, and they could get paid enough money to purchase their own lonely shimmering condo and enough chihuahuas to fill it by age 27, enticing and exciting the dreams and shallow hopes of every commitment fearing man who rang the little chime over the door, never procreating by choice, their goal â like that of so many females in this post-birth-rate nation â merely to be left alone. Here was Chieko â yes, weâve just named the woman who died with the Tamagotchi in her car â desperately wanting someone or something to hold onto. Maybe she was unattractive, and probably she was beautiful. Who the hell knows.
Here I am, thirty years old. You want to know something? I have sixty-six female Miis, all of them tall, thin, with beauty marks just beneath their right eyes and big round glasses on their faces. They all have the same name. That name is âChiekoâ. Where did they go? Why did they come back? When did I make all of them? What was I thinking? What am I, really, at this stage in my life?
Maybe Iâm not afraid of commitment. Maybe I just find other peopleâs idea of commitment shallow. Maybe Iâm waiting for some cosmic, huge thing. Love Plus sure as fuck isnât it.
âcan videogames be our friends?â
This is the second time Iâve asked this question, unless you count the title of this article. The answer is: I donât see why they canât be. I just donât think they should pretend to be our friends.
Tetris is our friend. Love Plus is not. (Though only because it pretends to be.)
Weâve got Fable II, right? I might have mentioned before how Iâm that guy whoâs really good at making a game look stupid within seconds of picking it up. In Stranglehold I ignored the on-screen navigation and slid back and forth over a tabletop for maybe two straight minutes. It was hilarious. In Fable II, I stood in town square immediately after they let you go to the town the first time, and I just started spamming the âthumbs-upâ gesture for, like, a minute. I had a crowd of people gathered around. Curious, I kept spamming the gesture. I knew there was a computer program trained to recognize âthumbs-upâ with a positive reaction. However, what I didnât realize was precisely how bone-headed the game was about to be. It turns out that âfavorable reactionâ stacks up over time, giving no priority to the size or impact of events. After thirty minutes of thumbs-upping in town square, I had no less than half a dozen girls repeating âI bet youâll be giving me a ring, then?â Is that all it takes to get a girl to want to marry you â just prove to her that you are capable of repeating the same tiny task over and over again for a half an hour at a time? (I wonder if one of those shops that airbrushes a photograph of your kitten onto a sweatshirt would do a sweatshirt with a picture of my Dragon Quest IX party on it.)
Now, Iâm all for a thumbs-up button in games. Iâve said before that Grand Theft Auto games are all about violence because there isnât a âhug buttonâ. Can you make a whole game where thereâs only a hug button? What about this Milo thing that Fable II developers Lionhead are working on? Itâs a whole game built around the idea of interacting with a little boy. That better be really clever.
Maybe playing Love Plus and thinking about Fable II again has allowed me time to think about the nature of violence as an interaction in a game: When you get a girlfriend in Love Plus, you begin a complicated relationship â which is even more complicated for the game designers than it is for you. In Grand Theft Auto, when you shoot a pedestrian, you end a shallow relationship which began only milliseconds earlier, when you pulled out your gun.
Recently, Toshihiro Nagoshi, the director of the Yakuza games, stated that the Grand Theft Auto games were morally difficult to classify in Japan, because they allow the player to do whatever he wants. Also recently, Hifumi Kouno of Nudemaker â developers of intricate mecha-piloting simulation Steel Battalion and a few adult graphic adventures for the PC â commenting on the recent debacle surrounding RapeLay (an amateur-made graphic adventure game about rape), said that it would be possible for a game that concerns a specific situation of violent crime to take an artistic and valid viewpoint, however, giving the player total freedom to murder innocents as in Grand Theft Auto is morally wrong.
What no one wants to talk about is that murdering innocent civilians in Grand Theft Auto is merely âsomething you can doâ. Itâs not a âfeatureâ of the game. Itâs never something the game tells you to do. Killing civilians in no way deepens your relationship with the game. It does, however, make you feel something. And, more importantly, it says something about you. Did you feel bad the first time you killed a civilian in Grand Theft Auto? I would say, if put on the spot, that I felt âabout as bad as I felt when I got a girlfriend in Love Plusâ. What does that even mean?
How bad did you feel the second time?
There are many types of friends. There are reliable friends, friends who you can always count on. Like Treasureâs Sin and Punishment or Super Mario Bros. 3. There are friends who were with you through tough times, like Braid, or friends with whom you share larger-than-life experiences, like Earthbound or Dragon Quest V.
Thereâs a game series that is always your friend, whether youâre a casual or a hardcore: Dragon Quest. Yuji Horii once described the ultimate goal of a Dragon Quest as being to create a world that the player âcan feelâ. I feel like Iâve mentioned this a hundred times: Every NPC in every town serves a small purpose. You might meet an old woman alone in a house. She says (never minding that you just stepped into her house uninvited) that sheâs worried about her son. Heâs recently joined the castle guard. Ever since his father died ten years ago, heâs insisted on growing up to be a military hero. Later, you find yourself in the castle. All of the guards look the same. They all say the same things. One of them, sleeping on a bed in the barracks, says that heâs sick, and he really wishes he had some of his motherâs home-cooked soup. Between two tiny NPCs (one of whom looks like a hundred others) and five short sentences of dialogue, Dragon Quest has just presented you an entire world, a world made of people. We need more stuff like that, less stuff like thumbs-upping a girl straight into future-wife status in thirty minutes in Fable II.
so, can videogames be . . . ?
Listen, I have been to a lot of modern art museums, and I would reckon the curators of those places make enough money, so they must know what art is. I have seen some stupid shit in some modern art museums. So for the first and last time, of of course they can. Out of this World is art.
Canabalt is art. Try and tell me thatâs not art. Itâs Super Mario Tetris. Itâs got atmosphere.
(or, âwhy the japanese still havenât gotten over final fantasy viiâ)
In conclusion, the Japanese still havenât gotten over Final Fantasy VII. Final Fantasy VII was a game that was about something. It had a âmain themeâ. It was successful. All RPGs now try to look just like it, to build their ramen shops right next door. Tetsuya Nomuraâs character designs have poisoned more than a decade of haircut catalogs. Ugly men whose most memorable human relationships probably occurred between their self and Aeris and Sephiroth in a dark room now enjoy employment at many game companies, sometimes consulting the spreadsheet in their head that lists all of the things Final Fantasy VII did. The thing is, Final Fantasy VII didnât come out of nowhere. It was, itself, calculated. Why is everyone in business trained to consider any success a fluke? No, wait, donât answer that. Final Fantasy VII is not a fluke. They pour love and stuff int the game. Not all of the stuff worked, though the love sure did. People responded to the love. The stuff, maybe they liked some of, maybe they disliked some of.
Why do they just keep making shells built around character designs and loud battle systems? What the hell was Final Fantasy VIII âaboutâ, really, aside from characters who looked at least as cool as the characters in Final Fantasy VII? Aside from the fact that the hero had a fur collar, a scar on his face, and a gun trigger on his sword? Where were the actual feelings? Do they think players are that shallow? Do they think we care only for the flash and bang, just because we once cared for something that had flash and bang in â in addition to many other things? Why not just look at the things Final Fantasy VII did, and try to do them again? Establish a character that players will like. You sleep in that characterâs motherâs house at one point, for godâs sake. Let the player experience solitude and confinement. Give them a world. Then show them something that happens in it.
Theyâre afraid of satisfying the players âtoo muchâ. Theyâre afraid of âcannibalizingâ other genres of games. A friend of mine was telling me today that the first phone he ever had in Japan contained a flawless voice-recorder feature that let him record up to fifty minutes of voice. When it came time to finally get a new phone, he couldnât find one with such a robust function. No, his new phone only has âroomâ for three ten-second memos. How lame is that? Itâs like, maybe NEC had a voice recorder on their phone, and maybe Toshiba, who also sells phones under the DoCoMo umbrella, came up to DoCoMo and was like, âHey, we sell standalone voice-recorders and we feel like that NEC phone with a voice-recorder is kind of cannibalizing the sales of our voice recordersâ. This isnât even conspiracy-theory talk: They do have guys at big companies whose only job is to think of shit like this. As the Japanese games industry grew, thanks to Final Fantasy VII, so did its potential for teasing its fans.
And then: I used to know a guy whose job was creating fake, âfemaleâ profiles for a Japanese website that advertised to men looking for a quick hook-up. Theyâd charge guys money if they sent messages to girls. Well, if you signed up, youâd get 30 free âconversation pointsâ. It would cost maybe 11 conversation points to open a message from a girl, and 11 points to reply. So this guy would make fake female profiles and then immediately message guys when the server showed that a new guy had signed up and filled out a profile. The guys would reply, and then he would reply back. The guys would reply one more time, which would put them two points into the red. The website sold points at a rate of something like 10,000 yen for 100 points. The âserverâ would âautomaticallyâ mail the guyâs cellular phone address a request for money, bank account information, and a please-transfer-by date.
This is the kind of psychotic bullshit from which I suppose games could serve as an escape. Some men on Japanese internet messageboards talk about how they âonly love 2D girlsâ, or how games are all the âsocial interactionâ they need. Today, I almost find myself sympathizing with these people. Loudspeakers right outside my bedroom window blare terrible commercials for bicycle shops or pachinko parlors or cat food wholesale stores, Iâve just told a game âI love youâ so I could get to the next level, I have 66 identical female Miis living inside my Wii, the man across the street at the tiny bakery is standing outside screaming into a megaphone at a dead-empty early-Sunday-morning street because itâs a âproven sales tacticâ. All over the world, people are pretending to be things or people they are not for money. Maybe itâs even someone you know. Sitting here, typing this, half-asleep, in what should be dead, spartan silence, I keep hitting the num lock key on my Macbook Pro keyboard. When did I develop this accident? These days, every day is one of those days when I keep hitting the num lock key on the keyboard. I start to sympathize with Hikkoshi Lady, who became so fed up with the world and her festering place in it that she took to screaming out her window literally 24 hours a day for nearly a decade. At near-inexplicably weird times like this, I feel entertainment, of all things, is failing us.
I wanted to use this story in here somewhere; I canât remember where. I wanted to mention how Hideo Kojima once told me in an interview that his âultimate gameâ would be not for any console â it would be a robot, maybe of a little girl, who you had to care for, who would maybe tell you a very long and affecting story. Then I wanted to mention Love Plus, where your guy asks the girl, during a routine walk home from school, âWhat kind of music do you like?â and she says, âYou know, the usual stuffâ, and your guy says, âYou donât seem like you like the usual stuffâ, and she says, âWhatâs that supposed to mean?â and Iâm home, in my boxers, in my bed, blue LED christmas lights taped in the shape of a psychotic constellation on my ceiling, thinking, I know what thatâs supposed to mean. Iâd ask her, hey, show me your iPod right now! Or if she didnât have an iPod (protip: some people donât!) Iâd say, whatâs the last CD you bought? Then Iâd realize Iâm not on the Holodeck on âStar Trek: The Next Generationâ, that in ths imagined world I can only timidly go where game designers have already gone before.
Then I wanted to mention Final Fantasy VII, then I wanted to mention the Final Fantasy XIII trailer, full of action figures posing and spouting impenetrable, indecipherable catch-phrases in scenes so vague that you can tell the makers hadnât jigsaw-puzzled even a quarter of the gameâs âplotâ together before they commissioned the cut-scene. Then I would paraphrase this joke. Itâs the kind of joke you can only paraphrase, really. Every culture used to have another culture they didnât like, or considered intellectually inferior, so the main character of this joke was usually a member of that culture, depending on your culture.
It goes like this: A man, who is an idiot, has a superhuman ability to paint straight lines. He gets a job painting a line down a long, straight highway. His first day, he does wonderfully. He paints miles of straight line. The next day, he paints significantly less. By the end of the week, his productivity has fallen through the floor. Heâs getting no work done at all. His superior asks him: âAre you having trouble?â To which the idiot replies: âNah. It just takes longer and longer to walk back to the bucket. It takes so long, I donât have time to paint anymore.â
Itâs like that.
â-
Once again, thank you for reading this! Your patience knows no bounds.
I will be back next month with, hopefully, something even more fatuous and impenetrable.
In the meantime, if you are a 2D artist or programmer and would like to help me make an independent game and are willing to work temporarily for (probably) no money at all, please contact me at 108 (at) actionbutton (dot net).
If you have any questions or concerns or suggestions for future columns, please mail me! Getting email is fun!
Also, if you are a game developer and would like me to play your product so as to further my broken encylcopedic knowledge of game design, please send me an email. Disclaimer: Giving me your product for free in no way guarantees a favorable opinion. I am even enjoying iPhone games, these days.
tim rogers is the editor-in-chief of Action Button Dot Net (stay tuned this month for a big-time Action Button revival! lots of cool stuff coming; bookmark it asap, etc); he lives in tokyo; friend his band on myspace!
Illustration by Harvey James. Vote for his shirt, 2012 The Ape~Ocalypseâ at Design By Humans!
