Texas Pages

How does a good old boy from Dallas end up living in Japan and writing about video games for a living?
Growing up, I'd always been interested in Japan and video games. As a kid, I had a bunch of game consoles: an Atari 2600, an Odyssey, a NES, a Super NES, a Master System, Sega Genesis and a TurboGrafx 16. Of course, as with most people my age, I grew up in arcades, stuffing quarters in game cabinets and asking parents for more said quarters.
After I graduated from Cornell, I decided to go to Japan. Besides my interest in things like video games, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I felt very comfortable. The initial plan was to stay three months. That's turned into seven plus years. This year I got my permanent residence visa, and now that I am married with two kids, I think I'll be here for the long haul.
I spent a lot of time in arcades when I first arrived in Japan. I still do. I love the vibe. I love that arcades are a place where people with a similar interest in gaming congregate.I love that I can sit down a play a game for 100 yen. If I like it, I can continue. If I don't, well, then I don't.
For the equivalent of five or ten bucks, you can have a great night of gaming at an arcade.
I was writing a feature on robots for Wired with another Wired contributor, Brendan Koerner. Brendan hooked me up with Gawker Media, and I started writing for Kotaku in late 2005. At the time, blogs were still a bit of a novelty -- they were new, exciting. Some people didn't know quite what to make of them.
Writing about video games is a great beat. There's a wonderful convergence of art, technology, commerce and interactivity in an unparalleled way.
What inspired you to write Arcade Mania?
As someone who mourns the decline of arcades in America, coming to Japan was like being in arcade heaven. Heck, it is arcade heaven.
In big cities like Osaka or Tokyo, arcades are found near large train stations. So, it's very easy and convenient for Japanese folks to go to arcades, or game centers as they're called in Japanese. Arcades are very much integrated into the Japanese urban landscape.
And even if you are not interested in going head to head against another player, there is the spectacle aspect where players practice a game like, say, "Dance Dance Revolution" and go to the arcade to, in a sense, display their skills. Some players often practice in their neighborhood game center and get amazingly good before daring to play and show off at famous arcades in Tokyo.
I came up with the idea to do an arcade book. Japanese game centers are prime book fodder. The interactivity of video games is highlighted in arcades. You can see people playing games, instead of them being squirreled away in their homes. You can easily check out which games are popular, just by looking and seeing where players are lining up to play. It's all right there for everyone to see.
I thought if I could focus on not only the games and the arcades, but the people who make them and the people who play them, then it would be an engaging subject matter. A lot of the writing about video games tends to be more technical. I wanted to inject all the humanity I saw in Japanese game centers into this book.
I really wanted to humanize arcades.
Was it tough to get inside of the culture of Japanese arcades?
Japanese arcades are, in a way, an extension of Japanese society. Inside them, you'll find all sorts of people from businessmen to schoolgirls and everything in between. Since arcades are an extension of society, Japanese manners extend into arcades. Things that are considered polite and respectful in Japanese society at large carry over into arcades. It's a matter of being aware of social norms and then examining them in an arcade setting.
So, for example, if you go to a book store and buy a book, the book is wrapped in a brown book cover so you can discreetly read it on the train or wherever. That's the same logic behind the unspoken rule that you do not look over the arcade cabinet to see your out of view competitor on the other side.
Living in Japan for a while and raising a family here no doubt has helped to break down those cultural barriers.
Japanese culture is certainly different from American culture. But people are people. And gamers are gamers. I wanted to examine those differences and hopefully point out the commonalities.
What do you think Japan's aging population means in the long run for arcades and, really, gaming in general in that country?
The thing with arcades is that a fair number of the players aren't "new" to arcades. So perhaps a player started going to arcades in the late 1990's, and he or she has just, well, continued. In Japanese arcades, it's not strange to see players in their 40's or 50's. I'd assume they would continue going to arcades to play games they did when they were younger. There's a nostalgia factor.
My oldest son is 5 years-old, and he goes to the arcade to play card-based arcade games. Will he keep doing that when he's 40? No clue. I do imagine arcades will look very different three decades later, just as arcades today look different from ones thirty years ago.
Regarding the shrinking population, I think this is forcing Japanese game developers to focus more on an international audience. According to Japanese game developers I spoke with, arcades are still popular in China, so that's definitely a market.
Sticker picture makers, for example, are already concentrating on releasing their machines in the Mainland. Fighting game developer SNK said its arcade games are quite popular in China.