A day in the gaming world

I am embarking on a new adventure in my blog= in-blog photographs. I have known for a while that this will make my blog at once less boring and more understandable, but the project has so far seemed a little daunting. Still, for all of you that read this I shall make an effort.

My weekend was not as fun filled as usual since I am saving money for the next two weeks, during which I will be participating in a lot of expensive events. Also the money from my scholarship took two weeks longer for me to get than I expected. Which made me broke and sad. Today I got moneys, though, and so everything is bright and shiny again. Except for maybe that the absentee ballot remains a worrisome challenge. I spent Friday night with JSP kids and some Japanese students bowling. Which it turns out is pretty damn similar to bowling in the US except it was maybe dirtier and cheaper. I was also one of the worst bowlers – as per usual. One of the weirdest aspect in Japan is the ability to buy liquor at convenience stores and then take them to karaoke places or bowling alleys. I think that was my first bowling experience where I drank as well as player. Which did not make me suck at bowling any less.


On Saturday I just kind of chilled in my house with my o-ka-san (host mother) and did some homework, went on a short voyage looking for boots with my friend Jen, and then came home for dinner. I think Saturday was the first day I ate all my meals in at my house. I mean I’ve spent the whole day with my host sister and mother before, but we usually eat lunch somewhere else. So that was actually a fairly relaxing change.




Sunday was my big adventure for the week because I went to Tokyo Game-show 2008. Which is a huge game convention in which all the major game companies in Japan show their new games for the year. The Game-show goes from Saturday to Sunday maybe 8-5pm. Getting to the Game-show proved a challenge since my cell phone has decided it hates me and won’t let me send text messages. Which is the main form of communication in Japan. And like the idiot that I am, I turned my phone off the night before the show and missed all of the text messages telling me that everyone was meeting much earlier than I expected. I also chose Sunday to be the first time I am not ridiculously early for a scheduled meeting. Because that is how I roll.
So I showed up at the train-station exactly at 8:30 and turned my phone on in time to realize that everyone else had left earlier. And that I had to wait for a half hour for my train, and then make the two hour voyage by myself. Which pretty much made for a terribly planned and timed morning, but once I got to the game-show everything got a lot better.





I don’t actually like playing games all that much. They are long and tiring and I get bored of them really easily. Mostly I just think about all the time I could be spending watching movies, reading or drawing. But I do like to know what is happening in the gaming world because then I can participate in a lot more of my friends conversations, and the art in games is often pretty awesome. Video games, comics, anime – they all sort of fall into one general category, so gaming knowledge is kind of useful to have. And very very rarely I happen on a game I actually like playing.
I also really enjoy conventions and Tokyo Game-show is the equivilent of E3 in America. It’s a convention filled with exclusive insider knowledge and free things about future games. And thus awesome. I don’t know how many people went to the Show but it had to number somewhere in the plus ten thousands. I got to there around 11pm and stayed till closing and the crush of people rarely thinned.




There were three giant warehouses filled with major game-companies displays, stages, and areas that allowed you to play the new games. The lines to play the games had wait times around an hour for most places and for the really popular games sometimes two hours. Occasionally after playing a game you got neat free things –like canvas bags or promo items, but not always. But you could also pick up free catalogues of each companies new games from women working called ‘booth babes.’ I think that’s actually they’re official title, except for at the x-box booth where they are called ‘official booth attendants’ and all these girls dress up in company outfits of varying degrees of slutty-ness and hand out the companies promo items. And a lot of people take pictures of them, and by people I mean men or the random gaijin tourist (i.e. me and my friend Emily).




That must be the weirdest job to have, where your job description has you dress in provocative costumes and let strange and often creepy men take lots of strange and creepy photos of you. But maybe that is just me looking at things from a very American feminist perspective. It would be kind of awesome to be pretty enough to get paid for having people take picture of you making a peace sign. There were more gaijin tourists there than I have seen in one place so far. I didn’t play too many games (the wait was forever for most of them and final fantasy required elusive tickets) but I did play this game called Little Big Planet, which was adorable.


You are a tiny burlap character that you can decorate and you run around moving objects and solving puzzles in this 2-D/ 3-D world. A booth attendant guy played with us and spent a lot of time telling me to ‘jump jump jump’ because I am not a good gamer. It was fun though. I also played Street Fighter 4 which is apparently not released in the US and a big deal to people into gaming. Or so my JSP friend majoring in gaming seems to find it really interesting. As does the boy who worked at Game-stop for a long period of time. I got my ass handed to me in that game, but my cute friend Emily had her boy help her with her character and she kicked his ass.



But Emily majors in computer science and plays games a lot. I refuse to feel badly about this. Also, Cosplayers came out in force for this event and I saw more elaborate costumes than I ever had before. I’ve been to anime conventions – but I don’t remember seeing anything to the elaborate level of skill that the Game-show cosplayers were on.
All in all a thoroughly fun and exhausting day, and here is all the swag that I picked up.



And a picture of my awesome Pokemon plushie.