A few days later, I sat down with another friend of mine - who happened to be an international student from Japan - and asked him a similar question. He replied that he did not think of himself as a gamer in the sense that I meant it because to him, our conception of the term "gamer" was akin to his usage of otaku - that is, a self-professed, obsessed, garden variety geek. I was fascinated. He proceeded to paint for me a vision of a world with a wholly different entertainment culture than I had known, one where men in their thirties, and even forties, would occasionally refer to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest in casual water-cooler conversations, where arcades were actually places that people socially played games, where a man, woman or child could play on their GameBoy Advance SP and not have it mistaken for a cellular phone that could play Street Fighter 2.
This is Japan, he explained - a country where any young man or woman might have played through Final Fantasy VII, but to put up a poster advertising that fact in one's dorm room would be unthinkably, unforgivably otaku. And if this sort of sentiment is not completely alien to you, dear Reader, then maybe it makes a little more sense that an arcade peripheral, unlike a stack of DVDs, would inspire an attractive, interested young lady to briefly consider if she really wants a long-term relationship.
Allow me to draw upon a contemporary example; one of my fellow dorm-dwellers came into the possession of a no-questions-asked copy of Square's straight-to-DVD movie release, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and held an informal screening in our living room. While I was unable to attend, I returned to find a living room packed; about half were Americans (all of whom had either played through the original Final Fantasy VII or had been forcibly dragged along by a friend) and the other half were Japanese (of which a handful had actually played).
As Advent Children appeals almost exclusively to people who at least know of Final Fantasy VII, this instance speaks very clearly to differences in Japanese and American attitudes toward gaming. While some of the international students had played Final Fantasy VII, the experience of those who hadn't played FFVII seemed largely akin to, say, someone going in and seeing Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith without having ever seen any of the original Star Wars trilogy; though they won't have experienced the fully continuous Star Wars experience, they still have some concept of Star Wars as culturally relevant. Conversely, the Americans in the room who had never played FFVII were horribly lost in a haze of beautiful fight scenes and choppy editing.
Let us consider gaming as equivalent to a mild narcotic habit, whereby it's perfectly acceptable for Yoshiko from Waseda University to wander into my room during a party and ask if I have marika (Super Mario Kart), or to pick up the MAS stick and explain to me during a game of Street Fighter III: Third Strike that she used to play all the time with her older brother, back in the day ("no, I'm not a gamer, I just do it socially at parties"). And perhaps that, in turn, explains the puzzlement and surprise with which Yoshiko later confides in me, "It seems everyone here likes Sen to Chihiro," upon encountering more than a few rooms with movie posters for the American release Spirited Away - oh, how otaku. It conjures up that moment of utter solemnity when beginning pot-smokers and beer-drinkers will pass on to each other the sacred Addiction Rule of Thumb - do it as much as you want, dude, just never by yourself. That's when you know you're an addict.
