Lots of high-profile game designers champion the importance of well-thought out gameplay over lush graphics. As I noted in a recent Gamespot article, leading lights like Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani and Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto have said they don't feel a need for consoles more powerful than the current generation. Rez designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi has jumped on this bandwagon too. At a November conference on CG animation, Mizuguchi punctuated every statement lauding technical advances with this pointed comment: "If you watch [Japanese cartoon] Doraemon on HDTV, is it funnier?"

These producers are arguing for the primacy of story-driven games over graphics-driven fluff - if they were film directors, they'd be doing indie film, rather than summer blockbusters. It's hard to argue with this stance.

But this article on the difficulties of fine-tuning the orc AI in the Lord of the Rings movies made me reconsider. It sounds like the battle sequences in Lord of the Rings are an extremely advanced game of Life. Animators place the CG orcs wherever they want them, and the orcs respond to their surroundings according to specified rules.

Now here's the thing. For the last few months, whenever I've discussed this with friends, I've suggested that most gamers will think "I don't need graphics any better than this" when game consoles are delivering graphics at the quality of Toy Story or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I realize now that I was wrong. The real be-all and end-all is consoles that deliver film-quality images, rendered on the fly.

We have a long way to go before our consoles get to that point. A Wired article about the CG in Lord of the Rings said that the animators used 1,600 dual processor servers to create their images. Making this kind of prediction is a sucker's bet, but I can't imagine that kind of power in game consoles for at least five more years.

But here's the thing. When we get there, we could potentially have a game where you place 1,000 orcs and 1,000 elves anywhere you want on a battlefield, then click start and watch them fight according to preconfigured rules - exactly the same "gameplay" (if you can call it that) as the game of Life. But will this be more interesting than Life? Hell yes.

My apologies to Mizuguchi, Iwatani and Miyamoto, but you guys are wrong. Doraemon may not be funnier in HTDV, but you will enjoy watching it more. So I say bring on the console horsepower...there's still a long way to go.

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Last night I went to a press conference about the NES retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Photography Museum. The featured guests were Toru Iwatani (creator of Pac-Man) and Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario and all that followed). Best moment of the night? When the two went head-to-head on Pac-Man Vs., the newly-released update of Namco's classic game. Two guys with that kind of gaming pedigree going mano a mano on Pac-Man? Wow. It was kind of like Jordan and Drexler playing one-on-one and doing commentary at the same time.

One of the most interesting info-nuggets of the evening was Miyamoto's definition of interactivity. Here's how he described what that word means to him.

"Imagine you have a character like Link walk up to a lever, and when you hit the A button he pulls it down. That cues a really nice animation of a gate opening. That experience is one that we've given to you, not one that you create for yourself. But what if Link walks up to the lever, and instead of the A button you use the joystick? Push it up, and Link lifts the lever - push it down and Link pushes the lever down. Now you're interacting with the game."

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I think that making analogies (non-literary ones anyway) is a cop-out. It's a sign of laziness. It suggests that you can't be bothered to go in, get the facts, and then present them concisely, but instead just pigeonhole your subject without devoting much thought to it.

Having said that, I find myself forced now to make an analogy about the U.S. and Japan. Well, no one's perfect.

Do you remember my barber? I guess that technically he's a stylist - whatever. At any rate, I went in for another haircut last week, and well, it got me thinking about some of the differences between haircuts in the U.S. and here.

In the U.S., I get my hair cut in under 20 minutes, they use clippers on the sides, and it costs me $12 plus tip. Of course, I end up looking like a plucked chicken for two weeks or so while it grows in, but that's what happens when you ask them to cut it "real short on the sides."

I looked for a similar shop here, but I couldn't find one. So I settled for the cheapest shop I could find - the one with the indentured servant stylists. Here, they get totally artisanal (I admit I just checked the spelling of that word) on your head. Some guy uses shears and a comb and takes 20 minutes to do what they'd do with clippers in five minutes back home.

So when all's said and done, when I get my hair cut here, it takes over an hour, includes a scalp massage and two shampoos, and costs about $30. Oh, and no plucked chicken look either - they won't cut it that short here.

Now matter how much I want to resist, I can't help it: the difference between the U.S. and Japanese barber shops says a lot about the differences between the two countries as a whole. Heck, distribution systems, business relationships, you name it, the barbershop analogy covers them all.

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Or maybe I should say "gaming gets co-opted." Huh, I was going to write a post about this today, but then I pretty much wrote everything I had in mind as a comment on Game Girl Advance. Go forth and check it out.

I don't normally do this, but there's a nifty little online game I found the other day that I just have to recommend. It's called Ball and Fan. I think I got to level 5 and apparently there's a total of 9 levels. Good luck. Oh, that site hosts a bunch of interesting games/interactive media experiments, so if you're trying to kill time or need some artistic inspiration, see their index for hours of fun.

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I went to town last weekend. Akihabara Electric town, to be precise. Akihabara is what you would have in the U.S. if everyone that's selling their used video games on eBay and Yahoo decided to sell them to a bunch of tiny used game shops instead. Oh, and if all those shops were in the same neigborhood. Of course, no single city in the U.S. has a large enough geek population for this concept to fly. But with something like 30 million people in the Tokyo area, there's enough people to support just about any niche business you can imagine.

Or, as Kenji Ono (my new friend and guide for the day) explained the neighorhood, "Akihabara is traditionally known for three things: home electronics, PCs, and video games. Of course, now it's getting pretty well known for adult products too."

I'd already noticed that, actually. I'd arrived about an hour early, and while I was looking for an Internet cafe to kill some time, I'd walked by five or six "adult establishments."

Ono-san proved his point by taking me on a whirlwind tour of the nearest sex shop, using some of the merchandise to stress key points about the Akihabara demographic. "See those cosplay costumes? There's a lot of that in Akihabara. Look closer - they look pretty big, right? That's because they're for men. If that's the kind of merchandise you want to sell, Akihabara is the best place to be."

Yikes. So in Japan, some sizeable chunk of the (male) game geek population is also into dressing up in French maid outfits. Thank goodness that our good wholesome geek population in the U.S. is nothing like that.

Ono-san is a game journalist and the founding editor of Japan's Game Critique magazine. This is a great magazine - I don't know of a close analog in the U.S. Basically it's industry trends and happenings, with some reviews, written for adults rather than junior high school students. The magazine is organized in long sections of 30-40 pages or so with multiple stories on a single topic by different writers. Game Critique takes pride in telling the straight story, and as a result seems to have shaky relationships with some Japanese game firms. Apparently most of the gaming media here practices press release journalism, while Game Critique rocks the boat a bit.

At any rate, I couldn't have asked for a better guide to Akihabara. We went to a lot of places I wouldn't have found on my own, including a Western game import shop. How bizarre is that? After all the people I've talked to about how U.S. games just don't sell in Japan, not to mention the research showing the same thing, there's a store in Akihabara that doesn't sell anything else. Actually, I guess that's just another proof of my first assertion that in Tokyo "there's enough people to support just about any niche business you can imagine."

Oh, and to be completely accurate, this shop did sell a few things besides import games. Like a talking Rocky doll, which I really should have taken a picture of. (That's Rocky as in Sylvester Stallone, not Bullwinkle.) But nothing out of the ordinary for an import shop, I guess. It was just surprising to find that level of interest in Western games after hearing/seeing so much evidence to the contrary.

The manager told me that the most recent import hit was GTA III for the PS2; apparently the long wait for the Japanese version of the game was a real boon for the mod chip industry here.

Oh, and did I happen to do some shopping in Akihabara? Why yes, I think I did. I'll gloat over my new toys later, when I have some more time.

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If you haven't had a chance to check out my article on the Famicon retrospective at the Tokyo Photography Museum, you should. Today's entry won't make much sense otherwise.

Back already? I hope you enjoyed the article. Did you check out this photo? That's right, according to the masking tape tag and the sign below the console, this is the last Famicon ever made, production date September 25, 2003. A little piece of history. Cool, no? My only regret: I was standing right in front of it and I didn't even think to reach out and touch it - or better yet, get someone to take a pic of me with the controller in my hands. I'm still kicking myself for that.

Ah well, what's life without a few regrets to rehash while drinking with friends? More importantly, I enjoyed talking with the exhibit curator Yuki Denda - she was pressed for time because I visited the museum just two days before the exhibit opened, but she still took a few minutes to talk and share some interesting information. Most of that went into the article, but her comments on copyright issues and game software ownership just didn't fit. Now, lucky you, you can read them right here on Gaming Japan.

Denda tried to contact every single copyright holder for every one of the 1,200 Famicon games included in the exhibit. She found that the copyright situation for some of these games - some of which are 20 years old - "is not very clear - actually, it's completely wack." (Very loosely translated.)

Apparently 20 years down the road, a lot of the original publishers and developers have gone out of business, so ownership of their products is hard to assign. Of course, that's a problem if you're trying to get permission to exhibit a given piece of software. But Denda rolled up her sleeves and dove in. She worked with a Japanese copyright/intellectual property protection organization, and mentioned that requests to the user community were extremely helpful as well.

The upshot is that she made a lot of progress - Hidekuni Shida, one of the game industry types who helped plan the exhibit, said something like "Denda-san went a long way towards helping nail down the early history of video games in Japan." (Though comments from both Denda and Shida suggest that she didn't quite get 100% of the rights nailed down.)

That's a good thing. Some years from now games are going to be the object of serious academic study. (Actually, I guess that trend has already started.) Addressing this issue now will pay off down the road.

Think about the alternative. Games are code, and in most cases, that code is not too hard to find on the Internet these days. Unlike the physical artifacts that we humans have been dealing with for the last couple of millenia, code doesn't degrade over time. Scholars in the future will be able to look at exactly the same game that we're playing right now.

But the human institutions that produced that code are nowhere near as hardy. That means that a lot of connections that seem obvious now could be hard to reconstruct in 100 years. So future archeologists might be reduced to drawing conclusions based on information in the code itself. Hopefully, Denda's work means that they'll have a little more to go on.

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Lately my articles on Gamespot have been getting reposted/referenced here and there online. As well as getting quoted/borrowed from in articles on CNet (part of Gamespot's corporate family), my articles have also been linked to from Slashdot Games a couple of times, and once from Game Girl Advance. But now I've hit the Internet big time: Penny Arcade ran a strip last week inspired by one of my articles.

The first time I got Slashdotted, I was pretty damn ecstatic. I mean, I've been reading Slashdot pretty regularly for the past few months, and the community is well-informed and ruthless in its criticism. Having them pick up one of my articles as worthy of mention was a complete surprise and extremely gratifying.

Same thing with Game Girl Advance - I read the site all the time, so it was awfully nice to see a link to not one but two of my articles up there.

But getting a tip of the hat from the Penny Arcade guys pretty much means that I can die happy.

It's weird how this kind of exposure seems to scratch an itch that I didn't know that I had in a way that I didn't know was possible. I mean, it's way better than being, say, a famous actor or a model: people whose claim to fame is their cheekbones. Having people chew over something that you write is immensely satisfying - and if they're people who produce work that you respect, so much the better.

But there's also something that's kind of hard to express. Seeing my articles referenced in the media that I look at every day is a bizarrely direct kind of affirmation - must be kind of how it feels for an athlete who sees one of his plays make the highlights reel of the evening news.

The author John Shirley actually described this feeling 'way back in 1989. He was talking about TV, of course, but the things that he said apply very specifically to the online world. In his short story collection "Heatseeker," in the story "The Wolves of the Plateau," Shirley describes a TV hacker - someone who uses his own dish to hijack satellite transmissions and superimpose digital graffiti on regular programming. Of course, his sardonic subtitles to the evening news are accompanied by his tag: it's not just the doing, it's the recognition.

Hmm, I wish I had that book here, but I don't, so I can't quote the relevant section directly. If you're able to chase down a copy, check it out.

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