Slum Online (5 page)

Everyone gathered in the arena was there to put the polish on their game.
If one of the top four can lose, maybe I have a shot
. The place was a tinderbox, and that one upset was the spark. Of course most of the people there were like kids standing on the school roof watching a typhoon roll in. When the storm came, they were going to be blown away. There were only sixteen slots in the finals.

Tanaka would make the cut. Maybe the snake boxer who just beat him would make it too. And Tetsuo sure as hell planned to make it.

The cumulonimbus of text bubbles covering half the screen cleared, leaving Tanaka standing at the center. A bubble appeared above his head.

> How ’bout another match?

> Sorry, getting sleepy. Maybe next time.

I glanced at the readout on my DVR. 11:10.
Versus Town
was just getting started at 11:10. It had to be an excuse. No way this guy was sleepy. While I considered his bald-faced lie, he actually logged out, right then and there. Tanaka started a match with the next character in the queue.

Something dawned on me later that night as I was fighting. That snake boxer was probably just some kid in elementary school.

Time is a limited resource, one for which online games have a voracious appetite. The more of this resource you spent in the virtual world, the less you had left over for the real one. The opposite was true too. Spend too much time in RL, and you wouldn’t have enough left over to do the things you wanted to do online.
Versus Town
may not have been as bad as those role-playing games that made you trade countless hours of your life to level up your character, but it birthed its fair share of sun-fearing basement-dwellers all the same.

Back when I had just entered university, before I’d ever been to Versus Town or created Tetsuo, I had one friend in RL I used to talk online gaming with. He was from up north, Hokkaido, and had come all the way down to Tokyo for school. He lived alone.

One day I noticed that he had started wearing his hair in a ponytail. That was the first sign of trouble. When I asked him about it, he said he’d been too busy to go out and have it cut. Pretty soon he stopped going to class. Whenever I was on my PC, he’d message me how bored he was, that he had nothing to do. I told him that if he was so bored, he should try going to class. Apparently he wasn’t
that
bored.

We had met and become friends through gaming. He poured almost all the resources he had into the virtual world. Maybe it was because he’d lost interest in the real one. There was a gleam in his eye when he talked about online gaming that was absent when we talked about anything else. Gaming was the one topic he could carry on a conversation about, which worked when it was just him and me, but as soon as you added a third person to the equation things started to fall apart. Little by little, he dropped out of our circle of friends.

I stopped by his place once around the end of April to check on him. He lived in a studio apartment that shared a communal toilet. There wasn’t a shower at all. The storm shutters covering the window drooped on their hinges, permitting a narrow shaft of concentrated sunlight into the room. Limned in cream-yellow light, the minute hand of the clock hanging on the wall ticked away the hours. Every time a truck drove by, his bookshelf would shudder, and the glass doors would creak loudly.

My friend’s skin was pale and hung loosely on his thin frame. It looked as though he had gone weeks without seeing the sun. Or a bath. I was still paying him occasional visits then, so he hadn’t entirely given up on shaving yet. A centimeter of stubble bristled on the bottom of his chin. The question
How
long does it take to grow a centimeter of facial hair?
flashed through my mind.

I can still hear him telling me how tired he was of RL. He said it was more trouble than it was worth, and I think he really believed it. Pretty soon he stopped leaving his apartment altogether.

I knew he was slipping off the deep end, but there was nothing I could do to stop him. Or maybe there was, and I just couldn’t figure out what it was. Now I’d never know. The only thing I could do was talk to him, try not to make things worse. In the end, it wasn’t enough.

Maybe a real friend would have been able to stop him from succumbing to his addiction. He had thrown away his chance at university and now spent his days sitting in a darkened room, staring into a monitor. He did all his shopping at convenience stores in the middle of the night. Most of his conversations took place in chat windows. He hardly ever spoke. Anyone on the outside looking in would have thought he was miserable.

All for a game. Any sane person wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. Count yourself lucky if you don’t.

Online games are only good for
otaku
and the chronically unemployed. If you don’t fall into either of those two categories, keep walking the straight and narrow. Nothing to see here. The less you know about online games, the better. You can live your life, fall in love, grow old, and no one will point and laugh at you for never having played an online game. That’s a promise.

Games in general are a waste of time, but online games are the worst. Mark my words. Still, I find myself wondering sometimes, if playing games is such a waste of time, what makes time spent in RL so inherently worthwhile? Hanging out with friends, laughing, fighting, studying your ass off for tests—these everyday experiences, a lot of which could only be called boring, form the foundation on which our lives are built, but I don’t think you can say, categorically, that they’re any more valuable than experiences in a virtual world.

My generation was raised on video games. We were the first to grow up playing them. We traded our pink left thumbs for hardened calluses by pushing too hard on control pads. We sat awake in bed dreaming up ways to take down the next boss. There were moments of clarity, sure. Sometimes the thought that it was all a colossal waste of time even crossed our minds. But it didn’t stop us from playing.

In theory, it was possible to earn a living online by participating in RMT. That’s Real Money Trading. A quick search of any auction site would turn up countless listings for people offering virtual money in exchange for the real deal. Rare items sometimes sold for astronomical amounts. Buyers were people with money in RL but without the time to play the game for themselves. Sellers were people with nothing but time on their hands, and no RL money. By parceling up and selling off time spent playing the game, you could earn the money you needed to live.

In other words, it was a job. In that, it was really no different than what millions of so-called blue collar workers did each and every day. There were those who claimed anything virtual was worthless, but they were wrong. In the right hands, nothing could be transformed into something. It was like the service industry. There was no substance to it, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t profit to be had. It was something we all understood.

But my friend and I never did anything like that. People with the brains to pull off that sort of operation didn’t get addicted to online games in the first place. The kind of person who could look at a virtual world as just another communication tool and put that information to use in RL would never organize their lives around playing some game.

Why? Because the instant you started dealing with RMT, the virtual and the real became bound together with numbers and symbols. Once that happened, you couldn’t help but realize that the virtual world wasn’t fun at all. In fact, it was just as boring and ordinary as RL, and just as worthless. You were running those childhood dreams through an RL calculator and spitting out their worth, if any, and the present value of the future cash flows they could be expected to generate.

So we avoided that scene. We didn’t harden the skin on our thumbs to fine Corinthian leather in hopes of cashing in. We played games to play games.

I didn’t have the words to stop my friend from traveling down the road he’d chosen. It reminded me of the end of
The
Lord of the Rings
, when the elves sailed off into the True West. I was a hobbit who knew the power of the ring only too well, but I was Merry to his Frodo. He knew that where he was going there was no coming back, and a part of me was a little jealous of that determination. I felt the power of the ring, even felt my hold on RL slipping away at times, but I hesitated. I lacked the courage to take that final step, even while deep inside, I hoped to make that journey myself someday.

My friend managed to eke out a living on his allowance for a little while, but eventually he had to go back to Hokkaido. His cell number and email worked through the end of May, but by June even those had been disconnected. In the end it wasn’t the west he disappeared into, but the north.

Sooner or later, everybody dies. I figure it’s best to spend your life doing what you enjoy. Every morning when I stand and look into the mirror, that time is still my own. I wonder how much longer that will last.

These are the sorts of things that run through my head each night while Tetsuo fights in the arena.

The clock on my DVR read 6:15. Morning had stolen up on me. I could hear birds chirping through my shutters. My room was much warmer than it should have been for June thanks to the residual heat from the television and game console’s having been on all night. Locked in the same position for hours, my knees creaked in protest as I stretched my legs.

Tanaka had logged out hours ago. The identity of the snake boxer who’d beaten him was still gnawing at me, but I didn’t have a clue whether or not he was the same character who’d been ganking people down in Sanchōme. Tanaka’s only defeat for the night had been at the hands of the mystery snake boxer.

The night’s score for Tetsuo: 97 wins, 2 losses.

CHAPTER 4

FEEBLE SUNLIGHT BATHED MY DESK. The air was still. Outside the window, row upon row of feathery clouds drifted through the Shinjuku sky. It was almost summer, but even in a long-sleeve shirt I could still feel the chill in the air. I was sitting by the window in a seat two rows from the back of a small, dimly lit classroom, listening to my economics professor.

The room was alive with sound FX. Gusts of wind rattling the window panes. Pencil lead gliding across paper. The guy in front of me rocking in his seat.

It was 11:28
AM
. I ventured a quick stretch. I’d just crossed the halfway mark of my second ninety-minute lecture of the day, and my health gauge was running low. It was all I could do to grip my mechanical pencil in my right hand. The disks of my back were screaming in agony. Expecting students to sit for ninety minutes at a time in such poorly designed chairs raised serious questions about the Japanese educational system. The chairs department stores lined up beside the stairs so elderly shoppers could take a load off were the pinnacle of comfort by comparison. I was starting to consider myself a man of preternatural endurance, a human copy machine whose sole purpose on this earth was to transcribe text from the blackboard onto sheets of loose-leaf paper for hours on end.

The professor, a man of about fifty, was delivering an impassioned speech in front of the blackboard. Mr. Yamawhatsit or Mr. Somethingawa. I couldn’t remember his name. I rested my chin on folded hands, only half listening to the lecture.

If you had two identical widgets, and the price of one of them dropped, the cheaper widget would sell more units. The drop in price would translate into an effective increase in real wages. If, however, the cheap widget was of inferior quality and the standard of living rose, he claimed, people would stop buying the cheap widget.

RL was full of convoluted laws in which I had little to no interest. Thankfully, the topic of the next lecture would be Game Theory. I didn’t know what games had to do with economics, but it sounded like it might be something worth listening to.

Fifteen minutes before the end of class, the professor dropped a bombshell. “We finished early today, so I think we have time for a quiz.” Ignoring the boos erupting from the seats, he started handing out the quiz. The stacks of neatly Xeroxed quiz papers gave the lie to his “finishing early.” Clearly this was a setup, but I held my tongue and filled in my name.

The sunlight shining into the room traced the shadow of the windowsill on the dingy recycled paper. I attempted to read a few of the questions but soon gave up. They may as well have been written in Greek. It was an open-note quiz, but the only notes I had with me were from today, and this was only the second lecture I’d attended since the beginning of April.