2001-12-04 - 6:10 p.m.
Shibuya, Tokyo at night:
In one of my earliest entries, I wrote about the spectacular interactive arcade games that you can find at Tokyo’s huge and numerous game parlors. Left, is a picture of two people playing “Dance Mania,” the game where you try to out-dance your opponent by following the complicated pattern of footsteps on the screen in front of you. Right, is perhaps the strangest game I’ve seen yet (and this beats Lela’s observation of a game in which the player drives a city bus). In this game, the player walks a dog. Actually, you walk on a treadmill holding a leash attached to an immobile plastic dog, while watching the computerized dog on the screen in front of you. You must steer the leash to take the dog out of harm’s way -- cars, menacing crows, etc., and must speed up and run when the dog decides to run. It seems that an activity doesn’t have to be that fun or dangerous in real life for someone to decide that it would make an exciting arcade game.
Today was a little better -- I taught the 8th graders and they were really good. It was rainy day so I got a lift from the principal. He used to be an English teacher, and his English is excellent. In the 1980s he taught Japanese for three years in Cairo, and has travelled a great deal.
In the teacher’s room there’s a board on the wall with little wooden name plaques hanging on pegs. As teachers come in the morning or leave in the afternoon, they turn their tags -- like the swim tags by the lake at summer camp.
