Slum Online

by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

  I cut the volume on my music, and the lecture came seeping into my ears. Seaweed Head was explaining that many animals live in groups as a way of self-regulating the population of the species.

  There’s a type of wheat-eating beetle that takes up cannibalism when the swarm grows too dense. Rats raised in overcrowded conditions show signs of mental disorders. A species of rabbit living in the U.S. state of Minnesota develops liver failure and dies when the population density of the warren rises too high. Seaweed Head claimed that before the spread of democracy, humans had instinctively limited their own population. The advancement of civilization was undermining a basic societal function. It didn’t sound like the sort of ideas a sociology professor should be espousing.

  Uncomfortably warm air filled the lecture hall from floor to ceiling. I felt an ache deep inside, at the core of my being. I stared at the attendance sheet and looked around the room. There were no familiar faces, no familiar names.

  Most of the few friends I had made were gone by the end of May. They weren’t strutting around Shinjuku confident of their intellectual superiority or copping an attitude on the trains. They’d just faded away. I played online games with one of them, but lately I hadn’t seen him there or in RL. In a sociological sense, he had been a member of the university student species living on an overcrowded campus and had died for the good of the group. Maybe I would be next. If the natural order held sway on university grounds, it seemed inevitable.

  Too stubborn to know when I was beat, I pored over the attendance sheet again and again. One name appeared more often than any other in the top row. My circle of friends had settled onto the bottom of the roster, and she had found a comfortable perch at the top. If I could write in her two-hundred-fifty-six-times-neater-than-mine handwriting, maybe scratching out notes during class wouldn’t be so bad. But if there was a proportional relationship between time spent studying and handwriting legibility, I was more than happy to rough it out with my hen scratches.

  More sound FX signaled the end of class. Clutching the attendance sheet, I walked down to the front of the room and placed it on the podium. I turned to head back up the steps and there she was, sitting in the front row. The same face I’d seen from a mere eighty centimeters’ distance the day before.

  She was wearing a collared silver-gray shirt with buttons down the front. Her 0.7 mm mechanical pencil rested in her hand. The strands of her neatly trimmed shoulder-length hair seemed less coarse than they had yesterday. Her glasses were nowhere to be seen.

  I walked past without a word. She noticed me and looked up. I saw her lips form the word thanks. Her lips kept moving, but I couldn’t make out the rest of the sentence. I pulled the headphone out of my left ear and looked down at her. Today I was going to make an effort to communicate.

  “Hey.”

  “Thanks for yesterday,” she said with an awkward smile.

  I told her it was no big deal and then hurried up the steps, once again turning away before she could speak. Fragments of a dozen things I might have said to her flashed through my head. It wouldn’t have been fair. I was just covering my own ass. We’re two very different kinds of people. But none of it would have done any good. I decided to skip my afternoon class and went straight home instead.

  CHAPTER 3

  I PRESSED THE BUTTON. With a click, I became Tetsuo.

  The same turquoise blue sky greeted me. The same light poles throwing their slightly jagged shadows on the ground. Beyond the lights stood the entrance to the town, barren and empty. Tetsuo winked into existence at that entrance, the same way he always did.

  Versus Town was an MMO—a massively multiplayer online fighting game. That means you didn’t fight against a computer opponent; you played the game against other players, all connected through the same network.

  At any given moment, dozens of characters might appear and disappear at any of the city’s twenty-four gates. Passing through a gate in the first district, Itchōme, would save your character’s win/loss data. Itchōme was also the place to go if you wanted to change your character’s appearance, fighting school, or weight class. There was even a message board set up offering players yet another way to communicate with each other. In practice, people rarely altered their character’s appearance, school, or weight class, and if you were already online you didn’t need any more ways to communicate, so none of those features saw much use. Itchōme was huge, and the first thing everyone did when they got there was speed-dash out of it as fast as they could. Tetsuo found the right side of Main Street and started running.

  There was no way to tell the identity of the player behind a character. It might be some salaryman you’d never met in your life or it could be the guy you sat next to in class who lived across the street. It could be anyone. The only thing that showed up on the screen was the character the player had created. It wasn’t much, but when you stepped up to go head to head with someone, it was everything.

  When you got right down to it, a fighting game was nothing more than an elaborate match of rock-paper-scissors in which you were allowed to cheat. If you thought you saw rock coming, you gave the sign for paper. If it looked like scissors, you responded with rock. When someone threw a punch at you, you blocked. Punches and kicks don’t hurt while you’re blocking, so your attacker would probably try for a throw next. You couldn’t block a throw, but every throw could be countered with the right throw break. Throw breaks, in turn, left you vulnerable to strikes.

  You had to read the battle, wait for your opponent to expose a weakness. Fake with rock, move in with scissors. Land blows where you could. Keep unavoidable damage to a bare minimum. That was what a virtual character like Tetsuo had to do to survive in this virtual town.

  Tetsuo pushed the frosted glass door open and stepped into the arena. The arena was located in the second district of Versus Town, Nichōme. Log in and out in Itchōme, fight in Nichōme: Tetsuo’s daily commute.

  The third and final district was Sanchōme, but it didn’t have anything to do with the meat of the game. After I first opened my account, I’d taken Tetsuo for a spin around Sanchōme, but it wasn’t much more than a polygonal slum.

  When they could hook your brain up to electrodes like in those old sci-fi novels and movies so you could feel, smell, even taste the virtual world around you, a place like Sanchōme might not be so bad. But the residents of Versus Town couldn’t touch, they couldn’t smell, and they couldn’t taste. They could only fight. The only windows players had into Versus Town were their lousy monitors. The only way to control your character was with one stick and three buttons.

  Tetsuo walked across the arena to the training rooms in back for his usual combo warm-up routine. A gamer that relied on fast reflexes was a lot like a katana. To stay sharp, you had to hone your skills each and every day. If you took a day off, you were that much weaker.

  For the most part, action games required your muscles to learn certain patterns of motion and execute them with blinding speed at precisely the right moment. Get carried away, and it could have a negative impact on you in RL. Suppose you spent ten hours a day playing Tetris. Next thing you know you’re walking down the street thinking about where to place that nice square building up ahead.

  Fighting games are the same. Everyone sacrifices something from RL to spend time fighting in Versus Town.

  Tanaka was in the arena with dozens of characters in the queue, waiting their turn to fight him. He was one of the top four, the best in Versus Town. Everyone knew who they were, so when one of them showed up in the arena, an endless stream of characters would arrive to sign up for a match. Tonight was no exception.

  Since the time I opened my Versus Town account, I had wanted to see Tetsuo join the top four. All I had to do was defeat Pak, the best of the best, and Tetsuo would reign supreme. I didn’t doubt for a second that everyone else waiting in that arena queue had the same idea.

  I wasn’t after virtual fame or notoriety. Tetsuo was already well into the ranks of the eli
te, and he never had trouble finding someone willing to face him in the arena. But if I made it into the top four, the internal barometer I had of my own skill would finally be calibrated against something like an objective set of standards.

  Games are just another form of entertainment. Being good at a game doesn’t raise your grades, and it doesn’t help you find a job. It wouldn’t do much of anything to help you in RL. Maybe that’s why I wanted some sign, some token of achievement in the virtual world to show for my hard work.

  Tetsuo finished practicing on the training dummy. He stepped out onto the arena floor. There were thirty-three people in Tanaka’s queue. I wanted to put Tetsuo up against him, but I wasn’t in the mood to wait half the night to do it.

  Tanaka was fighting a snake boxer in the middle of the arena. It looked like a good match. The snake boxer was a newcomer, someone I’d never seen before. Newcomer or no, he was holding his own against Tanaka. Come to think of it, the character that ganked 963 out in Sanchōme was supposed to be a snake boxer too. Hmm.

  The match ended. The snake boxer had won. Text bubbles started popping up over the heads of the characters crowded near Tetsuo.

  > Some guy just beat Tanaka!

  > No way.

  > Screen shot or it didn’t happen.

  As others read the bubbles and pecked out answers in reply, a chain reaction threatened to fill the screen with text.

  > Who did it?

  > I dunno.

  > What’s the big deal? Even Tanaka has to lose sometime.

  > Dude, a scrub doesn’t just come along and wtfpwn Tanaka.

  > You think it was that guy from Sanchōme?

  > We just witnessed history, man. History!

  > Damn, I need some food.

  > I go bio for a bath, and all hell breaks loose!

  > I can’t see. Is this even hitting you?

  > TEXT BUBBLES ARE ANNOYING.

  > Dude, caps.

  The comments rose one after another. It was like watching a cel-shaded pot of boiling water spill across the arena as the giddy wave of hysteria spread.

  Tanaka might play a hundred matches a day, so on average he was bound to lose two or three. Anyone could get tired and have an off night. It was the second season tournament that had everyone buzzing about the loss. It was getting closer, and you could feel the tension mounting.

  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 moment
s 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.