Trigger Happy
Statistical insights into videogaming in Japan are richly furnished by the 1997 CESA36 Games White Paper. It reports that attendance at the 1997 Tokyo Game Show was 82 percent male (while very heavily male-oriented, then, this still means nearly a fifth of attendees were female), while the median age of attendees was 25 to 29, and the most common occupation was that of “office worker.” (Videogames, then, are not just for kids in Japan any more than they are in Britain or the United States.) Meanwhile, the extent to which Japan is leading the West in terms of videogames’ status as a mainstream entertainment medium is shown by a poll of 6,000 people, of whom more than a third (35 percent) currently played videogames. Another fifth used to play them and probably will start again in the future, while an eighth had “never played before, but would like to try depending on software.” Less than a third of the population (31.7 percent) responded that they had “never played before and had no wish to do so.”
Now, Japanese women who are interested in videogames have notably different preferences than the men. When asked to rank their favorite titles, more
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36 Japan’s industry body, the Computer Entertainment Software Association.
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