Trigger Happy
like Lara Croft or Mario is, in these ways, inexhaustible.
Some say life’s the thing . . .
.. . but I prefer playing videogames. Time to dive once again into the bleep-ridden throngs of Makuhari, because it’s not just in terms of character design that the Japanese industry is instructive. We can also learn from the esoteric flora and fauna of its videogame biosphere that never make it to the West. Talking about them one night after the show in a local sushi bar, Japanese student Gavin Rees offers this observation: “The Japanese do not make the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘content’ that we do in the West.”
How so? Teruichi Aono, a professional Shogi (a board game also known as “Japanese chess”) player, has written about the Japanese art of flower-arranging that “the feeling is not so much that this flower or that is in itself beautiful, but that a world of elegant beauty is to be found, for example, in the skillful gathering and arranging of flowers and pampas grass.” In the tea ceremony, too, the rules for which it can take ten years to learn, the point is not so much the content (the actual drink) as the form (the highly traditionalized methods of preparing it): “The actions performed in
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