Trigger Happy
except for the wealthy. Yet in a culture where the form of an activity is held in such high esteem for its own sake, being able to recreate that form in a videogame context is, it seems, a decisively valuable pleasure.
This is not so different from a Western driving game. Most of us will never be able to hurl a Dodge Viper at two hundred miles an hour through the Tokyo suburbs. But we can play Gran Turismo, and as the form of the videogame becomes an ever more accurate analogue to the form of the real activity (with our provisos about playability), that is a better and better consolation. The gallimaufry of Japanese simulation games are attractive because they can provide the dynamic form of an activity even though the content (the physical paraphernalia of that activity: actual fish, or a real garden) are missing.
Now, of course, irrespective of their varying approaches to character design or formal realism, Japanese videogames are still, fundamentally, games. And Japanese people like to play as much as anyone else. One of their biggest leisure pastimes, in fact, has much to tell us next.
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