Sensory Overload

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DAY 343: I am probably a bit biased when I say this, but I think my generation, the generation whose childhood took place in the 1980s, is the best generation.  It was in the 80s that the video game revolution began, when an Atari 2600 or ColecoVision was on the top of every boy’s Christmas list, when visions of sugarplum game cartridges danced in our heads.  Yes, you can blame us for being that first generation that would rather play video games than do a boring thing like reading or taking out the garbage.  Why do anything else when you could switch your switchbox on the back of the TV from “TV” to “GAME CONSOLE” and play a game like Atari’s Combat, where you could fire a non-descript looking shape that was supposed to be a tank with such a force that it knocked the other non-descript shape all the way to the other side of the screen?

Video games, one of the biggest exports out of Japan, have come along way since the days of Combat and Donkey Kong; nowadays, video game tanks actually look like tanks and Donkey Kong has a family of his own.  Video games get more sophisticated each year and every fall the latest ones are showcased at the Tokyo Game Show, the world’s largest video game expo.  Liz didn’t think I’d be interested in such an event when her friend Cal told her it was going on that weekend, but Cal knew very well that I was in the target demographic for it:  young, male and jaded from reality.  When he showed me the article of the expo in the local newspaper, my eyes lit up with the same excitement of first finding the hidden Warp Zone at the end of Super Mario Bros. Level 1-2.

I immediately sent an e-mail to my friend and Blogreader LovePenny; I knew for a fact that he would share my enthusiasm of going to Tokyo Game Show 2004.  I mean, the guy lives and breathes video games.  When his daughter Penny was born (the namesake of his Blog handle), he joked that she would just run around in dirty diapers because all his money would still go towards his hobby of video games.  A frequent poster on video game bulletin boards, he knew the workings of a video game expo and sent me on a mission since he could not be in Tokyo himself:

“Take at least 10 pictures WITH the Game Hotties (the japanese chicks!)!!!!”

A TRAIN TOOK LIZ AND ME to the convention center in nearby Chiba, just a bit farther out of the city center than Tokyo Disneyland.  We met Cal at a coffee shop and then followed the crowd of teenagers and young adults—not exclusively male and not exclusively Japanese—to the ticket line.  Neither Liz or Cal were really up-to-date on the latest video games and so I played guide as best I could, geeking them out with trivia like a 3-D rendering engine that uses bump mapping uses less polygons than one without bump mapping, so less math is involved.  (If you are confused as to what that means, ask resident Blog video game nerd LovePenny.)

“My friend has sent me on a mission,” I told Cal.  “To take a photo with at least then Japanese models.”

“Models?” he questioned, confused at the ambiguity in language.

“As in women.”

“Oh, you’ll probably get that in the first fifteen minutes.” Cal, who worked in the tech sector, was no stranger to the strategies companies used at trade shows to entice the public—more specifically the use of sexy women in front of their booths, also known as “booth bunnies.” In the first couple of minutes after entering the first exhibition hall, we already had two photos down:  one with (1) an SNK girl and (2) a girl selling toys and accessories. 

If you’re not familiar with the tech expo, it is not just a bunch of generic-looking booths and tables that might be mistaken for a real estate convention or community bake sale.  No, companies spend millions on trade shows, each building a huge pavilion with flashy lights, big TV monitors and often a stage for presentations.  Each company tries to outdo the other, and the end result is an all out sensory overload that makes you feel like you are in some sort of giant pinball machine (picture above). 

VIDEO GAME ENTHUSIASTS (a.k.a. “gamers") came from every direction, searching for the latest in video games for computers, mobile phones and game consoles, which they all knew by their acronyms:  RE4, MGS3, GT4 to name a few.  Companies hyped them up with music and sometimes free giveaways—one company even had dancers performing to a loud taiko drum performance—and of course, booth bunnies like the ones at (3) KDDI, (4) Atari’s Driver 3, and (5) Koei.  Booths for driving games like Need for Speed 2:  Underground treated their showcase like it was at an import car show, having their booth bunnies sprawled out on a car instead of passing out flyers.  Nothing else mattered when a new model came out to pose—(A) one from Wayi literally stopped the flow of traffic since every drooling guy with a camera walking by couldn’t help but stop to point and shoot. 

The horniness at the expo translated to the virtual world too.  A couple of years back, Tecmo released Dead or Alive for Microsoft’s X-BOX, a traditional one-on-one fighting game.  While the fighting in DOA was fast and furious, many gamers responded mainly to the female fighters in the game, particularly the way they were rendered in the bust region.  These voluptuous virtual women became such a hit with horny teens that the producers of DOA took them and put them in a different gaming environment altogether to show off their curves and bump maps:  beach volleyball!  The women of DOA were put in bikinis and swimsuits so that owners of the X-BOX could put them in different outfits and wack a volleyball back and forth.  (That’s not all they were wacking.) Perhaps these virtual babes were on X-BOX in lieu of X-BOX’s real babes; pictures with X-BOX’s booth bunnies were denied every time I asked.  (Microsoft bitches!)

Models, like the ones for (B) Taito and (C) Konami weren’t the only ones dress for the occasion; many attendees dressed up as their favorite video game character, revealing yet another subculture within the already outrageous culture of young fashion rebels.  “I can’t tell if they’re dressed up as a character or if they normally dress like that,” Liz said.

“I would have expected the [exhibitors] to dress up but not the attendees,” Cal added.

With so many games to choose from, there were many outfits going around, some familiar, some not.  “Hey, I actually know who that is!” Cal exclaimed.  The girl in blue was just one of a group of people who had collectively worn different outfits for a big group photo of Japanese video game heroes.

Another group in costume that was more recognizable was a team of people promoting the latest Star Wars games by LucasArts:  one dressed as C3PO next to an R2-D2 unit and a bunch of Stormtroopers.  One by one, people in the crowd were allowed to pose with them, and eventually it was our turn.  I stood next to C3PO, the droid I grew up with in my childhood, and put my arm around his shoulder like we were old pals—but C3PO got all defensive and shoved me aside.  What?  C3PO?  C’mon now, after all the love I’ve given you all these years? A Stormtrooper noticed the commotion and restrained me from C3PO, who stood there all pompous-like, waddling in his standard droid pose with his arms out, all high on fame like I was beneath him.  We posed anyway, with the group from that galaxy far, far away, but if you’ll notice in the photo, the Stormtrooper held a grip on me in case I “assaulted” C3PO again.  (C3PO, you bastard!)

THE THREE OF US WANDERED THE CROWDED EXPO, taking more photos with booth bunnies—(6) Game Excite, (7) Taito, (8) Rumble Roses, (9) Gung Ho Online—trying out this game and that game for Playstation 2 and X-BOX, and watching others play not only with game controllers but with their entire bodies to show off motion sensor devices that are now coming from the arcades and into the home.  In one of these motion sensor games you had to throw virtual jam at dancing fish, while at the same time be beware of the attacking toast man.  How’s that for Japanese pop culture?

I thought everything we had seen in the first hall was a sensory overload until we entered the Sony-dominated second hall, with perhaps twice as many people, bigger booths with bigger screens and more sounds—so much that Liz had reached her threshold.

“I’m going to have to take a time out,” she told Cal and me.  She went off to find a quiet place on the side where other attendees were sitting on the floor from exhaustion.

The big showcase game in the second hall was one I was really looking forward to playing after seeing its “E3 2004 Trailer”:  Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (also with its own (10) MG3S booth bunny), the latest in a franchise that combined dramatic storylines with action, strategy and espionage, created by not only a team of programmers and electronic artists and a military advisor, but with a title sequence designer and score composer from the Hollywood movie biz.  As much as I wanted to try it out, the crowd for it was so big the waiting time to get on a station to play it was over an hour (like most games at the expo) and I just didn’t have the patience.  Instead I used my time more constructively and by that I mean take more pictures with booth bunnies (even though I had already reached LovePenny‘s quota):  (11) Electronic Arts, (12) Namco and (13) Hudson. 

I finally made it out to arguably the highlight of the show, the pavilion for Sony’s new portable gaming unit, the PSP.  Trying it out was easier than trying out MGS3 because not only were there multiple stations to play, but Sony’s booth bunnies went around with PSPs strapped to their belts for people to try them out.  I played a fighter game on one while admiring the PSP’s sleek design, hi-res graphics and stereo sound.  Unlike the snobby bitches at Microsoft’s X-BOX booth, (14) the Sony PSP booth bunny was more than willing to pose with me, even with the PSP unit despite the signs posted all over that photos of products were forbidden. 

AFTER THE SENSORY OVERLOAD OF JAPANESE ELECTRONIC POP CULTURE (and even more photos with (15) booth bunnies that I’m not sure what game or company they represented (although (16) one was an “actual booth bunny” [said Cal]), it was fitting that I found the perfect refuge from such a chaotic scene:  the quiet insides of a capsule in a Japanese capsule hotel since Liz had to go out of town that night to meet her husband Hiroshi at her in-law’s.  I lay my head to rest in my own little pod that night (which was roomier than expected), secluded from the flashy graphics and loud sounds of video games, as visions of sugarplum booth bunnies danced in my head.


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This blog entry about the events of Sunday, September 26, 2004 was originally posted on October 04, 2004 on the blog, "The Global Trip 2004: Sixteen Months Around The World (Or Until Money Runs Out, Whichever Comes First)," hosted by BootsnAll.com. It is one of over 500 entries that chronicled a trip around the world from October 2003 to March 2005, encompassing travel through thirty-seven countries in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. It was this blog that "started it all," where Erik evolved and honed his style of travel blogging. (It starts to come into focus around the time he arrives in Africa.)

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