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Number thirteen:
A word of warning to the wise and/or unwise -- I'm writing this in Seoul, Korea. I am writing it today, and I am writing it right now. There is no other today, no other right now, that's right for writing this. So that's why I've buckled down and made a choice.
It is Christmas Day in Seoul, Korea. Me, Tim Rogers, is a person with some Korean somewhere in him. You wouldn't know to look at me, or possibly even to talk to me. You probably wouldn't even know it if you shook my hand, or asked me my favorite color. Really, if I tell you my favorite color is orange, what does that tell you about the Korean inside me? What does it tell you about the Japanese inside me when I hint that when I said my favorite color was orange, I might have been lying? What does it say about the world that I might or might not be wearing orange right now, and what does it say about anything else contained within anything else, even language, that I would even suggest I'm wearing a color if I was, in truth, not wearing that color at all? And what does this have to do with videogames? I'll answer the latter question for you, because this is, after all, a website about videogames. That question's answer is: a whole lot, big boy.
I went to school with a lot of Koreans, you see. For reasons we can't get into without getting boring, the Koreans liked me. They liked me on sunny days and windy days, and even windy Sundays. I went to church with Koreans, looking for something. There was a girl in love with me in one of those churches, and I didn't notice because of videogames. Once, we can all recall one day while laughing, I lost the chance to meet a particularly beautiful young lady because of Rare's Banjo-Kazooie, which I didn't even want to play in the first place. That will never happen again, and not just because I no longer own a Nintendo 64. It will not happen because I, as a man and as something else, have been awakened to sensitivities that tell me to follow my heart, sometimes toward games and sometimes away from them. My heart told me to come to Seoul. It told me to come to Seoul about three months ago, and at that time I wrote a long short story, partly fabricated, about something that had shown me Korea while I was at home in Tokyo. That story was supposed to be posted on insertcredit.com, and for some reason never went up. Hell if I know what the hold-up is.
Still, I came to Korea, and I'm in Korea now. I'm in the house of the very girl who used to be foolishly in love with me five years ago. She's not here. She left this afternoon after putting on much makeup and asking me how each garment looked when she tried it on. What she really wanted was for me to ask her why she was getting so dressed-up. I couldn't ask the question. She wouldn't have answered it, anyway -- when I asked her this morning after church where it was she had to go tonight, she said "Somewhere out of the area." What that means, I don't know. In five years, I've not grown less clueless about some things, it seems. To think I was once the smartest person who ever lived in Kansas.
Last night -- that is, Christmas Eve night, this girl and I shared kimchee ramen with rice cakes. By rice cakes, I mean in the Asian gooey sense, not the crunchy Quaker stuff American people eat when they want to lose weight. While we were eating these rice cakes, we were talking about the present. She had her mind on the future even while talking about the present. She was talking about her current job at an English-teaching institution. I tried to get in an edgewise word about my Wired interview with Hideo Kojima, and it just wasn't going to work. This girl had other things in mind for me to talk about.
"Are you happy?" she asked me.
"No," I answered without hesitation.
Without allowing me to elaborate, she went on to explain that a thirteen-year-old boy in one of the English classes she teaches asked her if she was happy during the question-and-answer portion of her first lesson with them.
She put down her little metal chopsticks and finished crunching a pickle. "Can you believe a thirteen-year-old would ask me something like that?"
I shrugged. "I can." It seemed reasonable.
"Oh, shut up. You know what else they asked me?"
"If you had a boyfriend?"
She grabbed up the chopsticks again.
"Yeah! How did you guess?"
"Language teaching experience," I said, tossing back another cup of water. The ramen was a little on the too-spicy side.
"Can you believe they'd ask that, too?"
I decided to lie: "Not at all. Kids these days."
"I know."
"Yeah."
"So . . ."
Here, the girl wanted me to ask her if she, in truth, had a boyfriend. This is this girl's idea of being clever, and much as a certain friend advised me that she's quite the opposite, I tend to think this girl might be too clever.
"Either she thinks she's smarter than me and she's being weak, or she knows I'm smarter than her, and she's being strong," I told this fine website's Eric-Jon Waugh an hour ago via the magic of internet chat. This prompted him to ask me back, "Well, what do you think?" I asked, "What do I think about what?" And he asked, "Who do you think is smarter?" I told him I didn't understand the question. That's my way of avoiding a question. That's also my idea of being clever.
Last night, Christmas Eve night, this girl and I went running on a high school track as a white mist descended on the whole place in a way that made me think of Warcraft II. We ran for two hours, talking about assorted things all the while. She told me that it was good of me to come to Korea, putting a strange destined spin on it: "You made a good decision when you came here."
And now, a day later, she's gone. It's two in the morning on Christmas Night, and I'm alone in this girl's parents' house, in the presence of two other people. This isn't exactly a place I want to be. Her parents, while nice, kind of creep me out. Maybe they only creep me out because I was expecting them to?
Three months ago, I made the plans for this trip. My friend said she'd be sure to clear aside some time on the date of my arrival so that she could pick me up at the airport. The morning of my departure, I dialed her up on MSN Messenger, and she said she had to work that day. I was a bit frantic -- I had to be at Narita Airport in just two hours. What the hell did she expect me to do once I got to Incheon?
She told me to get on the bus for Suwon, and ride all the way to Pyoung Chon. Once there, I should go to a payphone by the old-fashioned benches at the NewCore department store and call her father. I was about to ask her father's number when I realized she was going to give it to me anyway. I wrote it down.
My plane, set to arrive at four-ten, arrived at three-thirty-two. I was on the bus by four-thirty, as the sun set over Seoul. I reached the Pyoung Chon NewCore terminal at six. I stood before a payphone with trepidation. Was I, really, ready to call this girl's father and have him take me to their house? Was I ready for the oddness that would spill forth from the moment I stepped into that upscale apartment and realized the very linoleum floor was heated? I put my 500 Won back in my pocket and took off down a shopping arcade that reminded me of 1987's Kowloon as depicted in Shenmue II. I found a Dunkin' Donuts, and screamed when I saw the donuts were American prices. I ate strawberry jam donuts, almost died, and then decided to find a PC-bang.
A PC-bang is a Korean internet café. Yet let's not be so blasé as to call them internet cafés; a PC-bang is a totally different experience altogether. An internet café in Tokyo will fill your lungs with smoke as a broken chair offends your ass and the fax machine bleats out pop-jingle melodies every minute on the minute, and ring your total up to two hours' worth when you stay sixty-one minutes. An internet café in Munich will charge you eight US dollars for an Orangina you don't want to drink anyway.
A Japanese manga café is quiet and respectful, full of salarymen who missed a last train or just really have a thing for Hajime no Ippo. A Korean PC-bang is patronized by old women with things for online mahjongg, old men emailing their daughters in Texas, couples on dates, and guys battling each other in Starcraft. The lights are down low, the seats are big and leather, and the experience is available for less than fifty American cents an hour; the reason it's so cheap might be because all of these people have computers at home that they could be using, and their homes are most likely within ten minutes' walking distance of the PC-bang. So the PC-bangs need something to lure the people in. This something is double-edged: low price, and impeccable atmosphere.
Unlike a Japanese manga café, a Korean PC-bang does not offer free drinks. A Coke sets you back around a dollar. In size, however, it's twice what they'd call a large at a Japanese McDonalds, and you're paying about a tenth the hourly fee you'd pay at a Japanese internet café, so don't complain.
They also sell Nong Shim kimchee ramen. Which is good, and even vegetarian-friendly.
I stopped into this internet café half-trembling. For one thing, the guys in the elevator were talking about me. Like, what the hell is the un-Korean guy doing here? Being that I'd only been in a distinctly Korean part of Korea for all of twenty minutes and I was already holding a bag of Dunkin' Donuts in the elevator up to a PC room, I must have either looked like a dork or been a dork. Once the elevator door opened, I stopped trembling: the shame that greets one when entering a Japanese manga café is as absent from a Korean PC room as air from a vacuum package of coffee.
Then there was the linguistic shame that came with being a foreigner speaking a foreign language for the first time in an unfamiliar country. Well, I'd said "Pyoung Chon" to the guy at the bus ticket counter -- that didn't count, though. This time, it was going to be real Korean, and it was at an internet café, and I was holding a bag of donuts, and the person behind the counter was . . . a girl who couldn't have been more than twenty. She had her hair tied up in smooth braids, and smiled at me as I stopped in front of the counter.
"Hello," she said, in California English. And -- that was that. No Korean needed to exit my mouth for the next couple of hours.
She got me hooked up with a membership card and a membership number and everything. She took me to a booth, and stood there wiping off the keyboard of the adjacent computer, asking me about where I'd come from and why I was carrying donuts. I told her about how I hadn't had real Dunkin' Donuts in more than two years, and it was a really pleasant surprise to see three Dunkin' Donuts locations on one street in one Seoul suburb.
She then asked me why I was using the internet. I showed her insertcredit.com, and I showed her my emailbox, which since the morning had filled with a hundred and sixteen emails from readers or editors offering me money. She narrowed her eyes at my Internet Explorer browser.
"Holy shit I totally know this site," she said.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. You cover GP32."
"Yeah. Wow."
"You got a GP32?"
"Nah. That's Brandon's thing."
The girl reached into a pocket of her white apron, and pulled out a GP32. In a moment, she was showing me Dig-Dug on a Famicom emulator.
Then her boss yelled at her. She disappeared for an hour, during which time I chatted with Eric-Jon and drank in the environment of the PC room.
People were talking. And not talking like they talk in Japanese manga cafés -- in other words, not quietly, on cellular phones, and getting snorted at by men in workingmen's clothes -- they were talking at normal conversational levels as the Starcraft laser sounds of a hundred-some computers pulsed and lived beneath a thin veil of cigarette smoke and incense like you'd smell at a jazz lounge. One guy was laughing loudly at his friend. Yet the whole scene remained quiet and calm, giving off the air of a cathedral inhabited by one child playing a Gameboy with the sound turned all the way up.
When the girl came back, it was to ask me, "Aren't you going to play Starcraft or something?"
"Yes. Yes I am."
And then I did.
I played Starcraft in a Korean internet café, and because it just happened two days ago, I can only put it in the last slot on this list. It makes the list because I played it as an old game while only twenty minutes into a new place, and it felt like my friend. Neither an old friend nor a new friend; just a friend. The Battle.net interface was in Korean, so I quickly clicked my way through without trying to comprehend as much as I could have. I built up some respectable forces, and then lost to a Korean guy who didn't type a word during the match. He was somewhere else in Seoul, most likely, probably too busy talking with a friend to gloat over a small victory.
Three hours later, I made a promise to the girl that I'd be back, and that was kind of a lie. Then I made that inevitable phone call from that payphone at the department store. My old friend's old father showed up in his Kia to pick me up and take me to the place where I am right now. I had to lie, in carefully broken English, about the flight's being delayed and my being dumb and foreign and getting on the wrong bus.
I found Mueslix and peanut-butter and chocolate waiting by my bed in that Korean apartment. I found that my friend wouldn't be home until after midnight. When she came home, she returned to me my copy of Natsume Soseki's Kokoro. She'd borrowed it for a class five years ago, and just this week got around to giving it back. I read the book the next day, instructed not to leave the house at the risk of offending her parents. While reading, I noticed that this girl had underlined innumerable passages about childhood, growing up, and love.
"Ojosan was by no means a child, however. This was very clear to me. What was also clear to me was that she wanted me to know she was no longer a child."
**
Four years ago, this girl introduced me to my ex-girlfriend, whose sense of humor I had admired from the moment she laughed when I told my friend God was going to be "very angry" with her if she was late for church again.
It was about four and a half years ago that a Neo-Nazi walked into this girl's church in Bloomington, Indiana, and killed eleven people with two machineguns while they were eating kimchee in the church backyard. This girl's boyfriend was one of the eleven killed. He was shot in the face while sitting directly across from her. So much of his blood had splattered onto her clothes that the paramedics had thought she had been shot, too, when she had merely just passed out from shock. I was invited to that picnic, and didn't make it because I'd been up the night before playing Final Fantasy VIII with my neighbor, whose Korean roommate had introduced me to this girl two months prior. I distinctly remember waking up late and walking down to the dormitory cafeteria and eating a plastic package of milk-saturated Mueslix without a spoon. It amounted to a lot of slurping, and it was between two of those slurps that I realized the train of police cars coming down Third Street were headed for my friend's church.
I'm explaining this story right now, to my friend Jane, and trying to figure out what it means in the context of the future, or even just the coming year of 2004. I really don't know what to say. All I can say is that this morning, in the picnic after church, I was thinking about Starcraft instead of anything that might make anyone cry. My friend was gone -- she only goes to church these days when her parents say she has to, and maybe that means she's growing up, or maybe it means something else. What's only certain is that she wants me to know it means something.
Tonight, now, it is three in the morning, and I've decided to start this feature. I decided to start it about two hours ago, after the above-referenced conversation turned into a rattling off of the eccentricities of my now-EverQuest-addicted ex-violinist ex-girlfriend. I explained how she logged easily more than six hundred hours on Phantasy Star Online well before the game was on any system other than Dreamcast. I remember how she said it was because she was Korean that she was able to arrive at the end of a two-month experience with Phantasy Star Online with eyes unclouded by cool graphics, and admit that Diablo II was indeed a better game.
"Korean people understand games better than Japanese people or American people. They understand the true meaning of beauty."
Actually, she stretched that word out: "Byuuuuuuuuuuu~~~tie."
And added a vocal emoticon: "Byuuuuuuuuuuu~~~tie ^=^;;;!1!."
She then said something about the difference between "Fashion" and "beauty," and she said it angrily. I'd learned to ignore her when she got angry. It was best for everyone.
Beneath a folder of real-estate photographs on my friend's dad's desk, I found a Diablo II: Lord of Destruction game disc, and without thinking who it was that ever played it, I popped it into the DVD-ROM drive. In moments, I was logging on to Battle.net. The default username, sans password, was identical to my friend's hotmail address.
Imagine that.
I typed in my old screen name. My account, it told me, had been deleted. I regarded this with little sadness -- it had been at least a year since I'd played, and the server deletes your characters after two months, right?
I wondered if my ex-girlfriend had been playing Diablo II lately. Without a thought (the best way to do things, sometimes), I plugged in her name and password. In a moment, her level 88 hardcore sorceress "Jurie" was storming down the plains of Act V.
A "hardcore" character is a character that is permanently deleted if you die once.
A level 97 barbarian who I asked to join my party turned against me, and killed me. I hadn't even been playing for fifty seconds.
Dead. Hundreds of someone else's hours shot in the head by me.
With a shudder of horror, I reached out with my big toe and turned off the power strip beneath the desk.
Then I thought -- what the hell did I do that for? I flicked it back on, and sat watching the Windows XP Professional Scandisk for a minute until I decided to go get some kimchee out of the refrigerator full of kimchee. My friend's mom was in the kitchen, at one-something in the morning, waiting for her daughter to get back, sipping green tea. I said I was getting some kimchee, and she made me some stir-fried vegetables and toast and a bowl of cereal to go with it. It was during the eating of the cereal -- with a plastic spoon, which my friend's mother told me her daughter had assured her to stock -- that I decided to start writing this feature, something that thousands of people could log hundreds of collective hours experiencing, something to fill the hole in the world created by my careless killing of Jurie. So that's what I'm doing now.
. . .
This was long. Expect the other entries to be shorter.
Thank you for beginning to read. And if you stick around until the end, you'll get another thanks, for having read the whole thing.
[next: number twelve: i'm choking, and not just on kraft string'ums string cheese -- i'm choking on genius!]
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