I am sorry to say that it was a while ago, but Kagawa Prefecture enacted a “Game Regulation Ordinance.
At the time of its enactment, there was a lot of talk from well-informed people that it was a violation of the Constitution and that it went against Cool Japan, but simply, as a gamer, I feel very uncomfortable with the ordinance.
When I was a child, I used to go to the arcade on the second floor of a local supermarket and spend all of my allowance (some of which I donated to high school yankees) playing tabletop games such as “Galaxian,” “Xebious,” and “Donkey Kong.
Eventually, I started saving my New Year’s money to play games at home, too, on a stationary console called “Blockcrusher” and “Arcadia” (I bet you’ve never heard of it). Finally, a few years later, the Family Computer (a.k.a. Famicom) was introduced.
When I learned about this, I was so eager to have a Famicom that I worked part-time during the summer vacation of my first year of high school to buy one. The first games I bought were “Spartan X”, “Super Mario Bros.”, and “Dragon Quest I”.
Of those games, I would say that I bought the NES just to play Dracula. Nowadays, you can play role-playing games on your smartphone, but back then, role-playing games, including Western games, were played on a computer.
Now you can play them on your TV at home. Anyway, that was revolutionary. (Incidentally, of all the games we bought, I didn’t play Spar Mario very much; my sister was better at it than me.)
The story of Dracula was excellent, as were the pictures by Akira Toriyama. In addition, the opening theme song with its flashy fanfare, which was also used in the Olympics (I still get emotional when I hear it now…). All the conditions were in place to lift one’s spirits.
I had always dreamed of becoming a novelist, but there was a time when I thought of becoming a game writer because I also loved games like this one. In fact, I even created an adventure story like Dracula and entered it into a sweepstakes.
Conversely, my novels were also influenced in many ways by radical and groundbreaking games like “Chrono Trigger” and Shigesato Itoi’s “Mother.
Anyway, for me, games were rolling playing games. Just a short while ago, a book was talked about, “Everything I learned from Dracula,” and I think this is neither an exaggeration nor an exaggeration, but a common awareness shared by those who were crazy about Dracula at that time.
I will write about Dracula another time, but the screen of Dracula was exactly like what we now call Windows. When Windows 95 came out later, I was able to adapt to it without any sense of discomfort, and I think it was thanks to that. The NES was a family computer that the whole family could play together.
I digress for a moment, but the Kagawa Prefecture’s ordinance regulating video games is not so much a violation of the Constitution as it is an unanimous belief that playing video games is wrong.
When I was a student, I spent a lot of time leveling up in Dracula, cutting down my study time and even sleeping, and my grades dropped and my eyesight may have deteriorated because of it. Perhaps, I could have gone to a better college. But if I had not played the game, I would have long since dropped out, unable to adjust to society.
As in most RPGs, the hero is basically good and the enemy, the Great Demon King, is evil. Then, he trains himself, raises his level, and defeats the evil one of higher rank, whom he couldn’t even defeat in the beginning. Looking back, the time I spent thinking about what justice was and what I, a tiny person, could do for the world was invaluable to me.
Years have passed since then, and although things have changed a bit, I am now able to live a normal life as a member of society.
Games were never powerless against the real world. On the contrary, the knowledge and experience I gained from the “Dracula series,” the “Final Fantasy series,” and although not role-playing games, the simulation games “Nobunaga’s Ambition,” “Three Kingdoms,” “SimCity,” and more recently “Minecraft,” and the way I behaved in the games The knowledge and experience I gained from these games and how to behave in them have helped me a lot in my social life.
The purpose of this ordinance is to prevent addiction, but the same is true for novels, movies, and comic books. They are entertainment because they are so engrossing that they make you dependent on them.
And even if you don’t go to the trouble of adding the word “cool,” I think games are a fine form of art. So the aforementioned ordinance sounds like the equivalent of saying, “This is how much time you spend reading a day.
It’s not just about games, but sports, creativity, getting into something so much that you become dependent on it, and what you get out of it. I believe that what you get out of it becomes a priceless treasure for you and enriches your life. As people cannot live without depending on something, large or small, those who talk about such restrictions must be people who do not understand the meaning of life at all.
Nowadays, console video games like the NES have given way to smartphones, and pay-to-play games and Internet games have become the mainstream. Perhaps a new trend in games will appear and disappear. That, too, is one history.
And if we are allowed to use the word “generation,” I am sure that the existence of the NES, like other booms, has created part of the common consciousness of today’s middle-aged and older generation.
Gaming began with the NES.” This time, I wrote a series of rather old and maniacal names, but that is because, as I wrote, I could not suppress my passionate homage to each of those games, which have become my treasures.
And now that I have written this much, I want to play the games again. The story of my life will continue in games.
See you soon.
