30th November
RFID Videogames
Sorry guys, I cannot hold back anymore… after posts about food, culture and society, I have to write something geeky. Japan is the only place in the world where geekiness is -to a certain extent- encouraged, a sanctuary for nerds, loners and misfits, a haven where even the whole of the Imperial College Computing department would be regarded as ubercool. Hyper-technological gadgets are everywhere: affordable, utterly useless and covered with alluring flashing lights. It’s like being 10 and seeing Doom for the first time all over again.
However, the average Japanese otaku (おたく) is much more than your average slashdot/videogames/star trek Western geek, and the geekiness phenomenon itself here is way more complex and fascinating than one would expect from a bunch of guys playing videogames and drooling over anime dolls. But this is not the place… the otaku phenomenon will be treated in another post, now I’ll cut the crap and get to the cool videogames 
…
Hon-Atsugi (like probably everywhere else here in Japan) is packed with arcades. Last week I decided to venture into one after a particularly satisfying bowl of crab tendon: pink neon-burning, cigarette-smoke laden and very, VERY noisy. Inside you can find all kinds of people: from the businessmen looking for one last adrenaline rush before going back to their wives, to the idle teenagers, to the addicted gamblers, to the fearsome Japanese kids able to finish any possible game with only one credit and constant source of shame and frustration for people like me…
At first glance you probably wouldn’t notice anything particularly different from the games you can find here and the ones in the Trocadero, same House of the Dead, same drums game, same racing simulators. Then you will probably notice an arcade machine with something unusual: it doesn’t seem to have any joystick/joypad/massive gun attached… instead, you play by moving RFID cards.
For the lazy ones that do not want to read the Wikipedia article, what’s a (passive) RFID card? To put it simply for the Londoners, an Oyster card. It’s a card with a chip inside, doesn’t need power (I know what you are thinking, you pedantic little freak… I’m trying to keep it simple here), and can communicate with another device at short range. No need for magnetic stripes or barcode. Just radio communication. That’s it in half a nutshell.
So think about this: a strategy game where you lay your RFID cards representing your troops on the battlefield, and each movement of a card on the board will correspond to the army moving accordingly in real time on the screen. Think Risk/Warhammer meets Minority Report’s interface. Here is a picture:
Sounds cool? It gets better. Obviously, you start the game with cards that represent crappy units, but as you win more games the machine will keep on spitting out more and more cards to assist you in the hunt for the ultra-rare ultimate troops. But wait, wait, it gets even better: apart from playing against the computer, useful for practice and army composition choice, all the arcades are networked so you can decide to play against people in the same arcade place or even against someone of ranking comparable to yours across the whole of Japan!! In fact, your progress is constantly tracked with a save card that contains your profile, and you know your national ranking at all times. So good… you can see here a video of one guy in action. Unfortunately towards the end he is about to lose so he just starts to shuffle the cards randomly. Oh, by the way, the name of the game is Sangokushi Taisen (三国志 大戦).
As you might have thought, I already bought my starter pack… I finished the tutorials and I’m ready for battle… Behold!!!:
As a side note, here in Japan there is something similar to the Oyster card, although it works just on one of the lines that go around Tokyo. Here’s a picture of the Suica card:
Cool thing is, you can also use it instead of a BIOS password in order to access your laptop… 