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the place to go if you wanted to change your character’s appearance, fighting school, or weight class. There was even a message board set up offering players yet another way to communicate with each other. In practice, people rarely altered their character’s appearance, school, or weight class, and if you were already online you didn’t need any more ways to communicate, so none of those features saw much use. Itchōme was huge, and the first thing everyone did when they got there was speed-dash out of it as fast as they could. Tetsuo found the right side of Main Street and started running.
    There was no way to tell the identity of the player behind a character. It might be some salaryman you’d never met in your life or it could be the guy you sat next to in class who lived across the street. It could be anyone. The only thing that showed up on the screen was the character the player had created. It wasn’t much, but when you stepped up to go head to head with someone, it was everything.
    When you got right down to it, a fighting game was nothing more than an elaborate match of rock-paper-scissors in which you were allowed to cheat. If you thought you saw rock coming, you gave the sign for paper. If it looked like scissors, you responded with rock. When someone threw a punch at you, you blocked. Punches and kicks don’t hurt while you’re blocking, so your attacker would probably try for a throw next. You couldn’t block a throw, but every throw could be countered with the right throw break. Throw breaks, in turn, left you vulnerable to strikes.
    You had to read the battle, wait for your opponent to expose a weakness. Fake with rock, move in with scissors. Land blows where you could. Keep unavoidable damage to a bare minimum. That was what a virtual character like Tetsuo had to do to survive in this virtual town.
    Tetsuo pushed the frosted glass door open and stepped into the arena. The arena was located in the second district of Versus Town, Nichōme. Log in and out in Itchōme, fight in Nichōme: Tetsuo’s daily commute.
    The third and final district was Sanchōme, but it didn’t have anything to do with the meat of the game. After I first opened my account, I’d taken Tetsuo for a spin around Sanchōme, but it wasn’t much more than a polygonal slum.
    When they could hook your brain up to electrodes like in those old sci-fi novels and movies so you could feel, smell, even taste the virtual world around you, a place like Sanchōme might not be so bad. But the residents of Versus Town couldn’t touch, they couldn’t smell, and they couldn’t taste. They could only fight. The only windows players had into Versus Town were their lousy monitors. The only way to control your character was with one stick and three buttons.
    Tetsuo walked across the arena to the training rooms in back for his usual combo warm-up routine. A gamer that relied on fast reflexes was a lot like a katana. To stay sharp, you had to hone your skills each and every day. If you took a day off, you were that much weaker.
    For the most part, action games required your muscles to learn certain patterns of motion and execute them with blinding speed at precisely the right moment. Get carried away, and it could have a negative impact on you in RL. Suppose you spent ten hours a day playing Tetris . Next thing you know you’re walking down the street thinking about where to place that nice square building up ahead.
    Fighting games are the same. Everyone sacrifices something from RL to spend time fighting in Versus Town.
    Tanaka was in the arena with dozens of characters in the queue, waiting their turn to fight him. He was one of the top four, the best in Versus Town. Everyone knew who they were, so when one of them showed up in the arena, an endless stream of characters would arrive to sign up for a match. Tonight was no exception.
    Since the time I opened my Versus Town account, I had wanted to see Tetsuo join the top four. All I had to do was