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you wanted to do online. Versus Town may not have been as bad as those role-playing games that made you trade countless hours of your life to level up your character, but it birthed its fair share of sun-fearing basement-dwellers all the same.
    Back when I had just entered university, before I’d ever been to Versus Town or created Tetsuo, I had one friend in RL I used to talk online gaming with. He was from up north, Hokkaido, and had come all the way down to Tokyo for school. He lived alone.
    One day I noticed that he had started wearing his hair in a ponytail. That was the first sign of trouble. When I asked him about it, he said he’d been too busy to go out and have it cut. Pretty soon he stopped going to class. Whenever I was on my PC, he’d message me how bored he was, that he had nothing to do. I told him that if he was so bored, he should try going to class. Apparently he wasn’t that bored.
    We had met and become friends through gaming. He poured almost all the resources he had into the virtual world. Maybe it was because he’d lost interest in the real one. There was a gleam in his eye when he talked about online gaming that was absent when we talked about anything else. Gaming was the one topic he could carry on a conversation about, which worked when it was just him and me, but as soon as you added a third person to the equation things started to fall apart. Little by little, he dropped out of our circle of friends.
    I stopped by his place once around the end of April to check on him. He lived in a studio apartment that shared a communal toilet. There wasn’t a shower at all. The storm shutters covering the window drooped on their hinges, permitting a narrow shaft of concentrated sunlight into the room. Limned in cream-yellow light, the minute hand of the clock hanging on the wall ticked away the hours. Every time a truck drove by, his bookshelf would shudder, and the glass doors would creak loudly.
    My friend’s skin was pale and hung loosely on his thin frame. It looked as though he had gone weeks without seeing the sun. Or a bath. I was still paying him occasional visits then, so he hadn’t entirely given up on shaving yet. A centimeter of stubble bristled on the bottom of his chin. The question How long does it take to grow a centimeter of facial hair? flashed through my mind.
    I can still hear him telling me how tired he was of RL. He said it was more trouble than it was worth, and I think he really believed it. Pretty soon he stopped leaving his apartment altogether.
    I knew he was slipping off the deep end, but there was nothing I could do to stop him. Or maybe there was, and I just couldn’t figure out what it was. Now I’d never know. The only thing I could do was talk to him, try not to make things worse. In the end, it wasn’t enough.
    Maybe a real friend would have been able to stop him from succumbing to his addiction. He had thrown away his chance at university and now spent his days sitting in a darkened room, staring into a monitor. He did all his shopping at convenience stores in the middle of the night. Most of his conversations took place in chat windows. He hardly ever spoke. Anyone on the outside looking in would have thought he was miserable.
    All for a game. Any sane person wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. Count yourself lucky if you don’t.
    Online games are only good for otaku and the chronically unemployed. If you don’t fall into either of those two categories, keep walking the straight and narrow. Nothing to see here. The less you know about online games, the better. You can live your life, fall in love, grow old, and no one will point and laugh at you for never having played an online game. That’s a promise.
    Games in general are a waste of time, but online games are the worst. Mark my words. Still, I find myself wondering sometimes, if playing games is such a waste of time, what makes time spent in RL so inherently worthwhile? Hanging out with friends, laughing,