Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

soba noodles and then taking me to a hotel. I
wasn’t complaining. I’d been doing this sort of
thing with this girl for about six months at that
point. When she showed up, fresh off work, at
the Don Quixote at nine-thirty, I tried, unsuc-
cessfully, to persuade her to invite me to her
parents’ house in Chiba, where I knew her
brother had a Super Famicom with an exten-
sive library that included SMB3. I didn’t want to
tell her, outright, that I looked pale and had an
edgy attitude because I wanted to play SMB3. It
would have felt stupid and cruel. This girl knew
I loved videogames, and she didn’t mind them,
either. We’d played a lot of Grand Theft Auto 3
together.
I guess you could say she was my girlfriend
for a while. I never used that word to describe
her, though I guess that’s what she was. She
had money and she bought things for me. She
was a little older, and she was really serious
about everything except me. I suppose I started
going out with her because she was the first
woman I met after breaking up with my girl-
friend. I call her a woman because that’s what
she was. She used to reprimand me for not us-
ing polite speech with strangers at restaurants.
She was otherwise very nice to me in quiet
places. We went to a hotel with a big bottle of
Coca-Cola, a bag of Doritos, and two trays of
soba. She bought a can of beer at Family Mart,
and we entered the first hotel with an overnight
fee less than 8,000.
The place was perfect. All the other hotels
we’d stayed in had been boring little places that
smelled like cigarettes. None of what you hear
about Japanese so-called “love hotels” is true,
I’d always been tempted to write. Yet I never
did write about it, because the subject is kind of
boring, because the hotels themselves are bor-
ing. They are rectangular hollows with beds and
purposes.
Well, this place was nice. There was a
wall of mirrors on the right side of the bed,
and a switcher on the headboard for turning on
black lights, which revealed thousands of stars
painted on the walls. The place came to life like
80 The Gamer’s Quarter Issue #3