TOKYO — Outside the giant Yodobashi-Akiba department store in the Akihabara district, hundreds of gamers gather each day, crowdsourcing the hunt for rare creatures and virtual treasure.
They stand, packed together in a cordoned-off area reserved for them, as store employees attempt to keep the sidewalk clear, ushering the players behind safety barriers. Everyone is holding a Nintendo DS and playing this year's hottest new game: Dragon Quest IX.
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Exploring Akihabara, Tokyo's Nerd MeccaIt's a cartoony, easy-to-master role-playing game about grand adventures, but these players aren't off slaying dragons. They're swapping character data to meet other avatars and quite possibly collect valuable treasures.
Call it a massively multiplayer offline game.
"They get here pretty early in the morning," said a 26-year-old player named Kawamura who stood away from the massive crowd but remained glued to his DS. It's a scene that's been repeated daily, albeit on a smaller scale, at hundreds of game stores, train stations and other convenient meeting spots all around Japan ever since the game's July release. By harnessing a simple gameplay element to a previously existing capability of the Nintendo DS, developer Level-5 has created a sensation capable of drawing gamers together.
The items the Dragon Quest players are exchanging are treasure maps that lead them to hidden dungeons filled with monsters and treasure. When a player finds a map in the single-player game and then passes it along, his name will be attached, perhaps making him a mini celebrity.
Players seek several notorious maps in particular, said Kawamura. The "Masayuki Map," named after the player who found it, leads to a dungeon full of nothing but King Metal Slimes, enemies that give the player copious experience points when they are defeated. Another map, called "Kawasaki Locker," leads to a dungeon full of treasure chests packed with high-powered items.
The Dragon Quest players are mostly adults, although a few kids have cajoled their parents into bringing them to the meetups. Deo, a 9-year-old player, wandered back and forth between the cordoned-off area and his dad, who was sitting on a nearby bench — also playing Dragon Quest IX.
"You can meet a lot of interesting people," Deo said, "and get items that you don't already have." The boy said his favorite item so far is the "Chiyoda-ku Map of the Gods," named after the area of Tokyo in which Akihabara is located.
Since the release of the original game in 1986, Dragon Quest has become a household name in Japan. It's one of the country's best-selling game series, and has moved close to 50 million copies worldwide. It's played by kids, teens, parents and grandparents; the long-awaited release of a new Dragon Quest game is something of a national holiday here.
Except for some spinoff titles, the games have previously only been released for home consoles; the announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be released for the portable DS raised some eyebrows at first. But the crowds of people still milling about Yodobashi playing the game nearly three months later suggests that it was a savvy business move on the part of publisher Square Enix.
The game mode that's fueling the Japanese crowds is called sure-chigai tsuushin, or "passerby communication." It's a brilliant concept for densely populated cities like Tokyo: If a player sets his DS on communication mode, then puts it into his pocket or bag, it'll automatically search for other DS systems while he is walking around, riding the train or eating lunch at a coffee shop. When he opens his DS later, the player might find that the device has located other players that passed by during the day, and automatically exchanged virtual hellos. In a game like Dragon Quest, that means he'll see the other player's character, read a short message they wrote into the game and perhaps receive an in-game treasure from them.
The genius of sure-chigai, then, is that you don't have to seek out other people who own the game. But the hundreds of people outside Yodobashi-Akiba know that you have to meet as many people as possible if you want the best treasures in the game.
Passerby communication has been around since the early days of DS. In the 2005 game Nintendogs, it was called "Bark Mode." Another player's virtual dog would join yours on the screen, and perhaps bring a present, like a chew toy. It's been used in many other games since then, but nothing has ever caused a reaction like the Dragon Quest crowds.
After the game's release, players quickly surmised that they were likely to collect more maps if they milled about in locations where other gamers would be. Since Yodobashi-Akiba boasts one of the biggest gaming sections in Tokyo, players began collecting around the Nintendo DS demo stations on the store's 8th floor. Soon the crowds grew so large that they were practically taking over the floor, and Yodobashi set up an official area outdoors (and banned playing the game inside the store).
Players also established an extensive wiki on the subject, logging various maps and their benefits. The wiki also lists locations where players can expect to find others using sure-chigai — and tracks shops that have banned it. Dragon Quest IX is currently so ubiquitous, though, that picking up new virtual pals just while walking down the street is easy. I couldn't walk more than a block down the street in the Shibuya entertainment district without my DS filling up with new visitors.
As befitting a new Dragon Quest release, promotional activity is all over Tokyo. If you bring your DS to a McDonald's restaurant, you can download a red clown wig, just like Ronald's, for your character to wear. Square Enix has also been quick to jump on the popularity of sure-chigai tsuushin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRWWUoIo5CoA new television commercial (embedded right), which can also be seen playing in Japan's subway cars, shows a guy and a girl hooking up because they both happened to be in sure-chigai mode. ("Oh, your birthday is next week?" he says when he sees her transmitted data.)
They're soon joined by two more giggly Dragon Quest players, and they all become pals.
On the streets of Tokyo, I didn't observe anything nearly this social happening in real life. Most players kept their heads down, filing new data away on their DS and scooping up more after seeing what maps they'd been given. While every player I talked to said they were interested in the game because you can "meet people," nobody seemed to actually be meeting each other.
Then again, in a culture where randomly introducing yourself to a stranger is something of a breach of etiquette, perhaps there really is a deep appeal to being able to virtually encounter other people, if only in passing.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
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