Well Played 1.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning by Drew Davidson & et al

Author:Drew Davidson & et al. [Davidson, Drew & al., et]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: vl-nfcompvg
ISBN: 9780557069750
Amazon: 0557069750
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2010-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Parappa the Rapper (or, how I learned to love Rodney Alan Greenblat and Masaya Matsuura)

Katherine Isbister

I was living in Kyoto, Japan, doing a one-year postdoc at NTT (at the time Japan’s telecom monopoly, with seemingly bottomless pockets for research). My boyfriend and I had an apartment in company housing in the suburbs, and were the only gaijin within biking distance (maybe even within a short drive). Each day I rode the train into work with lots of company men and office ladies, towering above a field of bobbing heads with neat dark hair, as we swayed along. After work I’d stop by the local grocery/department store, where small children with their moms often gawked at me as I perused the strangely different vegetables and the aisles of rice, pining for whole wheat bread, decent jarred pasta sauce, and cheese that wasn’t a tiny round camembert. I was struggling to learn Japanese but found by the time I got home what I wanted to do was read an English novel and retreat from the sea of difference around me and rest up to get ready for another day adrift in it.

Though I made some great friends by the end of my time there, some of the friendliest faces in the crowd in Japan in my memories now are still the adorable characters I’d see on advertisements in train stations and along the streets, for anything from cleaning products to soda to the latest video game. At the time I’m writing about, I’d been seeing a cute smiling dog with an orange stocking cap on, with a tantalizing wisp of English text — ‘Parappa the Rapper’. Something about him made me really want to try out the videogame. So my boyfriend surprised me on my birthday with a Japanese PlayStation, which we hooked up to the complimentary television that came with our apartment.

It was somewhat challenging to work our way through the Japanese menus of the game, but to our delight the singing and the commentary was all in English. I was nervous about how well I’d do — my videogame prowess at the time was limited to very rusty skills at playing the arcade version of Centipede, and a guilty workplace addiction to Tetris I’d had a few years earlier. But the control scheme was so simple! In fact I heard later that some skeptics when the game was released thought it was just a training game for learning the new controller pad for the PS 1, and thought it hardly seemed a game at all.

But for me, Parappa was not only a fun game, but also a powerful emotional experience. It was the first game I thought of when Drew told me about this book project. So I decided to try to unpack what it was about Parappa that resonated so strongly, by doing my best to relive the experience of playing for the first time.

I Gotta Believe! (Getting into Parappa’s worldview)

Settling in front of our TV on the tatami livingroom floor, I watch the opening scene in the game.

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