Meeting one's heroes

"Don't meet your heroes," they say. 

1. Your heroes will not be who you think.

My favorite case of this is when Richard Hammond met Evel Knievel, the jumping-over-things-on-motorcycles daredevil, in the senile twilight of his life. There may be no sterner warning on film.

2. Post Olympic Depression Disorder.

Likewise, living your dreams can be a dangerous thing. Gold medal winners are watched for depression after they've met their singular life goal. What next? 

Worse still is when the living of your dream is taken away from you. I've wanted to mention for months now that one of my favorite game designers, Warren Spector, had his dream of working for Disney ripped away from him after his Disney game wasn't a runaway hit. Spector has been a well-documented Disney freak his whole life. He was admittedly euphoric when the Mickey Mouse House bought his game studio and brought him into the fold. It must be devastating to be kicked back out of it. He's been silent in the press and on his blog since the studio closed early in 2013. I hope he's OK, and I hope he's working on something awesome.

I've said all of this to say that living in Japan has been something of a smaller version of that.

I didn't know it when I was younger, but I think at some point Japan became The Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I knew I wanted to learn everything there was to know about games, and Japan made all the games, so I needed to know the language to find my way around the world of games over there.

As high school progressed into college, teaching in Japan, grad school and going back to Tokyo, it's become apparent that I achieved the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I live and work in the city, I speak the language, I can move about somewhat smoothly, and I've even owned a Japanese market game console or two. 

But times have changed. 

In the last 15-20 years, the center of gravity of the gaming world has shifted west. Japanese to English localizations that used to take months or years now take days. And Japan no longer has a lock on what made its games so great. Your heroes will not be who you think.

Moreso outside of gaming, times have changed. Quoth Spike Japan, one of the more interesting Japan blogs, upon that writer's retirement:

I’m bored, to be honest, with Japan, the Japan of Abenomics and AKB47 [sic], of The Idolmaster and super-deformed anime, of bullying and territorial tantrums and constitutional revisionism. 

I wrote in 2008 that I had lived the dream. There are taller mountains to climb - maybe Dragon Quest VII or Yakuza 5 in the original Japanese - but I lack the language skill or the interest in the game itself. I live in the Japan of Monster Hunter 3, Monster Hunter 3G, Dragon Quest, and microtransaction-driven collectible card games made for Android.

What now? Post-Olympic Depression Disorder.

That's not to say I'm depressed. 2013 has been very good to me. But I've climbed my mountains and, as far as Japan is concerned, wish to climb no more.

I spent much of 2012 being bothered by the "What now?" question. I'm no longer in a huge rush to get back Stateside - just a minor rush, say, in the next 2 years or so. So until it's time to make that move, I'm going to slow down a bit and enjoy Tokyo. More networking, more parties, and more gaming - probably in English. 

Being Elmo

I've had a sort of big-picture life quandary over the last several months, and then I saw Being Elmo.

Being Elmo is a documentary following Kevin Clash, the puppeteer who's always played Elmo. Even though it's a documentary in format and presentation, the story is heart-warming enough to be as good as the Oscar winners from a few hours ago.

Clash came from very humble origins - a house that could've passed for projects on the outskirts of Baltimore and no means to travel - but his passion for puppetry was spotted at a very early age. He put on puppet shows for local kids and survived constant heckling from classmates. That grew into a spot on local children's TV shows, which grew into a spot on the popular broadcast show Captain Kangaroo. 

In his senior year of high school, he got his big break and met his heroes: Jim Henson and his entire crew. He succeeded before Henson and eventually settled into a steady career on Sesame Street.

Elmo is his creation, his character made from a spare puppet that was rarely used on the set. The real pivotal point in the film - spoiler alert (if such a thing exists for documentaries) - is the revelation that each Muppet character is based on a very focused character. Fozzy Bear is a Vaudeville performer, first and foremost. Elmo's character, on the other hand, is a concentrated and raw form of love. Elmo always gives hugs and kisses. Elmo loves you. 

Everyone who was interviewed for the film, from fellow puppeteers to Henson's contemporaries to Whoopi Goldberg, pointed to that Elmo character as a hidden side of Clash that only gets to come out when he's in character. 

While I'm glossing over a lot of wonderfully heart-warming details, the sum of the parts is that Clash had this passion for puppetry from his youth, and he followed it with such whole-heartedness and dedication that it led him to meet his heroes, become part of that tribe, and win great professional success along with it.

At 27, I've started to fear that I've missed out on my Elmo moment.

When I was 4 and first saw a video game, that automatic, natural connection went off in my head the same way it did for Kevin Clash when he saw the pilot episode of Sesame Street and Bert and Ernie talked to him by looking straight into the camera. 

When I was 9, I tried to learn C++. When I was 10 or 11, I subscribed to Game Developer Magazine. All the while, I played with every level editor for every major PC game that was a part of my childhood: Doom, Descent, StarCraft, Quake, Unreal. I was trying to be creative, the equivalent of sewing my own puppets together. 

Opportunity knocked for me, the same way it did for Clash. I attended Dallas gaming conventions and met heroes like John Carmack and John Romero. I worked in the gaming press - the dream job to end all dream jobs, if you were a young kid. I even worked at an actual game studio and had so much fun I preferred work to home life. I was invited to work - not just attend - E3 2009.

Yet in each case, things fizzled. The Dallas gaming empire collapsed, and my heroes fell from the spotlight. I lost my gaming press job after a couple months. I lost the game development job after mere weeks. The publisher that tentatively hired me for E3 backed out. 

The games industry - my own calling since birth, as I saw it - chewed me up and spat me out multiple times. My desire to work a job that would last, and one where I'd be taken seriously, led me to Rakuten. 

I feel good about Rakuten - it connects a lot of dots from my past including the Internet business, business strategy, working globally, and of course the Japan thing. 

My ultimate, eventual goal is to be part of a creative place. The Pixars, Nintendos, Sesame Workshops and Apples of the world have in common one thing: love. As Al Gore put it at the global tribute to Steve Jobs, Apple has it. Pixar and Nintendo both have it, if you go read the books about those companies. Valve, too, has it, as its legions of fans will attest.

Kevin Clash has it in spades, obviously. And if you watch his documentary, you'll notice that the same Henson Workshop puppeteers from the 1970s are still around and have aged very gracefully in lives filled with happiness and passion.

My only fear about Rakuten - a company which is kindly giving me a job, a paycheck, training and a position with advancement capability in a sector where I have passion and experience in my favorite city in the world - is what happens to creativity in a business (and consequently a career) with success and failure defined by metrics.

"Suck it up," you may say to me. I should be thankful I'm employed at all. I should have to do some real work and pay my dues. Everyone else does "work work" and I'm not deserving of escaping that.

Feel free to say those things to me. Just keep the volume low enough that the four-year-old me can't hear. 

How was the Zelda Concert? Well...

Back in early January, I got to use a birthday gift I was given back in December: two tickets to the Legend of Zelda performance at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

I got a couple questions pretty frequently following the show. From Dallas Arts District regulars: "How was Jaap?" That referred to the DSO's celebrated conductor and was an easy question to answer: he wasn't there. An Irish woman conducted the performance as part of the touring company that was putting on the Zelda concerts around the nation. 

The other question - "How was it?!" - is much harder to answer. It depends on what you think about games and what you know about music. 

"It was definitely an experience," I wrote to my brother, who I had unsuccessfully begged to come down from Oklahoma to join me at the concert. A professional musician and a devout Zelda player who even managed to sneak an Ocarina of Time reference into one of his successful compositions? Who should come but him? (On an aside, the excellent writer, world traveler and equally passionate gamer Hudson Lockett was an even better bromance-date for too many reasons to list here.)

The definitive trampling all over classical music tradition was in plain sight from the moment we walked in the place. Dress was all over the spectrum, from dating couples in suits and black dresses to cosplay groups in little green, elf-like Hylian outfits. The giant white board above the stage, visible in one of the pictures with this post, is a washed-out video screen that showed video clips from the games being referenced in the music.

The idea, it seemed obvious, was to educate listeners about what places or moods are being evoked within the music. The piece that we had all been assembled to hear was the "Symphony of the Goddess," a four-movement 'symphony' composed by an American spanning the Zelda franchise and a name derived from the latest game, Skyward Sword. 

The 'symphony' was, Hudson and I agreed, just an elaborate medley. Individual movements were medleys from individual games, so there was very little depth of atmosphere. Smaller details typical to the classical music tradition, such as the conductor's handshake with the first-chair violin, and not applauding between movements, were forgotten entirely.

Worse, the DSO sadly didn't do this music justice. The pianos and fortes were all in the right places on paper, but the group generally had a lack of chemistry that would move the audience. It sounded like the DSO hadn't had much rehearsal time at all with our Irish conductor. Criminally, the Fairy Fountain theme (you know it from every Zelda game's file selection screen)...

...was utterly butchered. No other way to put it. The poor harpists had to play their shortest strings to get those notes out, but by the looks I got on a video screen close-up, one player was older and had arthritic fingers that caused her to miss most of her notes. Stranger still, our composer thought it wise to do some call-and-response thing between the two harpists, but all that did was mess things up further when one player hit her notes and the poor other one didn't. It was cringing, dear-god-look-away awkward and equally painful to listen to.

So the performance itself really straddled the range from awful to (for tiny fractions of seconds) blissfully euphoric. And to cap it all off, our conductor left the stage two or three times, giving the audience the impression that they were being treated to a whole series of encores. That resulted in multiple (unnecessary) standing ovations.

That brings us back to your opinions on games and music. If you think games are art, then to celebrate them in the hallowed ground of a major city performance hall is an honor that they've earned. If you think games are the devil's work, it's sacrilege to let them into that hallowed ground. And if you're educated about classical music, then serviceable orchestration don't make up for blah arrangement, a wildly inconsistent performance, a huge video screen floating in the room shouting "HAY THIS IS THE PART WHERE ___", and all the smaller details of classical performances thrown out the window. But if you're not educated, you probably wouldn't have been bothered by any of those factors.

"You were probably not right not to come; you'd have hated it," I also wrote to my brother. A classically-trained musician, he wouldn't have enjoyed what was academically a lackluster piece of music and a bad performance to boot. Many real musicians probably committed suicide that night just so that they could roll over in their graves in response to the lack of musical convention and tradition. I honestly don't know if Kris would have been in that group.

Regardless of opinions, however, the facts speak for themselves. The Zelda symphony is the DSO's only sellout in its entire season and the fastest sellout in the organization's history. The arts, always more susceptible to patronage than we like to admit, will soon notice that gamers are a powerful, loyal and untapped demographic. In their (our) defense, is it so wrong that we call into question four hundred years' of tradition and appropriate classical music as our own when we pay for the artists? Who says we can't applaud if we hear something cool? Who says video can't augment a performance? Who says we have to be educated before hearing a symphony if we now have the technology to be educated while we listen?

As a birthday present, it combined pomp-and-circumstance and one of the greatest gaming franchises of my life. How could I hate on that?

Three or four standing O's, however many there were, were one final nail after another in the coffin of musical tradition. But from those gamers, those fans, those guys and girls across generations rocking Triforce tattoos and elf cosplay: I have no doubt that all of them were from the heart.

A layover that's lasted a year

The layover is, according to Google's define: feature, "a period of rest or waiting before a further stage in a journey." According to Anthony Bourdain's marketing department, it's an underrated opportunity for adventure on a more compact scale. 

I'm not one to write year-in-review posts, but in the case of 2011 my life was both. I uprooted myself and settled back down twice with a third trip on the horizon.

The first move was from San Diego to Palo Alto, SoCal to NorCal. I had spent the last several months in SD in that period of rest and waiting. With one quarter to go in school, I came pretty close to burning out, so I took a supremely easy quarter and spent my time enjoying the place, the weather, and a very positive relationship. 

Now, with 6 months' hindsight, I hate having left. San Diego rocked, and I miss living in an atmosphere of constant learning, constant international exposure, and constant ramen while living in a wonderful, comfortable apartment. Alas, graduation happens.

The second move was from Palo Alto to Dallas, from the place I always wanted to live in to home. With less than 6 weeks' hindsight, I wish I hadn't left. PA rocked. Aroon made me learn that I actually can live with the right roommate, and that it's really fun to live with a techie gamer who loves being social, loves beer and happens to be an awesome friend all around. A visit from Ale was that return to the best parts of the high school days that become oh-so-rare after age 25. Nick and Sam, I'm forever in debt to both of you. Everyone at Apple (especially iOS Maps and Keyboards; Tableau employee spouses who throw awesome parties and former employees bound to other startups included) is awesome, and my hat collectively goes off to you. The privilege of still hanging out with some of my favorite grad school friends there was icing on the cake.

I absorbed so much of the professional atmosphere there, and not just the lack of dress code. I worked at a tee-tiny startup for a couple months as a contractor, showing me the value of fast failure, being decisive, and just getting things done yourself - lack of skill isn't a valid excuse. It's the pace, challenge, control and collaboration I want. Can't wait to come back with a thicker resume and do something awesome.

That life was still one of waiting - to see if I could land a job. To see if I could move out of Aroon's place, get an apartment, and go on an IKEA shopping rampage. There were days when I wanted nothing more; I felt like that had been my destiny for months. I was ultimately waiting to see if someone would make a bet on me. Alas, they didn't. I wasn't pigeonholing myself properly.

My pigeonhole is overseas. My job search did end, and it's off to Tokyo I go. Since the search was over, it was time to clear out of Aroon's place (but thank you again for the generosity dude!) but I have four months to go before my job actually starts.

So here I am, in Dallas, resting and waiting before the next stage in the journey. It's an awesome chance to get quality time with hometown friends and family before that opportunity becomes exceedingly rare. 

To Tokyo I go (in a while)

The cat's out of the bag. I'm moving to Tokyo!

I told Facebook (ie, my friends and loved ones) about a week or so ago, but I've more or less known I'd go for a while longer than that. It was really just a matter of reaching a particular level of certainty that crazy random twists wouldn't happen at the last minute.

I guess they still could happen, but at this point I'm OK with stopping the job search and turning down whatever leftover job search calls that trickle in. (Why do I care about this? About 48 hours before my first departure to Japan, back in '07, Google called completely out of the blue. Making that decision was agonizing and sleep-depriving.)

Where ya going?
So, for the handful of readers who haven't already been exposed to the news somehow, I'm headed to Rakuten, Japan's #1 in e-commerce. (That's pronounced 'rock-ten.') I'll start in April 2012, so I'll be moving at the end of March. 

What're ya doing?
Honestly? I don't know. They'll assign me after a month of training. Could be their core e-commerce business, or it could be new lines of business (like Travel, Golf or Weddings!), or it could be international rollouts of existing products (how about Edy for your NFC money needs?), or it could be assisting in international acquisitions (which have happened so far in the US, UK, France, Russia and China by joint venture). They're a big company but still have room to grow at 7,000 employees (for comparison, Amazon has 43,000).

Are you nervous?
You mean about radiation? Not so much. I'm more nervous about leaving loved ones very far behind here in the US.

Are you excited?
Hell yes! A UT alum already working for the company was cool enough to reach out to me and tell me all about his experience. Seems like he's having a great time. When I was living and teaching in the boonies, I came to Tokyo to recharge my batteries. Now I'll live there.

Isn't it expensive? Are you making enough money to live on?
Tokyo housing isn't as bad as you may have been led to believe. I've found apartments online for about $1,000 a month in rent in awesome locations. Small, sure, but definitely not shoebox-sized. It'll be less if I let Rakuten set me up with housing. The company is located on the southern edge of central Tokyo, in Shinagawa. That's a major bullet train stop and is just around the corner from Haneda Airport, the swanky city one that just started taking international flights. I'll live somewhere roughly 30 minutes from Shinagawa. If I'm lucky it'll be in another big neighborhood such as Naka-meguro. Otherwise I'll just be a teeny-tiny bit closer to Yokohama: convenient to work but a little further from all the fun action.

For other money matters, Rakuten has free breakfast and lunch and pays for my commuting. I just need to pay for suits to wear!

What are you doing in the meantime?
I'm headed home to Texas to enjoy the winter at home, rent-free, with Mom. I'm going to miss California a lot but it'll be a good place for 4 months' downtime before things get crazy. Oh, also, I'm looking for an honest 4 months' work in Texas! So, uh, bring me in as a temp or something!

I'll be home before Thanksgiving!