will work for doughnuts

Mimi Ito’s going to be here tomorrow. From her blog, I see she’s a DS player so I’m looking forward to hearing some of her observations on how it’s used by kids in dense urban areas. If kids in England are gathering in the back of trains to play DS together, I wonder how it works when every car on a train has a bunch of DS’s. Does Nintendo’s crippled wi-fi implementation even put a damper on connecting to others? or are users actually walking around with games like Animal Crossing and Nintendogs running?

Also, what do kids do for power? Whenever I was in Tokyo, once I’m out, then I’m out  for hours. With phones and DS’s pulling down lots of data, I wonder if finding power has become an issue.

Mimi has an interesting post about “Location Based Entertainment” where I thought she would be talking about gaming that dynamically adjusts to your location in real-space. I was pleasantly surprised to find that she’s actually talking about arcade games that interact with the real space around them. For me this is a fascinating contrast to the MMO genre where there is a distinct feeling of “diving into” the game world. Like our group Mario Kart games, this feels more like reaching out.

Speaking of Mario Kart, folks are using upcoming.org to gather up and race. I wonder if there are random Mario Kart beat downs happening in places like the Shibuya train station? In a place with such a dense population of DS owners, I’d hope there are impromptu matches all along the JR Line.