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fighting, studying your ass off for tests—these everyday experiences, a lot of which could only be called boring, form the foundation on which our lives are built, but I don’t think you can say, categorically, that they’re any more valuable than experiences in a virtual world.
    My generation was raised on video games. We were the first to grow up playing them. We traded our pink left thumbs for hardened calluses by pushing too hard on control pads. We sat awake in bed dreaming up ways to take down the next boss. There were moments of clarity, sure. Sometimes the thought that it was all a colossal waste of time even crossed our minds. But it didn’t stop us from playing.
    In theory, it was possible to earn a living online by participating in RMT. That’s Real Money Trading. A quick search of any auction site would turn up countless listings for people offering virtual money in exchange for the real deal. Rare items sometimes sold for astronomical amounts. Buyers were people with money in RL but without the time to play the game for themselves. Sellers were people with nothing but time on their hands, and no RL money. By parceling up and selling off time spent playing the game, you could earn the money you needed to live.
    In other words, it was a job. In that, it was really no different than what millions of so-called blue collar workers did each and every day. There were those who claimed anything virtual was worthless, but they were wrong. In the right hands, nothing could be transformed into something. It was like the service industry. There was no substance to it, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t profit to be had. It was something we all understood.
    But my friend and I never did anything like that. People with the brains to pull off that sort of operation didn’t get addicted to online games in the first place. The kind of person who could look at a virtual world as just another communication tool and put that information to use in RL would never organize their lives around playing some game.
    Why? Because the instant you started dealing with RMT, the virtual and the real became bound together with numbers and symbols. Once that happened, you couldn’t help but realize that the virtual world wasn’t fun at all. In fact, it was just as boring and ordinary as RL, and just as worthless. You were running those childhood dreams through an RL calculator and spitting out their worth, if any, and the present value of the future cash flows they could be expected to generate.
    So we avoided that scene. We didn’t harden the skin on our thumbs to fine Corinthian leather in hopes of cashing in. We played games to play games.
    I didn’t have the words to stop my friend from traveling down the road he’d chosen. It reminded me of the end of The Lord of the Rings , when the elves sailed off into the True West. I was a hobbit who knew the power of the ring only too well, but I was Merry to his Frodo. He knew that where he was going there was no coming back, and a part of me was a little jealous of that determination. I felt the power of the ring, even felt my hold on RL slipping away at times, but I hesitated. I lacked the courage to take that final step, even while deep inside, I hoped to make that journey myself someday.
    My friend managed to eke out a living on his allowance for a little while, but eventually he had to go back to Hokkaido. His cell number and email worked through the end of May, but by June even those had been disconnected. In the end it wasn’t the west he disappeared into, but the north.
    Sooner or later, everybody dies. I figure it’s best to spend your life doing what you enjoy. Every morning when I stand and look into the mirror, that time is still my own. I wonder how much longer that will last.
    These are the sorts of things that run through my head each night while Tetsuo fights in the arena.
    The clock on my DVR read 6:15. Morning had stolen up on me. I could hear birds chirping through my