beware of flash games
A simple click brings you to the innocent seeming main page. A dazzling array of interesting games lay at your finger tips waiting to be played. None of them require commitment and they can be quit at any time. You look up for a moment and an hour has gone by, or was it two? This is what happens to your life the moment you take your finger off the button.
In an environment where communication is difficult (they only speak Japanese) and there is little supervision it is easy to get distracted, say to yourself that you’ll only spend a few minutes playing or ‘just finish this level,’ and have the time fly by. I know this feeling all too well working at a Japanese company. Hour after hour people sit and steadily tap away at their computers rarely looking up or acknowledging the outside world. Time is marked only by the occasional chiming of the office clock. No one bothers to pay any attention to the lone foreigner diligently doing his job at the table in the middle of the room. It is tough to stay on task, keep moving forward, and resist the sirens call of mindless time wasting. There is no one looking over your shoulder and telling you that 2nd period is over and it’s time to get to science class.
Let me check my watch…what? It’s been five years already! But I just got here… You look away for just a minute, get distracted by one short ‘level’ and the clock spins wildly out of control. There are so many quick, easy, and interesting things to do here in Japan that it is easy to lose track of what you are doing and where you are going. For those of us who have been here for a while we like to describe Japan as a theme park. It’s easy to get sucked in, stay a long time and have a bunch of fun, but the catch is that the park never closes. Before you know it you are a 40 year old English teacher at a private school talking to college girls at a local Starbucks and impressing them with your Japanese skills. Whatever happened to the ‘I want to be a firefighter when I grow up’? Don’t laugh, I’ve actually met people like that.
