neils clark

Tonight I set out at about 11 PM on a quest to find Singaporean gamer cafes, and find them I did.

Before I get into the boring details of the night’s culture spelunking, which is more an acquired taste, I’ll throw out my favorite quote.

Neils: “how late do you stay open?”
Attendant: “until the cops come.”
Neils: “hah hah, no really.”

…

Attendant: “well, the doors close at 3am…”

Somebody call the cops.

Random picture of Singapore at night. I stoles it from the Interwebs so as to add pizzaz.

This evening’s hub of gamerdom was found in a place called the Peace Center, on Selegie Road. It was an average-sized mall, about six or seven stories tall, including the game-café-packed basement. Not every café was open at this hour, nor were any of them at capacity, but there certainly weren’t any shortage of gamers. The basement floor had four separate cyber cafes, but only two of them had more than 15 or 20 players. The first floor had about three cafes, about 15 in each. The second floor had four or five cafes – and a couple of these were long, packed rooms. Probably about 20 or so gamers in the big ones. All told, probably around 200 gamers at midnight.

And there was a McDonalds, so I had a Big Mac.

While I was eating, I made an interesting observation. This place also sported two dance clubs, the origin for the massive amounts of bass which had been shaking the foundation of the mall. Skinny, attractive Singaporean women meandered in and out, while men only very rarely entered. Meanwhile, the gamer populations were comprised mostly (as you might expect) of men. I only spotted two girls among all of these cafes.

Finally, I met two young British guys, of Indian descent, and followed them into the most packed of the basement cafes. In this café, and in others, the most popular games were DotA [Defense of the Ancients, a WC3 Mod], CSS [Counter-Strike Source], and what I think was some incarnation of BF2 [Battlefield 2]. In other cafes, WoW [World of Warcraft lolls] wasn’t an uncommon sight, and StarCraft was strangely absent. I’m not sure if this is an anomaly, or if StarCraft has become something of a pastime for only the truly “elite.” I had heard that in Malaysia, CSS and StarCraft were reserved for only those people who had utterly perfected their technique (while others were the cause of fights and of beatings). I saw a lot of mention for Maple Story, and a number of unrecognizeable puzzle games.

The Singaporean gamers seemed to get most animated over DotA games, yelling incomprehensibly, and in Singlish (which is ultimately pretty similar to English, though was hard for me to understand).

So anyway, I followed these two friendly Brits into a packed café, and wound up primarily going between watching games of CSS and DotA. Everyone was between 13 and 19 years of age, and there was only one female gamer. She happened to be one of the most skilled CSS players, and would frequently solo kill the other 6-man team. I had the thought that I might want to jump into the game, but this recurring theme of the “weakest link,” in Asian gamer culture kept me from it. I was also feeling slightly intimidated by the only other person above the age of 25.

The Operator for this café was about 30, and wore dark wrap-around sunglasses. In a dark room. Anybody that isn’t afraid of accidentally mangling themselves on furniture is not to be trifled with.

So I got out of there before they sealed the doors for the night. Tomorrow night, or the one after it, I’m going to try hitting up the Cineleisure complex at Orchard. Like most of the spam emails I get, Cineleisure has promised largeness and fulfillment unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

Neils Clark :: Sep.06.2007 :: Games, General ::

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