Shenmue and Human Labor:
A horrendously backward crash course in reality
I guess the point of all of this, to start in a straightforward way, is that as a member of the species of unfairly privileged white middle-class American males, I was introduced to the realities of human labor through a video game long before I ever got my hands dirty in the so-called "real world." I got this introduction from Yu Suzuki's Shenmue, which was released somewhere around the year 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast. Set in 1986, Shenmue follows every footstep of its hero, Ryo Hazuki, as he basically attempts to chase down the man who murdered his father. The idea behind Shenmue is that it fully simulates locales in 1980's Japan (and later, Hong Kong and other points west in China), down to every last hairsplitting detail. Ryo can waste more than enough time buying soda from vending machines, visiting with a young neighbor and her kitten, training in his dojo, and playing in the local arcade rather than taking steps to move the story along. Unfortunately, the story itself is ridiculously linear, affording the player very little in the way of actually important choices. In addition, several tedious gameplay segments make the game difficult to suffer through at times, and these factors were enough to earn the game (and its sequel) lukewarm reviews and a poor retail showing on both sides of the Pacific despite the grand scope and expense of the Shenmue project.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Shenmue insofar as it is supposed to be "a game," and undoubtedly the aspect of the game that led to the most complaints in the reviewing circuit is that Ryo is forced to get a job as a forklift operator, both to collect information about his father's murderer and to raise money for his trip to Hong Kong. Rather than show some scenes of Ryo doing some work or supplying a nifty forklift-and-music montage, Shenmue actually has the player take the reins throughout the entire grueling process. Ryo can be employed as a forklift operator at the harbor for days or even weeks (comprising several hours of actual gameplay time), and the player must monotonously guide Ryo and his clunking forklift through the mazelike harbor, moving one box at a time, for hours on end, for barely any money, throughout the entire process. Playing the game through the harbor segment actually becomes a chore, and any hope of being entertained is sacrificed to the gritty and absolute realism demanded by the game's producer. Being a harbor worker in real life, after all, can't be much fun, even if the workers all get to race their forklifts around the stockyard at the beginning of every day. The world, Shenmue taught me, is a tough place where you actually have to work to pull yourself up, and that work, no matter how you try to dress it up, can be a serious pain.

Back in my actual life, things were sterile, happy, and more or less effortless. Every job I ever worked was either secured through my personal network or handed to me by the city or my school. While I've done some tedious stuff, including moving boxes Shenmue II-style for the Albany County Department of Social Services, everything I did was pretty comfortable and low-impact. The direct benefactor of my toils was usually the state, my school, or a not-for-profit organization. This would all come crashing down, if only for a few important moments, when I decided to forsake my hatred of the suburbs and corporate America to become a corporate wage-slave at the beginning of the summer of 2004. I was unemployed, my inaction and general sloth had delayed my personal connections for a few weeks, and it occurred to me that I had never applied for, secured, and worked an actual job in the "usual" fashion. Why not go for broke and see what it would be like?

I entered America's labor force as a night crew clerk in a suburban supermarket. The job of stocking shelves and preparing the store for the next day of business was described to me by one of the grocery managers as "the backbone of the store," and as I thought about it for a bit, I realized that the people who work to put food on the supermarket shelves across America, from farm and factory to highway and bi-way to box and barrel in the stockroom are really the backbone of our entire way of life. Feeding America's cities, if you actually take the time to appreciate it, is a tremendous and never-ending job that is handled by tens of millions of individual human beings, all doing their own part. It's a goddamn miracle, really. How many individual people have impacted me in some way by producing something that I have consumed? The number would be staggering. Seriously.

I realize that to the hardened member of society, my young man's epiphany that people actually work to get food on my table could be considered ridiculous and sad. The really sad thing, lest we forget, is that doing manual labor reminds me of Shenmue rather than vice versa. That said, my brief tenure as a muscle-cog in a corporate machine was just as physically and mentally taxing as it was ideologically eye-opening. Moving countless boxes of products up and down long aisles of colorful items all begging for consumption also got me to think long and hard about the presence of the corporation in every American household. Old advertising slogans and jingles pounded in my head ("the quicker, thicker picker-upper..."), the attractive packaging made me very inclined to buy things that I had never even heard of or ever considered buying before, and for eight hours it was up, down, my muscles were throbbing and my bones were aching and some terrible and depressing angst rock was blasting through the supermarket speakers courtesy of some Clear Channel tragedy. Some of my co-workers were singing along. We took "lunch" at five in the morning, and I looked out across the parking lot as I listened to a middle-aged man elaborate on the complications he experienced while having his appendix removed.

Much of what I learned about hard labor I had already learned from Shenmue. It can be tough, it can be boring, but it can also be fulfilling and thought-provoking. Every person that you work with, every person that you meet is unique and vivid and crude and valuable. I have, after all, nothing but respect for the unsung heroes of our society, working the graveyard shifts across the country for terrible pay to make sure that our corporate showcases gleam and entice consumers nationwide. Having suffered along with them for a very short amount of time, I can say with authority and experience that those people are far stronger than I am myself. Moreover, the fact that my own privilege had actually afforded me the freedom to merely "experiment" with being an honest-to-goodness laborer is a sobering testament to the reality of inequality in our vast and random caste system that we call "the civilized world." The most striking realization, though, has been the realization that in my caste, we learn about the "real world" first by playing Shenmue.

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