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Ryuichi 'Woshige' Shigeno had been waiting for more than a decade to fight Ken-ichi 'Ogawazato' Ogawa on a tournament stage when he heard that he'd drawn, as he puts it today, the "match of his dreams." When he was 13-years-old, Shigeno played in his first Japanese national video game competition. Since then, he'd risen to become one of the world's top-ranked players of Guilty Gear, Arc System Works' hyperactive, heavy metal-spruced fighting game series. This was to be, nevertheless, a challenging match-up. Ogawa, a part-time chef from Tokyo, is the world number one. As each player sat down to fight for a spot in the finals at EVO 2015, the largest fighting game tournament in the world, held that year at a Paris-themed hotel, complete with miniature Eiffel Tower, in glittering Las Vegas, more than a hundred thousand people logged on to watch the fight. Shigeno was born and raised in Kobe, a city slung deep and low on Japan's coastal underbelly. He started playing fighting games when he was ten, after his parents let him play on an arcade machine in the corner of a video rental shop, while they browsed the shelves looking for a film to take home that day. The allure of public performance proved irresistible. "I would practise at home on consoles to get better, then show off the results of my efforts at the arcade," Shigeno says. "It's been 15 years since I started playing so I don't know exactly how much time I've spent playing fighting games, but certainly more than 3,000 hours." Despite his experience, in Las Vegas that day, Shigeno was anxious. "Thinking about how many people are watching still makes me very nervous," he says.
In his early days of competition, Shigeno would prepare for major games like this by studying videos of his opponent's previous matches, searching for pattern and weakness that he might exploit. "I hate it when I can't put that to good use on the day or when my attempts to read the other person backfire," he says. "It creates a bad atmosphere for me. So these days I don't do much preparation before fights." Instead, Shigeno now tries to make both the crowd and the stakes disappear from his mind. "It helps move me into a mental state where I won't fall apart if I make a mistake," he says.
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