How did you find Player 9, Ren, who introduces the section on collectible card games?
BA: Ha! Easy. That’s my oldest son. He plays tons of card games and likes arcades, so he seemed like a good fit. I wanted a wide variety of people in the book — female players, extremely famous players, regular people, developers, non-Japanese folks. Basically, I didn’t want it to be an entire book of dudes. After a few chapters, that would have gotten stale. Finding Renny was simple. Finding some of the other players was extremely hard. Like, we all know who Daigo Umehara is, but how do you find Daigo Umehara? It’s not like he has some website we can get his email address off of. Same for people like Clover-TAC and Clover-YMN. Even tracking down Aaron, the DDR player, and Sakurina, the sticker picture model, was challenging. We sent Aaron several emails to the address on his website, but through some coincidence, the book’s editor, Cathy Layne, knew someone who knew Aaron. And then even after locating them, it was always a matter of whether they wanted to be in a book or not. Some pe
