population obeyed the Japanese order not to fall into American hands by committing mass suicide. Husbands killed wives, children killed their parents. Interviews with witnesses of what occurred include the director Nagisa Oshima and a Christian minister, «Kinji», who as a child killed his mother and his sister. Laura also sees film documenting a woman jumping off a cliff. Showing the sequence in slow motion reveals the woman’s hesitation at edge of a cliff until she discovers a camera aimed at her. The camera implicitly imposes expectations of honorable behavior that demand she leap to her death. There is an Okinawan tourist spot that is an odd memorial to this genocide in 1945, a cave in which many young nurses died rather than escape. This tourist site is also a sacred place, but what does it commemorate? Is it the sacred honor of Okinawans? While Japanese commanders on Okinawa committed seppuku, painful self-disembowelment as an act of will, the film makes patent the difference between seppuku and the death of a population by expectation. Far from revising the battle, this game teaches a lesson. What has Okinawa in 1945 got to do with Laura’s own personal (and hypothetical) tragedy? How could her

individual loss be compared with genocide? On the other hand, what could Laura learn from the game but the ineluctability of history, respect for human life and self-determination?

When Laura last puts her hand on a screen to gain access to the game, she is blocked— the game is over. At the end of the film, it isn’t clear what Laura has decided to do. Her last words to ‹you› are «Mercie…Mercie….» There is critical speculation that she has committed suicide herself and the video we see is an edit of her recordings made by Chris after her death. [19] However, would that be social development at «Level Five»? Is the game that the film plays a finite game with winners and losers or is it what James Carse would call the «infinite game» that is played «for the purpose of continuing the play.» [20] Carse echoes Haraway’s notion of «writing» with his distinction «finite players play within boundaries: infinite players play with boundaries.» (12) The Okinawa in 1945 was a finite game in which the issue for the Japanese commanders was «How far we will go to have others act in complicity with us.» (17) Finite and infinite gamers also have different relations to death. Finite