I'm always happy to talk to strangers about games. It makes up for the fact that I can't talk to strangers about sports. I wouldn't have any idea what to say if someone sidled up to me and said, 'How 'bout that game last night?'

Read the latest Random Encounter after the jump.

"I thought I was the only one with one of these." He half pulls a Nintendo DS out of his pocket to show me. I was playing mine on the subway platform, but now it's clapped shut in my hand as I get onto the train. I sit and he takes a seat across the aisle from me.

"What do you have in yours?" I ask. I'm always happy to talk to strangers about games. It makes up for the fact that I can't talk to strangers about sports. I wouldn't have any idea what to say if someone sidled up to me and said, 'How 'bout that game last night?'

"Pokemon Emerald," he says, pointing at one side. "Gundam," he says, pointing at the other. It's a worn DS, faded as much as white can fade and deeply used and probably very loved. There's a GBA cart protruding from the front. He's one of those rare people whose DS is doing double duty. He also has a PSP in his lap, with earphones dangling around his neck.

"What's in your PSP? You just listening to music?"

"Yeah, I was just listening to music. What's in there?" he asks himself, snapping open the back. "Viewtiful Joe," he says.

"I was playing Civilization Revolution," I offer.

"I was a tester on that," he says. He starts offering me tips, but he gets flustered on some of the details. "What you want to do is build three…no, wait, four guys. And then you join them up, but you leave one to defend your city and the others go explore."

He's a black kid, probably in his 20s, if that. He's wearing all black but without affectation. His body is round and unathletic, on the verge of being overweight. His face is young and soft, with a pronounced arch to his eyebrows giving him the appearance of Vulcan intelligence. But his eyes roll carelessly as he talks and he lowers his head as if he's being punished. Not that I would know, but he seems to have some sort of developmental disability.

"So, Gundam?" I ask after he's run out of Civilization Revolution tips. "I didn't realize there was a Gundam game for the DS."

"Yeah."

"Is it an import?"

"Yeah. A lot of good stuff doesn't come out here for like three or four years."

"Do you know Japanese?"

"Yeah."

"That's really cool. How do you know Japanese? Did you study it?"

"I was president of the anime club at my school. We didn't like watching the dubbed versions. And we even turned off the subtitles."

"Could you show it to me? The Gundam game?"

"I don't have my stylus. It really needs a stylus."

"Here, you can use mine."

I slide it out of the bracket and hand it over to him while he powers up his DS, curling over it and closing the world out with his shoulders. I have to slide half way out of my seat and lean across the aisle to see his screen.

"What does that say?" I ask.

"That's, well…I don't really know about that screen."

"Are those different types of attacks?"

"Uh, yeah, those. Those are different types of attacks."

"Do you have a base or anything?"

"Yeah, you get a base later, I'm pretty sure."

"It looks like maybe you can build or upgrade the robots, right?"

"Well, I haven't really played that far yet."

I suspect he doesn't actually know Japanese. It seems to me he's pressing buttons and giving commands based on years of playing Japanese RPGs, much the same way an RTS player has the muscle memory to drag select armies and queue up units at a barracks. Icons are moving around the screen, Advance Wars style. When the icons touch, pairs of little robots exchange cut scenes of firing laser beams at each other.

As the subway trundles on, he's lost in his Gundam game. He's no longer showing it to me. In fact, I don't think he ever was. He just booted it up and started playing it, and I'm pretty sure he was making up answers to my questions. When the train stops at a station, the music and the "pew pew" sound effects are audible for several rows around us. He keeps stabbing at buttons with Japanese labels, imagining or wishing he was somewhere else, somewhere that probably isn't even Japan, somewhere that doesn't even exist.