ABSTRACT
When the 3/11 Tōhoku earthquake hit Tokyo on 11 March 2011 at 2.46 p.m., 20-year-old Toshi mistook it for the haptic features of his PlayStation Portable (PSP) game. Toshi and a friend were at home playing a PSP ‘monster hunter’ game that, as it happens, involved simulated earthquakes as part of gameplay. Toshi was momentarily caught between the offline world and the online world, where the properties of one world occupy the other, and the sensing of the offline quake was attributed to the online game.
