When A. and I get on the train at Porter Station, the girl in the short dress made entirely of Magic cards is answering questions from a man who looks like he’s at least 40 years her senior. The dress isn’t all that revealing, but it suggests revelation in a way that’s hard for testosterone to ignore. The girl has an uncostumed friend with her, and when the old man gets off to make way for a young guy with a bicycle, the two girls start talking. The other girl has an Eastern European accent, and both girls are wearing PAX East badges. A. and I have badges, but I don’t have a lanyard yet, so I can’t wear mine, and even though A has a lanyard, he’s not wearing his either, possibly out of solidarity to me. We aren’t halfway over the Charles River when the guy on the bicycle starts chatting up Magic girl. Eastern European girl ignores them and stares out at the white sails on the river. It’s Friday morning, a little after 10 am, and we — A., me, Eastern European girl and Magic girl — we are all going to the third annual PAX East at the Boston Convention and Expo Center (BCEC).
Bicycle guy gets off at Park Street, and the PAXers and all the other travelers to farther points get off at South Station. Another random guy tells Magic to stay warm as she gets off the train. I want to ask her if that dress means she can never sit down, and I want to ask the European if she’s visiting from out of country specifically just to go to PAX, and I want to say we’re going to PAX too and isn’t it exciting, but I don’t want to be another one of those casually conversant dudes, so I let it drop. Two more men make “jokes” about how cold she might get before we finally lose sight of them in the crowds approaching the BCEC.
We have no idea what we’re in for, of course. After we get off at South Station and take the Silver Line to the BCEC depot, we have a quarter mile walk before we get to the actual expo center, and in that time we become part of a small mob of a few dozen people. We accumulate as a glob at the closed spigot of the street crossing, then we’re waved over, and we stream forward to the plaza before the center. There are about a hundred people out here, and a sign that toggles between three slogans:
WELCOME TO PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAX
WHY YOUR IT GUY IS “OUT SICK”
and, my favorite,
WELCOME HOME
❦
PAX East is a convention, or a “con”, as they’re called by people who go to lots of these things. There are cons for fans of anime, Star Wars, science fiction, fantasy, Doctor Who, and lots of other geeky and non-geeky things (but mostly geeky). They are basically events where someone sets aside space and time for enthusiasts of one sort or another to get together with other enthusiasts. These spacetime allocations are usually paid for by ticket sales and by vendors who pay money to set up floor space in the con. It’s pretty much a win-win for everyone all around. Vendors get to strut their finest stuff in front of their willingly captive audience, and fan-types get to, um…. geek out as hard as they can in a receptive and welcoming atmosphere. Penny Arcade, a gaming website, started PAX in Washington state in 2004, and it was so popular, that they launched an East Coast version in 2010. So this is the third PAX East, and while I don’t know how many were in attendance this year, I do know that last year’s official number is 69,500. It is kind of a big deal, and still growing very fast.
For a while, my only image of cons was the science fiction convention you see in the 1999 movie Galaxy Quest. Even though I liked science fiction, that just seemed like some crazy all bullshit to me, not the sort of uber-geekery I’d ever be into. Later, on the Interwebs, I saw more pictures of cons, and read more articles about them, and only became more convinced that they were not for me. I was a fan of some of the things cons celebrate, but I wasn’t a fan-fan, not an enthusiast. I had a life.
But my friend C also has a life and she goes to lots of cons. You might say she is something of a conophiliac, if you didn’t value your life too highly. Seeing this otherwise intelligent and well-put-together person hit these cons up and down the eastern seaboard, well, it got me to thinking. And then, when, I learned that there was a con for video games… well, I figured that was as good a point of entry as any. I could go to a video game convention, and not feel completely out of place. So I put it on my calendar last year to keep checking in, and, as soon as tickets became available for 2012′s PAX East last September (which I’m just going to call PAX from here on in, thank you very much), I emailed my friend, retired Warcraft guild leader, and recent MIT graduate A., to see if he wanted to be my date. He did, we bought tickets, and that was how I found myself inside the BCEC last Friday morning, standing in a line that some people around us thought might be the line to get in.
❦
It takes us about five or six minutes of walking, in the longest line I’ve ever been in, to get to the door that lets onto the exhibition floor. While in line, we pass $9 hamburgers, $6 fruit cups, a battle mech suit training certification program, a few rooms of exhibits, and a few rooms containing nothing but banks of console games. There’s a climbing wall erected to somehow promote, I think, Dungeons and Dragons Online. Just being in a line that big for that long, while still moving at a brisk place, is enough to start to overstimulate me, but that’s what I think, because once we get onto the exhibit floor, I take a karate chop directly to the visual cortex.
Step onto the floor and you are hit by a wall of sound and color that engulfs you and rushes past you but then keeps on coming, a torrent of attention-arresting sensory input. It’s games and stuff and lights and colors and sounds and people and the map in your hand is useless because you’re so overstimulated and overwhelmed by how much STUFF there is, you can’t remember how to read a map. There’s a million things you want to see immediately, and a million more trying to compete for your attention. By the end of the show, you’ll know your way around and be inured to the stimuli, you’ll be a vet, a pro, but right now, at the moment of contact, it’s like getting hit in the face with sack full of heavy pixels.
“Ok, we have to prioritize,” I say, amid the klaxxons of my own senses, alerting to imminent overload and emergency shutdown.
“Right! Prioritize! Priorities are good! Let’s make a plan.” says A..
We agree that our first priority is to find the pick-up spot for the Assassins’ Ball game we’ve signed up for. We signed up for this too late to have our materials mailed to us, so now we have to collect them on site, but the instructions are not super clear regarding where exactly we need to get them from. It’s hard to stay on mission, though, partly because we are both a little dazed, and partly because we keep getting sucked into the displays, booths, theaters, where we forget our mission. Plus they TOTALLY had a like a dozen playable demos of FunCom’s The Secret World available for trial play, and I’ve been waiting like four whole years for this game to come out and OMFG look at how many expansion packs there are for Carcassonne, I didn’t even know they had that, and what is this huge line for the new Aliens game and LOOK AT THAT GIANT SPIDER LADY what the fuck. This place forces ADD/ADHD upon you.
Eventually we develop our strategy, because we aren’t having much luck finding our target, either by map or by mapless drifting. We realize we can also just look for other players and ask if they know where the pick-up is, since players are identifiable by the assassin’s armband players are obligated to wear. I do the math: there’s something like 100 people playing, max, and maybe 10,000 people here today, conservatively. We have a 1 in 100 chance. I don’t tell A. the odds.
But it turns out I don’t have to, because within moments I spot an armband. I accost the young gentleman. “Excuse me but can you tell me, where did you get that?” I say, pointing to his arm. The guy smiles and says something that sounds a lot like, “boo.” I repeat my question, thinking he must have misunderstood. He says again, “Boo.” or possibly “Doot,” and smiles even more broadly, like now we are both truly in on the same joke.
But I’m not. I am completely lost. I’m at sea among an ocean of pure geeks who have their own code, their own language even. I am an outsider, I do not belong here. I am not and never have been a true geek, and here’s the proof. I am in the land of geek and do not know the language, cannot understand, cannot make myself understood.
A. comes up behind me then, and says, “The *armband*. Where did you get that armband?”
The guy says, “Oh! I thought you meant the shirt!”
❦
I went to a pretty small high school in Kentucky. There were only a few geeks, only we didn’t call them geeks then. When I went to college, there were two semi-Greek co-ed houses, both right next to the computing center, and they were the houses where the geeks lived. We still didn’t call them geeks quite yet at that point, but they were clearly geeks in that:
* they had a Star Trek night and a theater dedicated to it;
* they tended to all be at certain level of physical attractiveness that wasn’t Grade A, but wasn’t hideous either, punctuated by one or two really good looking types who pretty much had their pick of the sexual crop, provided they didn’t mind rotating among the same clique of giques;
* people there were really into computers and software;
* there were more boys than girls;
* they were really into board games;
* they had a high degree of focus on knowing all the trivia tied to their favorite SF/Fantasy franchises;
* they were super-awkward to talk to;
* they were generally pretty sweet and generous and eager to be liked
* they had that geek je ne sais quoi (GJNSQ)
[Even though, I say they were clearly geeks, I'm not actually 100% comfortable with this nomenclature. For one thing, I'm not sure everyone means the same thing when they use that word, and for another, I think of that word as something borrowed from another language and another time. It's a "best fit" but carries with it connotations and baggage that might gradually fall away over time, and it's also what most geeks now use to describe themselves. Like so many things in our culture where language's pace has been outstripped by technological change, the word "geek" is just a placeholder til somethin' better comes along.]
As embarassing as it is to say this, I didn’t really fit in with even the geeks. Oh, I was welcome among them, but I just couldn’t muster the same degree of focus or care for the things that preoccupied them. I liked SF/Fantasy, but I also liked other kinds of fiction and movies too. I liked video games, I liked board games, but I didn’t like watching the same episodes of Star Trek over and over. In fact I didn’t like any repetition all that much. I’d play a board game a few times, then be interested in something else. I also didn’t like how a lot of geeks seemed to be much more interested in authoritarian adherence to game rules, at the occasional expense of everyone having a good time. It also just felt, I don’t know, fetishistic (I’ll come back to this in a minute), the way some geeks could get about some geek-interest type things, most of which were just, to my eyes anyway, more consumer culture products.
After college, I ran into these types of people sometimes, but not all that often, until I moved back to Boston and started, very occasionally, visiting Pandemonium Books & Games, looking for new SF/Fantasy to read. Me and the geeks, those are the only people I ever saw there, and at first I thought it was funny and odd that the people in the SF bookstore should always, even down to the employees, be so incredibly like the people in the two co-ed houses I knew from Dear Old Dartmouth. That’s when I first began to suspect that these weren’t just a few people who’d found each other at Dartmouth, that there was something bigger and more widespread going on here.
And then came the Internet, which, among other things, let all the wide and scattered people of the world discover that there were others like them out there. We all noticed them, then, we all realized that there had always been these people out there who had something in common, and they weren’t just nerdy or just socially awkward or just into Star Trek.
As if all this history weren’t enough to open my eyes to this hidden-but-also-emergent nation, I got a job in 2004 working at MIT.
So what I’m getting at is, I’ve had a lot of time to think about geeks, how I’m like them, how I’m different, and how they’re like regular people and how they’re not. I’ve also spent some time thinking about how, increasingly, these people are shaping the world we live in:
Facebook
Harry Potter
Superhero movies
Google
Apple
World of Warcraft
smartphones
online dating
describing things as “epic” or “fail”
John freakin’ Hodgman
Some of the biggest brands, trends and franchises in our culture, if not THE biggest, were all either created by geeks or made popular by them. Now, I live in Cambridge, and I work at MIT, AND I spend a stupid amount of time on the Internet, so obviously my perspective is a bit skewed, but it does look to me like this is the age of Geek Ascending. As the height of the stack of technology on which we conduct our lives rises, our dependence on the technomancers of the world increases, and the more of a technocracy we become.
But who are these people? Are they, as some say, people who live at some region of the autism spectrum? What would that even mean? Are they geekish because of nature or nurture, or, to put it in D&D terms, is Geek a race or a class? If the answer is biology, is it pathology or mere difference? Would it matter? If it’s nurture, then how did so many people of such disparate origin get to be so alike? Not just alike in taste or low social EQ, but alike down to gesture, sense of humor, body language and comportment?
Or are they not alike at all, and is it just my own prejudices and stereotypes creating a filter through which I see anyone at all geekish? Is it possible to generate a real and useful definition of geek, and, once we agree on that, how hard and fast is the line that separates the geek from the non-geek? Can someone choose to be a geek? Why do I fit in with geeks on some things, but not on others? Where do I go, and what is my home, and who are my people?
Maybe some of these questions aren’t answerable, but if there was anywhere I thought I might take a few steps closer to getting answers, I couldn’t think of a better place to start than PAX.
❦
It turns out we’ve asked exactly the right person for help: he’s sharing a hotel room with phenixone, the assassin game organizer. First he calls the guy, gets no answer. Then he texts, but no response there, either. Eventually he gives us some directions to where he thinks they’re being held.
A. turns out to have an uncanny ability to get us wherever we want to go, as long as we have a specific location we want to get to. No matter where we are, over and over during our PAX adventure, A. will somehow know how to get us where we’re going, by the most expeditious route possible. We go to the location named by our armbanded benefactor, and… no one there has any idea what we’re talking about.
I allow A. to talk me back into going to the PC Free Play area, which sounds a little like the area we’re supposed to go: “the PC security desk by the bring-your-own-computer zone”. Well, ok, I personally don’t think it sounds anything like that, but we get there, and… nothing. Except for one sign that’s pointing to an empty wall, and the sign says, PC Security. IT’S THAT FUCKING SECURE, YOU CAN’T EVEN SEE IT, SEE? Nobody is infiltrating that shit, NOBODY.
I walk up to the wall pointed to by the arrow, and then I see a second, much smaller arrow taped to the wall, so I turn left, and there it is, the PC Security Desk, hidden behind a stage. I ask for our assassin badges and the guy not only knows what we’re talking about, but he has an envelope thick with badges, including our own. Fist pump, Ding, level up, achievement unlocked. It doesn’t matter that the game registration website then turns out not to work, and that we can’t register our badges, and so we can’t play. We’ve been on a quest together, and gained some XP. We are no longer PAX MMORPG noobs.
We observe the time and decide we need to get in line for our first panel discussion which starts in 20, “Gaming for Grownups”, sponsored by the Gamers With Jobs website. After we get in line, we are moved as a group to the real line, a snaking progression around taped marks on the floor in a small conference room they’re calling the “queue room”. We realize then that, before we came in this room, we were actually standing in the line to be in the line to get into the panel. All the panels will be like this, a long line to get in line to see the talk.
When we’re finally admitted, we’re a little disappointed to see the panel: four white guys over 30, one white guy under 30. No women will be speaking, nor non-whites. “Diverse panel,” remarks A., as we take our seat. It’s not exactly a diverse crowd either, I realize, though at least there are some women in attendance.
Most of the next hour is dominated by the two oldest males reminiscing about their history as gamers. They are themselves now directors at two different game studios, so they do have a few insights every now and then into gaming and its evolution. When Jeff Green of PopCap names his first game, Dark Castle for Mac OS 7, in 1990, I’m one of about three people who applaud, which makes me feel like I don’t even belong on the island of misfit toys.
A couple remarks stand out.
1. “I want to live to see the day where I can talk at the office about the gaming I did last night the way other people talk about what they watched on TV and not feel embarassed about it.” This statement generates the loudest applause by far of all the remarks made at the talk.
This sentiment actually gets stated a few times in a couple different ways, and develops as a running theme for the first third of the talk, how great it is that gaming is becoming more acceptable and more mainstream, but the day is still a ways off when gamers don’t have to feel at least a little self-conscious about how they choose to spend their leisure time.
Ok, so first of all: really? This is the cause gamers are going to be rallying behind? Changing the world so that they don’t have to feel embarassed by their gaming? Gamer Pride? Really? I don’t know, it just seems like if you’re 40, you should probably not give a fuck anymore what people think about what you do with your time, I’m thinking, and if you do, it’s probably not society’s fault. Let haters hate, brother, we don’t have time for that. We’ve got noobs to pwn, right?
But even as this thought is running through my head, I’m also pretty aware that I myself, at 40, am a little embarassed that gaming is how I spend part of my time. As long as I’m copping to playing games by showing up at a freaking gaming convention, I am kind of obligated to cop to being a little embarassed about it, right? And if I’m embarassed about it, shouldn’t I want that to change?
Sometimes they call gaming “e-sports”, especially when there’s spectators involved, which is totally a thing now. I wouldn’t be ashamed to say I play, say, Ultimate Frisbee, after work, so why should I feel any different at all about saying I play Starcraft 2 after work? They’re both forms of structured play. The only difference is the kinds of agility they demand of their players. And that in one you have have an actual body and interact with other people’s bodies. And in one you get actual sunlight. And fresh air. Whatever.
But then while I’m still trying to ingest the Gamer’s Pride idea, Jeff Green raises a motto he tries to promote in his workplace, which gives me this to think about instead:
2. “Don’t mistake today for tomorrow.”
Meaning, don’t evaluate tomorrow’s possibilities in light of current contexts and limitations. The things that are going to be revolutionary or innovative in five years aren’t going to sound like reasonable or good ideas today. The iPad seemed dippy when it came out, but now, here we are in the future, and it’s a hugely popular gadget. The present is a shitty lens through which to view what’s just around the corner.
Suddenly PAX starts to make a LOT more sense. PAX is about The Future, and if you can’t evaluate it in those terms, it won’t make any sense, none of it makes any sense, and all you’re going to wind up doing is misjudging it all. And anyway, what are you, what am I, what is any of us doing judging anything at all? Haters gonna hate? Maybe so.
Later, after the talk, when we’re walking around just drinking it all in, I mention to A. that I’m sorry, I can’t help it, but everywhere I look, I think “Geek, nerd, nerd, nerd, geek, there’s another one, there’s one more,” like it’s a part of my brain that I can’t shut off. A. looks at me hard, and asks, “Really? You really seriously think you are that different from all these people here.”
“Yes, I do. I’m not really like these people.”
“Really?”
“Ok, I don’t know.” And I really don’t. I don’t like labels, and I don’t like going around looking for ones that fit me, but every now and then, I can’t help but wonder if labels have an up side, in that they can help you figure out where you belong, help you know whether that sign is speaking to you when it says, WELCOME HOME.
❦
I know you won’t believe me, but it was completely by accident that I downloaded and started listening to the audiobook of Ready Player One as read by, um, yeah… Wil Wheaton (If you don’t know who WW is, or what is his significance in the geek canon, no single explanatory hyperlink is going to help you, sorry). I cannot imagine being much geekier than listening to an mp3 of this book read by this person on my iPhone in the week leading up to my attendance at PAX East. Maybe if it was a jailbroken iPhone, or a rooted Android.
Ready Player One deserves its own review, but you won’t find that here. Sorry, just too behind on the other book reviews I want to write. I’m only bringing it up here, because it so intimately informed my experience of PAX. One of the things RP1 is about, intentionally or not, is a certain kind of idolatry of one’s own youth and its myriad totems. An eccentric programmer dies and leaves behind a puzzle challenge with a fantastic, world-changing prize, but to solve it, you have to know, as well as he does, all the minutiae of his childhood and early adolescence: 80′s teen movies, atari and nintendo video games, 80′s pop music. The programmer was happy once in his life, and has enshrined that happiness in a series of puzzles. The teen who grew up in the 2020′s that goes in pursuit of the prize has to, therefore, memorize a million little details and pieces of trivia connected with that bygone time and its pop culture artifacts.
That’s the sort of thing I think about when I see the current glut of “retro” games on the market, and especially in the App Store. What must it be like to be fifteen today, and come across this stuff. I’ll tell you I have a pretty good idea what it feels like, because I bet it’s a little like what I felt growing up and the only music on the radio was 60′s classic rock, the same old irrelevant crap that the generation before totally dug and thought was way far out man.
I don’t think the book means to indict anything. I’m not even sure it means to comment in any way on this tendency of geeks to hyperfocus on certain aspects of pop culture that are keyed to the younger crowd, nor on the tendency for these interests to become a little ossified as people age. I don’t mean to judge it, either, but I do think it’s worth talking about, especially after what I saw at PAX this past weekend.
The best way to describe this con, and perhaps any con, is as a, by and large, non-sexual fetish ball (I say “by and large” because I have my suspicious about what happens with some of these cosplayers in private chambers). There’s a set of fetishes that all loosely cohere: fetishes for game rules, fetishes for tabletop gaming, fetishes for certain characters in video games, fetishes for certain franchises of certain video games, fetishism for a kind of structured play, unfettered by concern or care for its connection to the quote unquote real world. At a con you can dress up as Link from the 1986 NES classic, Legend of Zelda (I counted six separate instances), you can stand in a crowded room and not talk to anyone but just play your handheld mobile gaming device, you can carry around a replica of a sword that appeared in a movie 20 years ago, you can choose from, literally thousands of different shapes and colors of gaming dice. It’s a place where you can let your fetish off its leash.
You know what else? Boston has other cons. There’s Boston Anime, and there’s Comic Con, and one other huge, non-industry related annual convention: the Fetish Fair Fleamarket. You know what else else? I used to hang out and write at the Diesel Cafe, and one night every week, there was a meeting of what I eventually learned was a group of local polys – and every single one of them sure looked like a full-blooded geek to me.
You see where I’m going with this? Me neither. All I see are dots, but I’ve no fucking idea how to connect them. There’s a lot of talk about “gaming culture” and “con culture” and “kink culture” and while I don’t know that “culture” is exactly the right word to describe these arcana-centric affiliations, it does look an awful lot like there’s a fair amount of overlap between these things. From the outside, anyway. Where I am probably viewing it all from, by and large.
❦
After the panel, we decide we want to try finding something a little more hands-on than just wandering around. So we find a line to stand in. This line looks like it’s to get into a small, closed-off room built on the middle of the expo floor that promises something having to do with Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Gods & Kings. I am kind of out of the loop on the Civ games, so I think “Gods & Kings” is the subtitle for the next title in the franchise, Civ 5. It’s not. It’s an expansion pack. We are waiting in line for an xpac, and I don’t know it, but A. is into it, so I am game. We strike up a conversation with the two guys in front of us, Sam and Chris, who drove up last night from Maryland. Sam’s playing with a Nintendo 3DS. Neither of them looks quite old enough to vote.
[Sidebar: most people spend most of their in-queue time playing handheld video games. Everywhere you look, it's lines of people, hypnotized by the electronic fantasia tightly gripped in their sweaty little nerd fists.]
A. asks if we can take a look at the 3DS, which I also don’t know much about. I don’t belong here, remember. I’m not a real gamer, or a real geek. I’m not even in my 20s. A. gets the device first, and is blown away. I take it from him when he’s done. As soon as I get in my sweaty little nerd fist, I’m actually surprised as well. It really is 3D, and without any sort of special eyewear. It’s a flat screen, but it really does have a depth to it. Things don’t pop out at you, but they do appear to have extension backwards into space along the z axis. Sam shows me the Resident Evil game, which he says shows off some its best application, and he’s right. It’s kind of like magic technology. Sam also tells us where we can get the swag bags we see everyone toting.
After 40 minutes, we finally get into the star chamber. A woman my age with a euro accent introduces herself as Lead Producer for the Civ 5 expansion pack she’s about to demo. She tells us we are not allowed to videorecord or photograph what we are about to see. Ok. She asks if anyone in the room has not played Civ 5. Not a hand goes up, not even mine, even though this is the exact moment at which I’m learning for the very first time that the game even exists. Then she shows us what’s new in the expansion pack. I am kind of thrilled with the graphics. I don’t remember a single thing the presenter said, but I do remember how cool I thought some of the animations were. After 20 minutes, the presentation is over, there are no questions, and we are unceremoniously disgorged back onto the expo floor.
We find some shitty, expensive food to abate the hunger enough to stay a bit longer without being distracted by it. We are lucky to find a table vacating in the middle of a wide, well-trafficked concourse just as we are ready to sit down. Ding. Level up. A eats his disgusting burrito and I eat my vegetable shortening based guacamole and we people watch. There’s only one loner, a terribly shriveled and malformed person in a wheelchair. I feel a little sorry for him, not having any companions, until I watch how uncannily deft he is with his hot dog, balancing it on top of one crabbed, paralyzed hand while he eats, and I realize he’s probably a lot more capable than me. I notice that none of the cute girls in cute, skimpy costumes are there alone, they’re all there with boyfriends. This will remain the rule for the rest of the time I’m there, with one exception, a pair of girls I see walking around in night elf costumes, unaccompanied by males. I see a girl in a bloody zombie nurse outfit, and realize she is not only missing the lower half of her left forearm, but she’s actually incorporated this brachiative difference into her costume, painting it with red paint to make it look freshly shorn. Awesome balls.
After we finish, it’s time to go stand in line to stand in line again. Once we get through the line and the meta-line, we sit to hear another panel, this about the applications of gaming to education. It’s a disappointing presentation, without much coherence. The opening remarks are all that’s really interesting, especially the part where the moderator cites a study undertaken to determine which characteristics educators anticipated being most valuable in the 21st century: creativity, group collaboration skills, problem-solving, the same skills, in other words, accidentally taught by most video games. That’s thought provoking, but the case studies they present are not too interesting, and none of them asks what I see as the most important question. If we let games be how we start teaching children, who’s going to police the corporations that publish those games? Or do we all just think corporations are the best entities in whom to entrust our best and brightest minds? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they haven’t exactly done the best job so far of shaping our culture. In fact, if anything, large corporations, through advertising, have done as much as they have been legally allowed to dismantle the strictures imposed by culture and make better consumers of us all.
Which immediately becomes, of course, another lens through which to view PAX. It is one fucking enormous coup for people who want to sell things to people who have a hard time connecting with other human beings, to the people who wrap themselves in fetishistic obsession as insulation against not having anything meaningful to care about, to those who armor themselves against the present moment with dreams of the future.
❦
Every idea, thing, fear and fancy is but another resplendent jewel in Indra’s magnificent and infinite net. Consumerism, hyperLinks, haters, geeks, computers, 80′s pop culture, Zelda, Link, the worldwide web, the internet, the internal neural nets, they are all gems and all manifestations of the infinite, and the closer you look at any one piece of it, the harder it becomes to see anything as separate. You can see all the jewels hidden inside the single jewel, and even see yourself in there, a jewel regarding itself. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and maybe something is aborning here, maybe geek nation, maybe something grandiose, maybe something weak and small, but after a day of thinking about how all this shit connects to itself and to the world outside and to my own net nodes, I eventually lose the ability to make sense of any of it. I go home, I write a few pages of notes, rest, get up, go in and see if there’s anything that I missed.
There’s still plenty to see of course. Back when we were buying the tickets, I was thinking just one day would be enough, but A. thought three sounded better, based on what he’d read and heard. Now I’m grateful for the three-day pass. I don’t think I will be up for a third day, but one definitely hasn’t been enough.
Saturday is of course, much more crowded, and now there are also actually people here who don’t look like gamers or geeks at all. There are people here who look like they’ve wandered into this convention from a Bruins game, and there are people who look like they’ve wandered here off the trailer park, or possibly Kmark. These people fascinate me most of all, the middle-aged ones who look utterly normal and working class, like they’re at the wrong convention.
A. and I circle the floor a few times while we’re waiting for his raffles to be called. Today A. is heavily into raffles and winning things. He’s wearing a giant paper worm on his head, because that is the entry condition for one raffle where he might win an iPad. I am appalled by this choice of his and make no secret of it, but A. remains smug, “You’ll see, when I win an iPad. Then we’ll see who’s all superior.”
A. doesn’t win any raffles, I’m sad to say, but having to orbit the floor does force us to see some areas I had not known were there. At one point a trailer for an upcoming game (Firefall) appears on a 40-foot screen and it is so awesome that it’s not until it’s over that I realize my jaw is resting on the floor. I am literally agape. I watched it when I got home, and it wasn’t all that awesome on a four-inch youtube window, so I’m not going to embarass myself by linking to it here and asking you to share my awe.
After A.’s losses, it’s time to go stand in line to stand in line for another panel. We are in that line for about 20 minutes before a PAX floor worker (they are called Enforcers and wear highly visible cherry-red shirts) comes along and informs the entire line that we are not actually standing in a real line. We are in line for nothing. He thinks this is a little funny, but I think it is a little fucking retarded because it’s the Enforcers’ jobs to make sure things flow smoothly for us paying customers. I’m not surprised though. In a small back room part of my brain, I think I’d always known this was going to happen at least once, that we’d have to wind up in a line, sooner or later, that led nowhere at all.
So we go stand in another line, this one to get into the “Free PC Area”. This is the area where NVIDIA and INTEL have partnered to provide about 200 PCs, each preloaded with an assortment of games to try out. We don’t know what games are available, but that’s ok, we are easygoing. By the time we get to the front of the line, though, we’ve learned that the options are not super awesome. Still, we wind up playing Left for Dead 2, which A. is skeptical about. I’ve seen the first one on the Xbox though, and I know it’s probably going to be pretty fun. It is. Mostly I don’t like video games with realistic violence, but there is something about beating the shit out of zombies that just scratches all my itches. We had a blast, and were unaware of time passing. When our 45 minutes were up, I couldn’t believe it. It felt like it had been 5.
A. mentions that he had a good time the night before, after I left, in the tabletop gaming area, so I ask him to conduct me thither. At this point, I have stopped even looking at maps. A. always knows the way.
The tabletop gaming section winds up being much much much much much bigger than I thought it was going to be. It’s like a few dozen acres of tables, broken up into areas for tournaments, for free play, for particular games only (e.g., a Magic section, a D&D section, a Settlers of Cataan section), a section for vendors, a section for painting miniatures, and each section has dozens of tables. It goes on forever. It’s like the whole entire other half of PAX, and I never knew about it or imagined it. I came into this knowing that PAX served both video gamers and tabletop gamers, but I had thought the tabletop gaming experience so mentioned in the literature was just a nod to the traditionalists. Not so. PAX honors its roots.
While we are wandering, right as I’m realizing I’m beat, spent, my brain is done with the overdrive I’ve subjected it to by both trying to just have the PAX experience, and also, at the same time, catalog that experience and analyze it, this girl accosts me, and there’s this weird moment of symmetry and closure, although I don’t realize it at the exact moment. At the exact moment, I’m just flummoxed that a girl is talking to me. It’s not until much later I realize that this is the other bookend, the other shoe falling, the poetic reversal of fortune that might indicate my inner geek has leveled up while at PAX.
“Wazaaimitm gom matttta?”
“I’m sorry?” I say.
“Where did you get that?”
I’m not carrying anything. I actually look and double check: no armband on me. No bag. Oh wait, my backpack…?
“What?”
She thinks i’m funnystupidcute now, enjoying herself, I suppose, because she doesn’t clarify, she just asks again, “Where did you get that?” But then she relents and points at my shirt.
I am wearing my Awesome Shirt, the shirt with a t-rex on it, breathing a fire of pure rainbow awesomeness. I wear this shirt when I want people to know how Awesome I am. Clearly this is a woman with taste.
“Oooooooh! The shirt. Threadless,” I inform her, naming the company that produced my shirt.
“Oh, so I guess there’s no more,” she’s crestfallen, because she knows they specialize in limited runs.
“Actually I think there are some designs they reprint over and over, and I’m pretty sure this is one of them. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to check it out, anyway.”
The girl nods, and slips back to her boyfriend, and I quicken my step to catch up with A. who’s patiently waiting.
(many more PAX pix here!)