Xark!

This week's contest voting...

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Pick the winner in my latest contest

See the original post -- along with all the reader entries -- at my Fun & Games blog.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Caption contest: Test a new voting option

The Fun & Games caption contest rules say that I'll take entries up to Tuesday at 5 p.m., so the results of this poll are non-binding while I test this widget. That said, I'm interested to see how this will work, so please pick one.

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Caption contest

This is posted over at my Fun & Games blog. You can enter the official contest by e-mailing your caption to me (make the subject line "CAPTION CONTEST" so I don't mistake you for spam).

Movie pitch contest

Over at my Fun & Games blog: A contest in which I'm asking people to write a one-sentence movie pitch (or "log line") for an as-yet unproduced movie related somehow to Charleston.

You don't HAVE to be FROM Charleston to play, so please help a brother out. It seems that when I do caption contests, dozens of people enter, but when I do other types of reader contests I get very few entries. I don't have a single entry so far for this movie-pitch contest, so I'm beating the bushes looking for funny stuff I can consider for this week's prize (duh -- a T-shirt).

So please: Stop your productive work, think of something riotously funny, and e-mail it to me at my work address. Deadline is Tuesday at 5 p.m.

@ Fun & Games: Caption contest

Just added over at Fun & Games: a caption contest. And yes, I completely stole the idea from The New Yorker. I've played with this idea before, but never with an actual cartoon.

You gotta follow the the link or e-mail me to enter though. I'm just trying to get you guys over there to play, so save your captions for the contest instead of just leaving them here...

Death knell for idiot marketing

I subscribe to WIRED, which means that I find out about cool new geek stuff at the exact moment when it becomes old and uncool (because nothing can be truly leet if a print publication has noticed it). On the other hand, WIRED acts as a bridge between the pioneers (Dewey) and the relatively early adapters (me, Janet, etc).

Anyway, I point out this video thanks to this item in the March issue's package on Snack Culture:

Sony's two-hour press conference on May 8, 2006, was a slo-mo car crash. Intended to rally geeks around the PlayStation 3, the event instead left them cranky about the feckless sales pitch, weak games, and high price tag. Over the next few days, bloggers tried to capture Sony's cluelessness, but none were so eloquent as YouTube user Macaw45, who posted a video titled "Sony E3 2006 Press Conference in 1 Minute." Editing footage from the event, Macaw45's clip distilled the meltdown with DJ-like dexterity, looping key moments for maximum effect. The defining shot in Macaw45's montage showed a game developer explaining how to defeat giant enemy crabs: "Attack its weak point for massive damage!" A meme was born: The phrase became the "All your base are belong to us" of 2006, and it was used as shorthand for Sony's lameness. The inevitable T-shirts, dance remixes, and homages followed. Marketing execs beware: Geeks with iFilm can pare you down to your essence - you'd better hope you like what they find.
- Daniel Dumas

I don't think this is a small thing culturally. How much of what we deal with in life is crappy because of slickly marketed shoddiness? And I'm not just saying this as a consumer. Shoddiness is a disease of the soul -- punished in individuals, but often rewarded by institutions and corporations. This is why we've come to hate flacks, mouthpieces and pitchmen. This is why advertising -- as we know it -- is in a state of flux.

Name that entrance

OK, this one is for all you pluff-mudders out there. I'm working on a new idea, so here's a test:

Can you name the business to which this distinctive tile arrangement serves as an entrance?

The reality of Geekdom

I'm at least on a roll, possibly in a rut, but I am feeling rather inspired this week, possibly because I just spent four days doing what I love more than anything in the world - gaming.

My husband has always been very secretive about his gaming hobbies.  Almost no one at his place of business knows where he goes when he takes a week of vacation in August.  I, on the other hand, generally live by the principle of "If you've got a problem with it, that's your issue, not mine."  When someone at work asks me where I'm going, I tell them.  When they ask me what GenCon is, I tell them.  And at my current place of business, the response is mostly confused looks, followed by repeated questions of "so..is this like something you do competitively?"

Honestly, "competitive gaming" is such a scary thought that I don't like to even dwell on it.  Certainly there are players who see it that way, and they annoy the piss out of the rest of us.

But then the question becomes 'What's the point?"  Why do I play games in which there is no winner?  It really is the joy of playing, but I understand why people think that's a cop-out answer. 

Is it that I don't like reality?  Well, occasionally.  Honestly, don't we all at least occasionally wish we were somewhere else, or we were someWHERE else?  And for the majority of role-players, that's what the hobby is about: being someone we're not in an acceptable setting for such behavior, so we can go back to our mundane lives without causing a stir. 

Are we unhappy with our real lives?  Not particularly.  But reality, honestly, is pretty boring in comparison with what it could be.  Granted, boring has its benefits.  In the real world no one is trying to kill me or depose me or otherwise destroy me.  Is my fantasy life something I wish I was living?  Not a chance in hell, in most cases!  Fighting crime is hard and dangerous work, and in some games, I'm not even the good guy.  On occasion, I can be a really rotten bastard in-game.  It's a joy to cut loose and do that on occasion, but it's not something I'd actually want to submit real people to.  Really horrible things happen to us in-game too.  The Star Wars game that has been referenced several times in my post is a great example.  Best scene I was ever in involved the death of five other characters, including my in-game boyfriend.  I had real tears in my eyes as it played out. Oh, and did I mention I was the one who killed them?  The BF informed us that they were doomed anyway, and there was a big baddie on their ship, and I gave the order to blow it into little bitty pieces.

And people ask me if I would prefer my imaginary lives.  Are you kidding me?  It made a great scene in a game, but I would never, ever, want to live through that or anything close to it.  That's the difference between fantasy and reality, folks.  And, yes, most gamers are very, very aware of the difference between the two.  It's been an interesting journey the last two years, playing a character responsible for the death of a loved one.  The character is a mess now, as one might expect.  But it's only fun BECAUSE it is fantasy, because no one actually died, because my character's devil-may-care attitude and drinking problem are things that I have chosen to play, not things that have actually been forced upon me by circumstance.  (suggestion to other gamers: alcohol and blasters really don't work well together,  just trust me on this one.  They are, however, occasionally hysterical together.)

And for this character in particular, we've ended up with a certain personality within a personality, which I find amusing, to say the least.  Very early on the character got nicknamed "Crash & Burn," due to her creative piloting maneuvers.  Almost ten years later, most people don't even know Crash has a real name, and she occasionally gets pissy about it, and I just laugh at it.  One of the judges actually double-checked that I was playing Crash at GenCon because he overheard me being called by a different name - the name I originally made for the character.  My character has a character.  There's me, and there's the character I created, and then there's "Crash," the character that other characters see, regardless whether that was my original plan for her.  And they are three sometimes separate people.

Are there connections?  Of course.  As much as I try to actually roleplay, to play someone I'm not, my own personality sneaks in.  Most of my characters display snarkiness and sarcasm.  I just can't help myself.  That's me.  Many of my characters have some sort of serious flaw, generally physical, and I can only guess that that stems from my physical limitations.  There's something about overcoming personal adversity that I enjoy playing.  A number of characters also have particularly dynamic with their fathers, although I haven't been able to logic that one out yet, as me and my own father are neither notably close nor estranged.

(ok, I've completely lost my train of thought, so I'm going to end things here, as my husband just came in bragging that he ran over two mice with the lawnmower.  Blah!  Not something to brag about, at least in real life.  Now there are mice bits all over my yard.  Yuck.)

And God said, "Let there be Geek."

Now you've whetted my appetite. Is it mostly networking? Or socializing? Or gaming? Is the emphasis on existing games or previewing new games? Are there lots of panels, like with the sci-fi fan conventions, or are there lots of vendors there with lots of gamer schwag?

Xarker's question really deserved it's own post, so here it is.

The short answer is no, sometimes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes.

GenCon was started about 30 years ago by TSR, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons.  (It has since been bought out by Wizards of the Coast, or WOTC for short.)  As I understand it, D&D was the main draw, and it was small.  As the convention got bigger, people continued to bring in their wider idea of "gaming."  When I started attending in the mid-90s, role-playing was still the main event, and D&D and was a large segment of that, but there were also people who attended solely for board games or miniature gaming. 

They also had guests - lots of them.  Writers held seminars about publishing, story creation, game development, character development, and other applicable subjects.  Up until the last few years, there was always a major sci-fi star in attendance, plus a swarm of more minor stars.  Recently the selection has been a little more hit and miss.  Originally the stars were largely from Star Trek, but as science fiction TV broadened, so did the actor pool.  My husband and I's combined autograph collection includes not only most of the Star Trek actors, but cast members of Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (new), and Buck Rogers.  David Caradine was in attendance last year.  James Marsters from Buffy and Angel was the year before that.

In 1993, a card game called  Magic: the Gathering came out.  It had a fantasy setting, so it appealed to gamers.  (This is the game that started the craze that led to Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and so on.)  The effect on GenCon was staggering.  Every horizontal surface not being used for gaming was taken over by a Magic game.  This frequently included the floor.  You literally could not traverse the convention without tripping over a Magic player.  By the end of the convention, anonymous signs had started showing up for "Magic Anonymous" and "Friends don't let friends play Magic."  TSR tried to curtail the game, but it was just too popular, and the next year there were Magic tournaments, followed in the following years by tournaments in newer card games.

Computer games now also take up one corner of GenCon.  So does Anime, which technically doesn't have any connection with gaming at all, but is popular among gamers.  There are people who now attend just for the Anime screenings.  It's also a popular place for gamers to dump non-gamer girlfriends so they don't get bored.

If it's out there, you can probably find it at GenCon.  Exhibitors run free demos of new games, while attendees register ahead of time to run games in established systems, which other attendees like myself sign up for. D&D is still prominent, but no longer the clear leader, in large part to the huge number of new games that have come out in the last decade.  Most games are run by individuals, but there are also a growing numbers of clubs that run games.  GameBase7 is one of those groups.  They've been running a Star Wars campaign for ten years now, and that's where most of my friends are to be found (the ones I didn't count in my previous post, because I knew I would be seeing them at the SW games.)

For a lot of people, there is no socializing.  This is a convention of 30,000 geeks, after all.  29,000 don't know how to socialize.  (seriously, thousands of them don't appear to know how to bathe.  A few particularly snarky people have handed out soap in gift bags as either a joke or a not-so-subtle hint, take your pick)  GameBase7 is an exception.  We've been playing together for years.  We know certain friends are going to be there, and we look forward to it, and sometimes we even take time out from gaming to, you know, actually chat (usually about gaming) or have a drink.

I can't easily scan a photo from my wedding album, but there's a picture there that is telling of the social dynamics.  We have one picture that is only GameBase7 members, as Jerry and I are both members (which is weird in and of itself...we were members of the same club and never really crossed paths until three years ago, even those both of us counted our best man as a friend for most of our years with GB7).  There's about twenty people in the picture.  That's way more people than non-family who came from Green Bay or Milwaukee, which were our respective homes at the time.  It's more people than even came from Michigan, where I spent most my life.  I see these people a couple times a year (at various conventions) at most, and here they all are at my wedding.  I would trust any of these guys with my life, even though by-the-numbers I barely know them. (4 to 10 days a year for up to 10 years.)

GenCon continues to grow and expand.  Many more artists are becoming involved, partly because GenCon made it more economical for them to display works, but also because the industry has had an influx of artists, at least partly because the card games demand huge amounts of artwork to be produced.  A Christian Gamers group has shown up for at least the last two years to hold a worship service Sunday morning.  A monstrosity called True Dungeon has run for 3 years now, which is a 3-D dungeon that players walk through as they play.  The LARPs have spilled out into the mainstream time slots, when previously they were run almost exclusively at night (when everyone was playing Vampires, go figure). 

And people are bringing their kids.  It's not just that my personal friends are growing up and having them.  It's that that fact is no longer stopping them from attending.  Frequently, parents take turns gaming - one gets to play while the other entertains junior, and then they swap.  And most of them have armed their toddlers with foam dice.