Having been to PAX East this year, not even a week later most of the memories are hazy stretches of nothing. After paying the yearly tithe to the overlords of video game culture, I planned in between seeing a few friends and acquaintances on and off the floor to get my rare glimpse of into the beating heart of darkness of culture, just like the last two years. Ticket fees were rationalized away as being a chance to get material for reporting, fuel for griping and critiquing and lambasting and lampooning.
If the title lumping in a bunch of other stuff was any indication, nothing really came up. Maybe it wasn’t the right panels, maybe it wasn’t the right booths, maybe it was missing all the right podcasts and people and presentations and parties, but on this trip into what’s supposed be one of the public epicenters of nerd culture, there was just… emptiness. More than one event was shrugged off just to keep sitting in quiet corridors, charging a phone and reading a book. I had plenty of memorable experiences thanks to Greater Boston Area being a wonderful place, like the Thursday night farewell to regular weekly content for the Rock Band series in Cambridge or a peaceful steakhouse dinner with an extended circle of Internet acquaintances, but the memories that rang the most true were almost universally outside of the expo hall.
Obviously there were welcome exceptions to the malaise. I had a great time absorbing Hot Journalism Tips from industry bigwigs (hashtag ) and dizzily shaking my head at Utilikilts and Vibrams toe shoes. As far as sincere enjoyment, the smaller PC developers and bigger-ticket indies maintained their usual charming enthusiasm. I learned after the first year that any booth with a line wrapping around it is a waste compared to games with actual onlooking crowds or open stations, so I had next to no wait getting my hands on Dropchord (intriguing), Octodad: Dadliest Catch (as fun as the original prototype), and Soda Drinker Pro (the most revolutionary title on the show floor). I saw a lot of faces again, some for the first time, and even accidentally picked up a business card or two, and those were the moments that meant something to me. All totaled, though, they were kind of sparse.
Where a different Adam managed to spin his experiences into three separate articles, I can’t even finish one. The console releases which flooded the expo floor were mostly speculative puffs of titles on barely-announced future consoles or the last dying embers of the current one, years-long game series taking victory laps or their last bows. There was next to nothing revealed or explored, nearly nothing to show for the whole event except a sense of almost begrudging ceremony. (The tabletop section was its usual, serene, composed, better-smelling self that I don’t presume enough about to honestly reflect.) Everything from the dwindling cosplayer count to the Bioware self-love shrine to the seems felt completely perfunctory.
At GDC and IGF, on the other hand, stuff totally went down. Even the went down with more sincere gusto! Clearly the West Coast still has that action wrapped up tight compared to crabby old-school Atlantic types. Finally, the indie kids get to shoot themselves in the foot just like the big boys, right down to the paternalistic protection instinct and shaming of the hired guests . Looks like when you resign yourself to rebuilding all existing feminist theory from square one you can’t start skipping waves or borrowing any lessons already learned from history. nerd culture, everybody.
Richard Hofmeier’s response to winning the Seumas McNally Prize at IGF with Cart Life was also telling. Here was the creator of one of the most poignant manifestations to date of a mechanically robust game using its systems to emphasize its message and story… and he felt so utterly displaced and unworthy that he wished his game death and forfeited his booth to a graffitied takeover by interactive fiction writer Porpentine and her work howling dogs . Noble, certainly, but it still comes at the cost of a talented creator throwing himself under the bus. Hofmeier managed to pull off the rare and cherished feat of symbiotically merging gameplay mechanics with narratives, a hurdle that trips up as many independent developers as it does the AAA industry figures they claim to repudiate. The former keeps growing to mirror the latter more and more every day, with only the grace of experimentation as a partial excuse, and one of the people who might buck this trend feels utterly unworthy in the community that should continue to sing his praises and look to creators like him for the way forward.
Lulls happen, and there’s no way around it. Some years boom and others bust, but a stirring muse it doesn’t make. For all the complaints about the extended generation of home consoles, you can see the strain on a lot of peoples’ faces to get back on the hype train for new DRM-laden boxes that are liable to set their up-to-date libraries back to zero again. The PC folks get to skip this whole affair, but the upheaval going on is too vast and dramatic to really get a solid read on the future. Maybe it’s not the poetic answer or the one that gives over best to a coherent narrative (or article) but it’s what there is. There’s the sense of something ending without being sure how to feel about what’s about to begin, ennui mixed with confusion and change, but it’s a healthy uncertainty and uneasiness given the times. Growing pains.
At least we can all keep laughing at Sim City in the meantime. Haha! What a mess.
Further Reading: Postcards From PAX EAST: The Partisans (Medium Difficulty)
Heart of Darkness: E3, Violence, and Context for Outrage (Medium Difficulty)
