PAX East: A Modest Success

Editor's Note: There is much to say about the disaster in Japan, but as I'm still playing catch-up, I'll wait on that post and give an update on that thing I've been working on

I hope that next time [Team Respect] goes to a con, there are more of us to hit up the panels and hand out swag, because for as much fun as I had at PAX East, I do wish I'd gotten the chance to play some more videogames.

To that note, I did get the chance to demo the new Mortal Kombat, which was more fun than I've had playing a fighting game in a couple of years (and more fun than I've had playing a Mortal Kombat game since the franchise launched).

I also got to demo Twisted Pixel's The Gunstringer, which is truly fucking astounding. Using the Xbox Kinect, you control the story's hero, who just so happens to be a marionette! As you fight your way through the barren landscape, a narration plays that adapts to the action on screen. It is to puppet theater what Rez was to music.



None of this is to suggest that I regret the other purposes for which I attended PAX. As it stands, [TR] is garnering still more followers on Twitter, with a major spike since the con. We distributed pink wristbands with our twitter name and our URL, collected business cards from a fair number of developers. I was also approached by a teacher from my high school, who was interested in organizing an event there about ethics and hate speech and wanted to know if I'd be interested in giving a talk.

Considering that one of the long-term goals we had from the getgo was doing precisely that sort of thing, I'm pretty fucking psyched.

When we started out, we weren't quite sure what we could accomplish at PAX East with such little time to organize and so few resources. The bar we set for ourselves was thus: Make it absolutely fucking clear that at this con, in this city, the people who are interested in helping greatly outnumber the trolls.

The douchetrucks behind @teamrape managed to stage a "flashmob" consisting of between 15 and 18 people outside a nearby UNO's.  They also managed to get us to give them handfulls of bracelets before we knew who they were, and get themselves kicked out of the Gender in Games panel. They've been at this for a couple of months longer than we have, and are followed by 60 people on twitter.

As of this writing, we've distributed around 2000 wristbands, are followed by 192 twitter users-- including the great and powerful @Themiscyra, who on Sunday became the first woman to take the stage for the final round of the Omegathon, and did so proudly displaying a [Team Respect] wristband-- and have made significant content with the press, the industry, and activists in the community. We also met with the brilliant minds at MIT's Gambit Lab, who in addition to their great work in gaming, created the Hate Speech Project as a reaction to the hostility surrounding the dickwolves debacle. It was put on display at the back of their booth at the expo hall.



A full report will follow over at the Team Respect blog, but in short: [TR] is WINNING. This started as a response to a specific mishap in the gaming community, but it won't end there.

As gamers, we're sick of merely saying "games aren't bad for you." Games are GOOD for you. They keep soldiers deployed in combat zones from wanting to kill themselves-- in fact the only behavior more effective in decreasing risk of suicide is 5 hours of daily exercise.  They treat depression.  They improve confidence and self-esteem, and channel positive energy. If you don't overindulge, they make you a more productive, more considerate, more helpful member of society.  But the catch is, none of that shit works if you're an asshole, or are playing in a space that's dominated by assholes.

We can't sanitize the Internet or online gaming as a whole--nor do we want that power-- but from what we've learned at PAX, it's quite clear what our mission from here on out ought to be: To carve out a space where people can expect to be treated respectfully, and to encourage people to take that attitude out to the gaming community as a whole. To encourage others to lead by example and in so doing change the fucking world. The limits of what can be accomplished by our efforts have yet to be fully defined, but what we already know commands us to press forward.

Practical Magic

Found a pretty neat blog called Paleofuture.  It's a fairly extensive log of past predictions of the future.  Including what the Thomas Edison Park thought the world would look like in 2011.  My favorite prediction is  that we'd be able to carry entire libraries in our pockets-- printed on wafer-thin leafs of nickel. As is true of his entire professional life, these predictions are brilliant forward thinking with some key flaws. The man who failed to predict that the phonograph would be used to listen to music (and despite the contemporaneous popularity of the player piano) was, in fact, mortal. And yet, what he created (or took credit for creating) was so new and wonderous that nonetheless he was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park; a Merlin of his own time.

I've been reading through Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and it's had me thinking about what the word "magic" means in the real world. In the series, economics is referred to as "the reflected sound of underground spirits," and much of practical witchcraft relies on herbalism and what is known as "Headology," or the practical effects that a known practitioner of magic can acheive without uttering a spell when amongst non-magic users.  Witches and wizards do, in fact, posess "real" magic, but that's because the Discworld is a world where magic is a real, physical force. But the word "magic" is still idiomatically used to describe, well, the sort of things that involve the same kind of deception as a conjurer's act, or the same kind of dexterity and creativity that Harry Houdini became famous for. It differs from superstition only in that it actually works.

Arther C Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and I think it extends further than that. In earlier times the shaman would take you in to their yoda-style living spaces and serve you a strange tea that would send you into a different state of consciousness and it was magic.  Today the active chemicals are crystalized and used for the same effect and it's called pharmacology.

The difference? Science is an open process. Magic is cloaked in mystery, whether by coercion or lack of deeper understanding. It consists of disguised invention as well as manipulation of forces that one cannot adequately explain. The economically measurable impact of an extension of unemployment benefits is science. The known predictive nature of an original NFL team winning the Super Bowl is magic.  The known impact of antibiotics on a bacterial infection is science. The known impact of antibiotics on a viral infection is magic (As is the similar effect of a sugar pill, but in the case of antibiotics, the consequences of antibiotic overuse make it dark magic).

The fields of economics, diplomacy, medicine, psychology, political science, artwork, music, drama, comedy and sex, among others, are mixed practices.

Home field advantage was magic until it was discovered that while its measurable impact didn't vary based on era or distance of travel or method of travel, it did vary based on the distance of the crowd from the officials. Another clue dropped when the Seattle Seahawks-- whose fans were outnumbered to the tune of an away game in Super Bowl XL-- got fucked over by the refs. As it turns out, while the impact of the crowd on the players may anecdotally be a psychological boost for the home team, it's far more evident that the officials are more likely to swallow their whistles when the home team is doing its thing. They don't want to be seen as deciding the outcome, and by their inaction, they influence the outcome.

It's also important to note the significance of the word "witchcraft," as the meaning of the word has a similar twang. When you examine the context of its usage in history, from the Dark Ages to Salem to Pat Robertson declaring feminism to be "a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians," to the signs featuring President Obama as a witch doctor. the meaning that emerges is "women with ideas above their station." Merlin was the picture of wisdom in the Arthurian legends, but a woman who practiced the same arts as he (and indeed, as those of that era who were styled as "wizards" historically) did was assumed to be up to no good. Come the age of Christianity, it all was verboten by an authority that wanted a monopoly on spiritual healing.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit in the past couple of days, because despite the fact we're at 9.4% unemployment that a solid State of the Union address does not statistically increase the political capital of the President delivering it, and despite the fact that the party that has any ideas that can statistically increase the number of jobs in this country has less power than it did two years ago, the 91% of respondents who agreed with the President's policy proposals have me feeling bullish about the coming year.

Because among many other things, that dude is magic.

Fuuuck, is it 2011 already?

I believe I was in third grade when I learned that during the winter months the Earth is actually closer to the sun.  My teacher used a magnifying glass to explain just why that made sense.  Miss Zimmerman was miles away when I learned that it was because the Earth tilts on its axis, so I never got to have one of these moments, but nevertheless it was one of those mind-expanding moments for me that made me enjoy school to an extent, even if most of the time I was there I was sneaking a book under my desk and falling woefully behind on my work.

Last night I learned that the date at which the Earth begins to move further away from the Sun in the course of its orbit is called perihelion, and that at the time of this writing, we have been moving away from our star for 26 hours.  Next year, perihelion will be on the 5th of January.  At the next leap year, it'll be on the 2nd.

Gaia has been around a great while longer than the Gregorian calendar, and She'll orbit as She damn well pleases, thank you very much.

This is what has been on my mind as I consider the decade that I'm calling the 20-'aughts.

In a few words, it kicked my ass and introduced me to some great people.

I'd like to try and find terms of truce with this new one.