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.

[TR] Update and other thoughts

Six days without a post is the norm for much of my time on this blog, to the extent that I still, STILL have not yet posted my 500th piece on this site. But it's a bit off from my recent posting habits, so let me assure you, I've still been banging my head on the brick wall that is the Internet, but it's been at a different part, and this time I've begun to see deeper cracks appear.  Team Respect has been live for six days now, and as of right now we've racked up 92 twitter followers, an entry on the debacle "Pratfall of Penny Arcade" timeline, 25 forum members (who have collectively posted 93 times) and 37 likes on facebook.

To be fair, we haven't really been trying on facebook, because nobody we know has any finesse with it.  My twitter chops have the likes of Melissa Harris-Perry and Harry Shearer tossing me @replies. My facebook chops have people in my circle of friends telling me "cool story, bro." If anyone were to offer advice or assistance, that would be killer.

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Valentines Day came and went, but the discounted chocolate remains, as does the bottle of gin my Other of Primary Significance got me for what we refer to as "Hetero-normative Teenybopper Bullshit Day," which rates rather above the "teacher valentine" chocolates I got her and leaves me playing catch-up. It's Rogue Spirits Pink Spruce gin, and having sampled a fair number of juniper-wrought liquors, I have to say this is my favorite. The gin has been infused with spruce oil and seasoned in Oregon Pinot Noir barrels, which come in along with various citrus elements to strike the first chord. It middles with cucumber which continues to the tail end, where it's joined by the juniper and grains of paradise, a peppery spice famously employed in Sam Adams Summer Ale.

I've yet to use it in any mixed drinks, as it's delicious on its own or with ice, but I suspect that combining it with Lillet at martini proportions with a twist of lemon would yield agreeable results. I shall report back when I've tested this hypothesis. Enjoying it in any form you choose along with the lyrical stylings of Garfunkel and Oates comes with my unqualified endorsement

May we all be spared of our parties taking a turn for the douche.

Peace

Team Respect: A Grand Announcement

Ever since I was three years old, I've played videogames. It started when I was three years old, and my father's Intellivision allowed for two controllers to control the same character in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. My father maneuvered the crudely pixelated Ranger whilst I shot arrows. We played that Intellivision until it went bust.

Later, I was hospitalized for asthma. I was breathing out of a tube in the wall, and while my parents visited me, I was often alone.  Luckily, they wheeled in a TV with a Nintendo Entertainment System. For sure, I'd rather have been breathing under my own power, but it made my time in the hospital less scary. It's that experience that would later lead me to support Child's Play, a charity that puts toys and games in children's hospitals, so that kids everywhere can feel a little less scared while they're healing.

The charity was the brainchild of Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, best known as the creators of Penny Arcade. Their action helped redeem the gaming community in the eyes of society at large. Gone now are the frothy-mouthed rantings of Jack Thompson. Indeed, the narrative has flipped completely. Prominent researchers are now saying that games are good for you.

Their other great accomplishment is PAX, which is for many of us summed up in a word: home. Last year, it came to the East Coast for the first time, and I was in attendance. It was, in short, awesome. While many other conventions of its sort are commercial enterprises centered on hyping games and getting gamers to part with their money. Not true with PAX.  PAX is a community of gamers who are there to play games with each other. And at that, it's one of the more inclusive spaces in the gaming community.

However, recent events have led many to feel less welcome. Here is a timeline of events. It's not the comic itself that has so many of us upset. It's the boorish response from the creators and their defenders that served to make reasonable critiques invisible. And encouraged some high-grade dickery, taken to the most extreme in those who have vowed to show up to the con wearing shirts that say "Team Rape." As a result, many people-- some of my friends included-- to no longer feel welcome at PAX.  Which sucks, because PAX is truly special and everyone should have the ability to enjoy it.

We're better than this. I know because I've been there.  I've seen people at PAX receive prizes worth hundreds of dollars only to immediately return them and request that they be put up for auction to benefit Child's Play. There is a culture in PAX-- and in gaming at large-- that is conducive to being changed for the better by the existence of good examples.

It is with this in mind that some friends of mine and I have founded Team Respect.

We're not quite sure what our long-term plans are.  As of right now, we're encouraging those in the gaming community who don't like to hear it when their fellow gamers are inconsiderate of others, whether it be defiantly pledging be assholes to abuse survivors, or using "faggot" as a generic insult to stand up and declaim it. To say that we, as gamers-- as human beings-- won't stand for this.

And after that? Who knows? But right now, we're making a hard push to get the word out ahead of the convention on March 11th, and I'd ask everyone who reads this to pass it along to the gamers in their lives. It's time to take our culture back.

Convince one mind at a time to cleave to the spirit of Wheaton's Law, which is to say, "Don't be a dick."

Appropos of nothing, riding bikes in the rain on consecutive nights is to the common cold what a hammer is to a nail.

I went to a concert on Saturday.



Paul and storm are some funny motherfuckers.

When I saw them, when they got to the part where they called for the crowd to issue different "ARR,"s, one of them was, "who was your least favorite Star Trek character?"

"CrushARRR!" bellowed the crowd.

"HEY!" came a voice from the crowd. The surly audience member charged the stage, and glared at Paul and Storm, then the rest of the audience.

It was Wil fucking Wheaton himself, known for that day, the next day, and the previous day, as the Prince of PAX.

The Penny Arcade Expo has gone on for three years now, though until this year the event has only taken place in Seattle. In their enduring wisdom, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik decided to open up an incarnation of the con on the East Coast. Less wisely, they chose Boston's Hynes Convention Center-- which to their credit would have easily accommodated the numbers that attended any previous PAX-- which was quite simply inadequate to contain the teeming masses of gamergeeks. It of course stands to reason that any region containing both Boston and New York City is going to furnish plenty of con attendees. But the fuckers on the West Coast who'd already had their PAX seven months earlier saw fit to get on planes and come here. Which meant that this PAX needed an attendance cap, and three-day passes sold out before anyone actually knew what was going to happen there.

This was the Pax East Saturday Night Concert, which went on well past the time the T stations close-- which meant I needed to walk for two hours before finally collapsing into someone else's bed. It was worth it. The closing act was Jonathan Coulton, who's famous in the gamer community for writing Still Alive-- the closing credits song to Portal-- which he performed.

Both Coulton and Paul and Storm make most of their songs available for free on their websites, and charge for the higher-quality files while holding out their Paypal tip jars. I fully recommend checking them out. Same goes for MC Frontalot, who headlined the Friday concert but who I didn't get to see because that particular night my feet were aching so much that even with the benefit of public transportation it was painful to get back home.

PAX is a gamer con dedicated not only to video games, but also roleplaying games, card games, and board games. And I'm not talking about Monopoly or Clue or any of that (albeit often entertaining) bullshit. These people play games like Arkham Horror, which takes place in the Lovecraft universe and the object of the game is to not lose your freaking mind.

I could tell you all about the expo hall, the demos for yet-to-be released games, the (amazing) custom equipment being shown off, or anything else that gaming journalists are no doubt writing previews about as I'm typing this. But that's far from the most remarkable thing about the event. This is a place where about 10% of the people go in costume, under the expectation that others will want to take photos with them. I saw a group that came dressed as the entire cast of Team Fortress 2. Weirdness of all kinds is commonplace there. On the escalator I ran into two guys, one of whom was holding a sign that said "Free Hugs." his friend had a sign that said "Deluxe Hugs: $1."

In case anyone reading this encounters something similar, the extra dollar isn't worth it.

But even as someone who, having played video games for over two decades now, never believed in any of the bullshit propaganda that politicians and family values activists from have spread about gaming culture, I was overwhelmed by what I saw there. When we were lining up to see Wil Wheaton's opening keynote address, I somehow managed to lose my three-day pass, which the saner people in the crowd had put around their necks as soon as they had them. I ran back towards the registration desk with a panicked look on my face, and stopped when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

"Is this yours?" said someone who was old enough to be my mother.

"Yes. Thank you."

she kept her hand on my shoulder.

"It's ok. Everything's ok. You can calm down now."

I looked around to make sense of the situation but no, there was no kid in sight. She was here for herself. Awesome.

At the Q&A panel with Gabe and Tycho (Jerry and Mike to the Census), there were many heartfelt testimonies as to the importance of Child's Play, a charity the two of them dreamt up that donates toys and videogames to children's hospitals. I had planned on stepping up to the microphone to tell the story about how when I was seven years old and stuck in Boston Children's Hospital, breathing with the help of a tube that came out of the wall, I was able to distract myself with the help of a cart that was wheeled in with a TV and an NES. It was the first time I'd played a videogame (Super Mario Brothers) all the way through.

But there were plenty of those stories there, and better ones, and told better than I would. Some of them made me bury my face in my hands and pretend to have a cold. But that wasn't what impressed me the most. A man stepped up to the mic with a framed set of trading cards that had been made special for PAX, by the attendees. He came up to the stage and handed it to Tycho, who said "Stay right the fuck there."

He went back behind the curtain and came out with a box with the Intel logo. It was a brand spanking new, top-of-the-line Core i7 microprocessor. Without taking a closer look at the box, I couldn't tell you how much it was worth for sure, but it's somewhere between $550 and $700. He had it in his hands for about a second before he donated it to Child's Play.

I'm proud to consider myself a part of the gaming community, and that's why. Despite the way the media used to (and sometimes still does) portray us-- in fact, the first Child's Play toy drive was reported to have been done by a "local Catholic school" and to have been worth "nearly a thousand dollars." Despite the fact that the haul-- consisting of seventy Gamecubes, four crates of GBA SPs, and twenty bins of toys-- had been valued at an estimated $175,000, and despite the fact that the local press outlets were told explicitly who was responsible for it.

The media has a history of going out of its way to make gamers invisible where they aren't being portrayed as a bunch of drooling, murderous, antisocial slobs.

It's gotten better since, but I have a long memory. This year, for instance, CNN's coverage of Wil Wheaton's keynote was merely inept, rather than deleterious. It helps that games are now a bigger industry than Hollywood. If you have a spare hour and like oratory, I've included the keynote below. Having been there, I can tell you that it was to geeks what Obama's 2004 DNC speech was to Democrats. In it, he spoke of how games help us create new worlds together.

Assuming that you didn't watch it, and I mean, I get it, it's an hour long, I leave you with this, my favorite line from the speech:

"While all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it's different every time."