-- Garrett Martin, 'Paste Goes To PAX East'
[Today's Good Song: Crystal Stilts, 'Shake The Shackles']
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Why I'm Not Into Going
"Genuinely loving games isn't even enough. You have to love the idea of loving games. You have to listen to music about games and tell jokes about games and dress like characters from games. You must completely obsess over games until you forget how to relate to people in any other way. It's kind of like being an Evangelical or, worse, a Boston sports fan."
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14 comments:
I think the real reason you're not going is to keep with your "Fuck Boston" mantra.
well, i was born there so it's kinda hard
I absolutely disagree with this comment. I enjoy gaming but it in no way runs my life. In the same way that I don't build my life around movies and books and tv. But PAX is much much more than a gaming convention. It is a community of people getting together and having fun and being social. I mean I have had some amazing in depth sociological- political- philosophical- conversations at PAX that were no more centered around gaming than they were around being alive and thinking thoughts. This quote saddens me to think that there are people missing out on an event because of misconceptions.
"Genuinely loving games isn't even enough."
That comment is nuts, imo. When I used to go to conventions, I enjoyed being around people who shared the same interests as me. I didn't feel 'bad' or 'unwelcome' just because I didn't have the same level of passion as random other people about every single thing they liked.
Of course, conventions tend to be for the folks who consider their interest more a 'lifestyle' than just a pastime. But I would hate to believe that some people ACTUALLY are looking down on other just because they don't see gaming as their personal religion.
Characterizing enthusiasts as obsessive or socially incapable as a rule is clearly wrong. Yeah, there are people whose lives are almost "defined" by their passion for video games or whatever, and it can be uncomfortable to be around those people sometimes. It's just as uncomfortable to be surrounded by normal, socially adept people who merely happen to be celebrating something important to them (whether it's video games, anime, sports, or whatever) in an enthusiastic, unapologetic way, in an environment conducive to that kind of celebration. Then again, how can you even tell the difference?
Don't get me wrong; it makes a certain kind of sense to be uncomfortable around crowds of people who find "the cake is a lie" jokes funny and enjoy dressing up like M. Bison. I'm sure I would be too, to some extent (I deal with that kind of "extreme" passion with regard to music as it is). But it's totally rash to conclude that "these people, in their everyday lives, dedicate themselves too much to this medium. Because I can tell." That's like going to a Super Bowl party and deducing that everyone you know is an aggressive, psychotic emotional disaster-- all the time.
It's really weird that that sort of ends up being the article's ultimate "takeaway." I'm not entirely sure where it's coming from or what it accomplishes. It could have been a nice little piece about how PAX is such an effective breeding ground for this sort of fantastic, unprecedented (and yes, perhaps even unnerving) level of unrepentant kinship and expression. Why it had to frame that in terms of "getting out in the real world and doing something else" is a mystery to me, and reeks of elitism in a way that could have been avoided by simply articulating the scope and foreignness--even "scariness"-- of the event. I really empathize with the author in a lot of ways, but that was the worst possible way he could have ended the article, whether or not we grant him a reprieve for his laughable "these people who traveled hundreds of miles to hang out together, while I sit in the corner and complain about the fun they're having, need to get out more" assumption.
I find it both sad and telling that in a world where people feel it's perfectly fine to send their child to Hogwarts Summer Camp or wear a football jersey to a bar, we are essentially self-policing ourselves to "play it cool" during the 2 weekends a year we get to go nuts about what we love without getting laughed at for it.
Even to someone who loves all of the arts, and lives a diverse life, these kinds of sentiments bear the clear, ugly marks of a self loathing learned from a lifetime of social conditioning; like an odd form of Stockholmes syndrome where instead of just fall in love with our captor, we do our best to follow the lessons their imprisonment teaches.
It actually hurts to read such words.
You seem like you love your video games. I love them too.
Statements like that are what really move the medium forward.
None of this "improving gaming's reputation" or "expanding the market beyond the hardcore" crap.
...
:P
I like video games, but only so much. They can be exciting and fun for me, but not "fulfilling" in the way that I've seen some people write about them. I like games and I like to write about them, and I like to read what some people have to say about them, but "video game culture" as practiced on the internet, like every other kind of culture based out of the internet, is more often than not off-putting for me. I know I'm saying this as a person commenting on a gaming blog, so yeah, pot meet kettle. But dudes: not everyone who loves gaming loves conventions. Not everyone will enjoy taking a high dive into that surging sea of fandom. Many people will never be such fans of anything that they'll go to a convention about it. And that's fine.
Additional: it's possible to share interests with other people and also not be "their kind of people." I think he went to PAX and found out he didn't belong there. Seriously, our culture is geeking out right now. It's cool to be a nerd. It's great that these subcultures and hobbies can come out and be mainstream. But it's strange to discover, in the process, that you personally are not 'geek enough' to come along with it. You end up lurking in an odd middle-ground.
I totally disagree. It's this ultimatum of either you're a nerd or you're not that keeps people from liking nerdy things. If people stopped acting like watching anime turned you into an otaku or playing video games makes you a shut-in then more people would do those things and they wouldn't be considered weird things that perverts and manchildren do.
I'm sick and tired of being told that I am socially stunted because of the things I enjoy and I'm sick of seeing other people who like those things accept it as true.
Yes PAX is for people who love games a lot, but that doesn't mean that everyone who goes there has a debilitating obsession.
The first comment on that article said it best:
"The problem, I suspect, is what you say in the fourth paragraph. You play and write about games for a living. That means that you go to work...and you're in game culture. You go home to relax...and you're still in game culture.
The thing your forgetting is that it isn't the case for most everyone else there. Everyone else gets up and goes to work in IT, or as a teacher, or at a library, or in sales, or who know what else. They then come home and have a little time to game before having to deal with family and other things. They are not immersed in game culture day in and day out the way you are.
What's more, the average con goer isn't going to every con because its their job. The average con goer goes to one con a year, if that. This is, therefore, their one chance to act up and really go deep into the thing they love. So of course, when you only get to do it a couple days a years, some people really go for it. They go nuts with the costume of a favorite anime character. They debate the fine details of the Clone Wars. They get into the nitty gritty of WoW lore. They do all the things that make you feel contempt and disdain for them.
And then, you know what happens next?
They go home. On Monday, they go back to work. And that's all.
On the other hand, you come home, and you write about PAX East for money. You surf the web for game news to comment on or pop in a review copy of some yet to be released game. You don't get to come up for air, because as an online journalist you're like a shark...you keep swimming or you die. Soon enough you'll be headed to GDC or E3 or PAX Prime, and you'll see the same kind of people there too, and you'll think to yourself "why are they so obsessed? Don't they know that game culture never ends?"
All the while forgetting that for most people, it does end. It ends every day they go to work and take care of the kids, and watch American Idol with the spouse, because that's what you do.
So if some people seem by your standards to be "going overboard," maybe you should cut them some slack. Because the odds are, they're trying to cram into a weekend what you get to do all year long."
Word.
Interesting... you definitively got to have a great passion for what you do, although I digress with the "dress up like game characters" part hehe.
Thanks for sharing! :D
Kanji Learner FTW
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