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"FacebookPinterest\n\n The underground double bus on Boston's silver line is filled to capacity with an unusually homogeneous crowd this morning. Mostly male, mostly twenty-something, mostly white, mostly dressed in slouchy windbreakers, cargo pants, and baggy jeans. Their T-shirts mostly depict pilated cartoons and mushrooms, and esoteric catchphrases. It's the uniform of a certain social subset, the kind of attire that suggests acne where there is none. I am standing in the accordion hookup between the two bus sections, which creaks and rattles in a way that suggests imminent disaster. Next to me are two people who do not fit that description: a tall, built man wearing a Bruins jersey and what is presumably his girlfriend, whose streaky, highlighted, flat-ironed blonde hair seems synonymous with the phrase \"body shots.\" Noticing that something is up, he turns to his other side and asks someone, \"Where's everyone headed?\"\n\n \"It's PAX,\" the addressee says, giving the guy's blank stare a moment before adding, \"It's a convention? For, like, video games.\" And maybe I'm projecting, but his voice seems to contain exactly that kind of haughtiness you'd expect, an Oh, you've probably never heard of it vibe that existed long before hipsters roamed the earth. The Bruins guy doesn't pay it much mind, though. And it's not all pimply pale dudes and the jocks they sneer at, either. Seated not too far from me is a pair of black guys who for a minute might seem to be the only other people going somewhere else\u2014until I listen in and hear: \"Nah, dawg, it's like a first-person adventure/fantasy. You're saving these villagers from like an evil sorcerer...\" and so on.\n\n They are a certain kind of person, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't come to the Penny Arcade Expo without expecting to find them. I tried not to make this into a faux-zoological study, a David Attenborough documentary that depicts the geek, that socially outcast sub-species of the young American male, in his natural habitat. But if this scene weren't peculiar enough to warrant such a treatment, you wouldn't be reading about it. Besides, if this bus is any indication, the stereotyped could hardly care what we think. They're here, with their gear; get used to it.\n\n\n\n The Penny Arcade Expo is a case study in gaming culture if there ever was one, a sprawling three-day convention featuring new releases, developer panels, gaming tournaments, and more. Unlike other shows, like E3, it is open to the public, making it more of a populist, community-driven experience than an opportunity for industry titans to hawk their wares\u2014though hawk they still do, of course. There are two PAs now; the original Seattle-based one, now called PAX Prime, drew 70,000 attendees in September of last year. While Prime opened in 2004 with a scant 3,300 guests, PAX East here in Boston began just two years ago, and is now comparably sized to its big brother.\n\n Cresting the overpass from the subway station, the sight of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center is the first sign that PAX is serious business. It is an enormous stadium-sized building of steel and glass, its fa&amp;amp;#xE7;ade an enormous, windowed second-story overhang that looks, somewhat fittingly, like the bridge of an interstellar spaceship. An 80-foot-tall video tower displays the PAX logo, with a game controller's directional pad composing the \"X\" and a rotation of slogans below it: \"Why Your IT Guy Is 'Out Sick,' \" and so on. The second sign is the massive flow of people that can be seen from hundreds of yards away, all converging on the booths and signage that lie just past the front doors. Then, you finally get to the doors to find that Chevrolet is an official sponsor of the event. An Aveo compact is parked in the courtyard and covered in PAX stickers; predictably, all of the cars present are small, fuel-efficient hatchbacks and hybrids. There are no Cadillacs here. The marketing implication is clear: The attendees here are young, and they aren't investment bankers or soybean farmers.\n\n Once inside, I am immediately lost. The lobby acts as a meeting place for hundreds of people, mostly of the variety I rode with, but also peppered with a collection of costumed individuals, known as cosplayers, dressed as their favorite characters (more on that later). I get a map. There is certainly enough going on to keep a gamer busy for three days: the exhibition hall, showing off new games under a flurry of LED lights and thumping bass; gaming-centric seminars and lectures, from \"Gamers with Jobs Presents: Gaming for Grown-ups\" to \"How to Start Playing Dungeons Dragons\"; and plenty of free console and arcade play areas to keep you entertained in between. I decide to avoid the exhibition hall for now since even from all the way out here, I can hear a muffled sound like Skrillex performing in a fish tank. I decide to wander the halls instead; it doesn't take long for me to find, as it were, the kind of thing I am looking for.\n\n In one of the side halls is a small stage, open to all, running Dance Central for the ox Kinect, in which a motion-capture camera tracks your movements as you imitate dance moves choreographed to Top 40 hits. Onstage is a man with a pink ponytail and a mustache and wearing a tweed vest. He looks like the type of guy you'd expect at the counter of your local used bookstore, engrossed by a Detective Comics while you attempt to find the Italian cooking section. That apparently doesn't make him immune to the rhythmic charms of David Guetta's \"Sexy Chick,\" as he's up there popping, locking, and pumping his way to a flawless performance. A girl walking by is seized there, mouth agape, for the duration. When he's done, the game racks up his perfect score. Applause all around, from the dozen or so people sitting cross-legged on the surrounding carpet.\n\n Then, a new challenger appears. Another guy decides to up the ante with a similarly perfect rendition of \"Toxic\" by Britney Spears; the choreography includes a recurring snaking-hips move that the audience finds gender-bendingly amusing. One kid waves his oversized plastic broadsword to the beat. The ponytailed dude feigns not to care, leaning on a nearby column and looking at his while his challenger shimmies and grinds onstage. Louder applause all around. It's all set for a deciding match\u2014never mind that the game is for all ages, and forgiving enough that they both just hit perfect scores on the hardest difficulty\u2014until a pair of greedy novices take the stage, load up the Lady Gaga, and set the game to \"easy.\" Step aside, newbs!, everyone seems to moan. Ah, well. The rivals disperse, and the geek faceoff is spoiled. This is starting well, I think.\n\n\n\n Early in the day, I attend a QA with the creators of the Penny Arcade web comic, gaming mega-stars and PAX founders Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. As if the mind-blowing turnout here weren't enough, fans make frequent pleas to the need for a PAX South, or a PAX Dubai. Build it and they will cosplay, I guess.\n\n I go to the QA not just to people-watch, but because, I have to confess, I'm also a huge fan myself. When Penny Arcade was first published in November of 1998, I was still in grade school. By virtue of parents who worked in IT, we had an Internet connection at home, a 28K modem that did a lot more beeping and screeching than actually downloading anything through the phone line. I played video games, though. A lot of them. I quickly graduated from my Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog platformers to the hard stuff: fantasy role-players like Baldur's Gate and Fallout, shooters like Quake and Unreal. Without the newest gaming rigs (whose hardware now make my smartphone look like SkyNet by comparison) I was playing the hottest games long after they'd gone cold, but it hardly mattered: It was an addiction, the kind of unconscious clicking-and-staring-until-your-eyes-water-holy-crap-is-it-really-that-late preoccupation that ruins your grades and worries your parents. There are many reasons I, as a classic \"gamer,\" could give for why I liked it so much: a nomadic childhood that stunted friendships with flesh-and-blood people; an inherently introverted, reclusive personality that resulted in the same; or an inclination toward cerebral, technical interests\u2014no doubt exacerbated by a complete ineptitude with sports and the outdoors in general\u2014that naturally translated to video games. The instantaneous tactile cause-and-effect of gaming, its tightly logical, computer-generated worlds: These were archetypal, the escapist obsession of \"geeks,\" socially anxious and fragile beings for whom the infinitely variable chaos and physical ertion of the real world were just too much.\n\n Nowadays, however, when Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice is an avowed Call of Duty fan, and Vikings superstar Adrian Peterson allegedly plays the Magic: The Gathering collectable card game (his teammate, punter Chris Kluwe, definitely does; so did I), that genealogy probably needs some rethinking. But even so, the crowd at PAX makes it plain that the heart of gaming culture are still the peers I wish I knew as a kid, those of us who were in love with it before it was...well, not cool (it's still not that), but even socially acceptable to admit.\n\n It was not always like this. The Penny Arcade comic was the brainchild of Holkins and Krahulik, featuring their respective alter egos, Tycho and Gabe. By then gaming wasn't exactly some obscure fetish\u2014it had been part of the cultural consciousness for decades, from Pong to Mario to The Last Starfighter. But it had just gotten its first taste of mainstream, grown-up popularity with the success of the first PlayStation, and was still several years away from becoming the large-scale medium (and raking in the grown-up money that would come along with that) it is today, with so-called \"hardcore\" gamers still residing on the fringes\u2014exactly the demographic to which Penny Arcade catered. The second-ever Penny Arcade strip was a jab at John Romero, the (relatively) famous designer of the first-person shooters Doom and Quake, whose personal project, Daikatana, would prove to be a famously bug-ridden boondoggle. (Yes, I played Daikatana. My enduring memory is of being so aggravated by my AI teammate running into the line of fire that I turned on the invincibility cheat\u2014and then watched him kill himself by walking out of a train.) And if you didn't know who that was, then it wasn't for you: It's fascinating in retrospect how inside-baseball the comic was from day one; its viability is above all a testament to how the Internet has enabled individuals to pursue and spread their hobbies for little cost (and in those days, no profit). But on another level, it was also a harbinger of how gaming would soon be ready for prime time, not just as an entertainment product, but one with a captivated fan base, and industry-focused, Variety-esque coverage and dialogue akin to Hollywood. In 1998, you could write a free web comic about the video game industry and develop a healthy readership; in 2012, you can host a video game convention with attendees flying in from Johannesburg.\n\n Gaming, Penny Arcade, and I all grew up together. You'd probably count Microsoft's release of the ox, with its emphasis on PC-like gameplay and a robust multiplayer network in an affordable and ready-made package as a seminal moment in the mainstreaming movement. After that, the frat bros got into Halo and Call of Duty, and the craft never looked back: Spike TV hosts its own Video Game Awards\u2014Call of Duty commercials have \"world premieres\" during the NBA playoffs; gaming has graduated from cottage to big-time industry, in a way it never could have without expanding past its dedicated base. The comic's humor became more confident, its references more self-reflective, Gabe's art style more fluid and vibrant; the writing has dealt with the industry's as well as their own booming success, addressing how the varsity goons who used to beat them up in high school are now all up in their GameStops. Conversely, in high school is when you would conventionally say that I \"outgrew\" the strip and gaming in general, as preoccupations like girls, cars, and a depressing shortage of both quickly pushed gaming to the backburner and then, in college, off the stove entirely. But it seems obvious now, judging by the throng of alternate selves roaming this building, that I didn't outgrow squat\u2014that if anything, the hobby I left behind has done more growing than I ever will.\n\n\n\n Unfortunately for those who came to see video games, this year there is no new Halo or Gears of War, the kind of multi-million-dollar blockbuster that gets the Spike crowd going. Judging by the show floor, the most buzzed-about title here is Max Payne 3. Max Payne is a series of third-person shooters in which the titular character, an amalgam of countless pulp detective and action-movie archetypes, tears his way through the game in a John Woo- and Matrix-inspired combat style featuring gratuitous double-pistol gunplay and slow-motion, bullet-time acrobatics. It's an old PC gamers' favorite, and thus an old favorite of mine. The line for the demo is immense. It stretches around the big black box of the Max Payne booth and far off into the concrete and cinder-block outskirts of the hall, where you'd be forgiven for thinking you were in line for a meet-and-greet with Kate Upton.\n\n At the end of the line, when I finally find it, is a guy named George. I make small talk with George for a while\u2014or really, he makes small talk with me. He doesn't seem all that excited about Max Payne, but he's got his DS (Nintendo's dual-screen portable console) in hand, and he'd just be playing the same games sitting down...so, you know. Accordingly, the next purchase he's debating is the 3DS, which is upgraded with some cool 3-D/augmented reality bells and whistles. \"I kind of want a 3DS but it's like, all the games are remakes. What am I going to play on it? There's Metal Gear Solid...well, I already have that for the SNES. And [The Legend of Zelda:] Ocarina of Time, I have that for N64.\" Throughout the day I hear a lot of quite earnest and long-winded talk about video games from many people, even when I tell them I'm a writer, and that I haven't come to write about any games. These conversations are pretty tedious\u2014usually, people shouldn't delve into an oral review of the latest Pok\u00E9mon sequel before checking to see if you're ready to invest ten minutes of your life into it\u2014which, I guess when the common denominator for everyone in the building is their time- and life-consuming dedication to video games, is exactly the kind of \"rule\" you've made a pilgrimage here to escape. Deciding I've talked enough with George, nice as he is, I politely take my leave...to skip to the front of the line.\n\n Okay, so I lied. George, I'm sorry. I don't need to stand in line, because I have a PAX media pass. This affords me a private appointment with one of the PR reps running the booth. At the front counter, I check in with a cute, brown-haired British girl. By the looks of it, of all the women who work in the gaming industry, the vast majority of them are in client-facing public relations\u2014whoever could guess why? While she looks my name up, I look over at the front of the line, where a trio of men who look like they've exhausted their supplies of potable water and canned goods getting up here have obviously caught wind of what I'm doing. You know how in the wake of the financial crisis/recession/Occupy movement, the media has been drumming up countless \"millionaires have it so hard\" faux-sob stories, just to spur on outrage and disbelief from all us common folk? The beams of sheer hatred I feel on my back are a lot like that. I'm so embarrassed, I can't look at them. I want to try to get them in with me, and go back for George while I'm at it. But the girl says to come with her, and I follow her past the crowded demo kiosks into a temporary demo living room, replete with a coffee table, air conditioner, and leather coach. It keeps getting better. Or worse. I don't know anymore.\n\n While chatting with the girl, a heavyset man with a \"common\" three-day pass wanders in. Seeing the big screen and the leather couch, he gets a pleasantly confused look on his face, like he's accidentally gotten backstage on the Watch the Throne tour. The PR girl gives him a blank, mildly hostile stare, like that's exactly what he's done. \"Sorry,\" he starts, \"I wasn't sure if this was where I was supposed to go.\"\n\n \"...No,\" she says, before gently leading him out to one of the kiosks outside. \"Sorry about that,\" she turns around and smiles, \"where were we?\"\n\n After the rep arrives and gives me a short rundown of the game, he hands me an ox controller and lets me play through a level of Max Payne 3\u2014the only ten minutes of gaming I will have at PAX. And after ten minutes of running, ducking, diving, and performing some brutal shotgun ecutions, I come to the conclusion that it's...all right. A perfectly fine game, and a worthy successor to the games I used to love, in the sense that it's pretty much exactly the same. There are upgrades, like a \"kill shot\" feature that lets you Swiss-cheese the last enemy in a scene with a hail of slow-motion bullets (a less than wholesome marketing highlight), as well as an intriguing multiplayer component, which involves dueling bullet-time abilities that require you to get the drop on your enemies and freeze-frame them before they can do likewise. But did it strike me as something I would like to spend 15 or more hours playing? Now, I've spent 15 or more hours recently doing some pretty dumb things. But there is something about this game and all the others here that leaves me completely cold, and I don't really know what. I think of my teenage self, who easily spent over 30 hours sitting at a mouse and keyboard, jumping around in slow-mo, just like Neo does! I think about the line outside. How many limbs and first-born might be offered in exchange for sitting where I am right now?\n\n While I haven't seriously played any games in years, I had always thought of it as a natural, temporal shift in priorities, like not seeing a good friend for a while: I've just been busy; I've had a lot on my plate lately. But this was like finally making time for that friend to discover that you don't really care to spend 30 minutes with him in a coffee shop, let alone do it on the regular. This stuff more or less used to be my life; now, confronted with all the diversity and sophistication of modern gaming, not to mention a drool-worthy exclusivity of access to it, I'd rather be at home, watching Mad Men reruns.\n\n When I step outside for a smoke, a man takes one look at me and my badge and says, \"A media pass, huh? How do you get one of those?\"\n\n \"Work in media, I guess.\" And, I want to say, in my best immigrant mother's voice, but never forget where you came from! I think he's fine on that, though: He's going to the Bioshock developer's seminar at 3 p.m., and he's really stoked to hear Ken Levine.\n\n\n\n While getting my jacket at the coat check to fish out some cigarettes\u2014anyone's guess as to what socio-cultural non-risk factors are at play here, but in none of the outdoor areas have I seen anyone so much as take a puff\u2014I take quick notice of the couple next to me. The man is nondescript here, a small Chinese guy in a size-medium T-shirt and wire-frame glasses, with hair that's spiky but uncombed. The girl is something else, though, a petite blonde wearing a slinky white dress with a big red bow tied at the waist. What sets it apart as handiwork is her hair, gelled to each side in a pair of gravity-defying curlicues that stretch past her shoulders. I ask her about her costume; she explains that she is cosplaying the titular character from Catherine, a Japanese story-driven adventure game. When I point to the hair, the guy chimes in: \"Yeah, that part took us a long time,\" he laughs. Us? A group of admirers come from behind me and ask for a photo. \"Sure,\" he says. He? Standing just behind her right shoulder, carrying a DSLR camera, he looks like the proud boyfriend of a beauty queen. I wouldn't call her pageant pretty, and this isn't exactly the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, but she's the center of attention here nevertheless.\n\n Cosplay is short for \"costume play.\" Good cosplayers get photographed here a lot. It's a common courtesy extended by everyone who comes here in costume, and probably a substantial reason they dressed up in the first place. When it comes to the scantily-clad female costumers, it's customary put your arm around them without actually touching them, thus the comically hands-off \"hover arm\" that's a bit of a sexually frustrated geek trope in itself. There's a lot of hover arm going on right in front of me, in fact, as a tall, gawky guy having his photo taken with Catherine is treating the girl's pale bare shoulders like the surface of the sun. Female objectification and titillation is a fact of life here, pretty much guaranteed by the decreasingly so but still predominantly male audience that gaming draws. The weird, anesthetized sexualization that persists here often goes unmentioned. Many female characters in gaming are strong figures, after all, even if they have to navigate their bare midriffs and enormous, heaving chest plates while fighting the forces of darkness. One woman, who'd in fact been paid to show by the maker of the game she was cosplaying, was asked to leave the exhibition grounds, on account of her character's outfit being a jumpsuit that opened at her cleavage and closed just short of the wrong hairline. Of course, when you consider that the game's main character is named Lollipop Chainshaw, the problem begins long before a paid performer and her choice of source-material-faithful dress. Who knows if that is something that can be helped in an industry that, while it grows broader, older, and more female by the day, would still probably call the ten-percent female attendance at PAX (just eyeballing) a healthy turnout.\n\n Later I am walking across the Microsoft area on the show floor\u2014by far the largest, as Microsoft is plainly serious about capturing the purist market over its rivals at Sony and Nintendo\u2014to find that the center of it is consumed by a huge crowd, larger than the Max Payne line, with dozens of smartphones and cameras raised up in periscope configuration. I have to ask someone in front of me, someone much taller, what's going on. Turns out it's photos and autographs with Felicia Day, star of web series The Guild, and geek pinup extraordinaire; another (albeit closely related) kind of geek may know her from Joss Whedon's writers'-strike web musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris. Mostly through the Whedon connection, several of my close friends are drooling fans of hers. So, if only to piss them off, and promising that this will be my last abuse of GQ's power, I swear, I ask her manager if I can talk to her after she's done here. I come back an hour later, at which time we literally whisk her across the exhibition hall, her glasses concealing her identity Clark Kent-style for just a few seconds\u2014I feel like I'm escorting Princess Grace or something.\n\n Talking to her, I find that there's very good reason for her position as goddess and role model in the world of gaming celebrity, and why a substantial proportion of the line for her autograph\u2014more so than many other crowds here, actually\u2014was female. \"I think it's very flattering and I'm aware that it's not going to last forever, so the more I can be out there and inspire people to follow in my footsteps, the more breakouts there will be. With the opportunities the Internet provides, this is the time. The next George Lucas won't come from Hollywood, you know? It'll be someone doing something online.\" She is starting a TV channel called Geek Sundry, in fact, but on ox Live, where The Guild and other shows are available streaming, direct to their intended audience. Given the rising stature of gaming and her sex symbol status within it, would she be up for a photo shoot? \"As long as it's not anything slutty,\" she laughs. \"I have too many girls looking up to me, I can't pose in like, a bikini.\" She's the thinking geek's girl next door, beautiful and smart but without all the marketer-ordained skimpiness. She has almost two million Twitter followers, most of whom would probably kill to stand here and watch her recite her grocery list, let alone have, like, a conversation.\n\n \"My friends are going to kill me for this,\" I say.\n\n \"Oh no! Why? Don't die, I like you!\" Okay, so I'm not totally apathetic about being here.\n\n And as for what she'll be doing many years from now? She will be gaming, that's for sure. \"Obviously the people I appeal to might change, but hopefully not.\"\n\n\n\n I spend dinner eating some terrible heat-lamp chicken strips and sitting with a crew of five guys who, despite sounding like the best of friends, have never met before. They've been talking for years on an Internet forum, they say. When I ask what forum, one of them, who has spotted my media pass and already asked what my deal is, uses the laymen's explanation. \"SomethingAwful.com, have you heard of it?\" Yes, I assure him, I have. (Whether you have isn't terribly important.) They picked PAX East as their first-ever meeting place, and despite some consternation over what it would be like to speak in the flesh\u2014some of them have met other \"e-friends\" before, others haven't\u2014have pretty much taken their rapport seamlessly into real life, they say. I ask what drew them together, of all the thousands of people on that forum. They say they shared some favorite games in common, but that between the hundreds of people who favored the same games, they don't know how they gravitated together\u2014they just liked each other, they guess. Seems like friendship in the Internet morass works just like in real life: as in, who the hell knows?\n\n One way online friendship does not work the same is the diverse spread of geography and demographics these guys represent; they're plainly kindred spirits who never would have met by other means. One works at a call center in Canada. One of them is a student at law school. The oldest is 35, and the youngest is 19. Maybe if I'd had a crew like this, I'd be here under different circumstances; the fact that I've had that thought, and a little wistfully at that, suggests that something here is getting to me.\n\n Accordingly, the most noteworthy item I spy on the show floor all day is Geek Chic, a hardwood furniture company specializing in playing/living/dining-room furniture for grown-up gamers. From bureaus that double as dungeon master tables, to specialized comic book storage, to massive tabletop gaming centers that double as dining room furniture, Geek Chic produces upscale craftsmanship specially for an aging generation of gamers, who don't want their middle-aged lives to clash with continuing the hobbies of their youth. Thing is, the company's wares run from one to over twelve thousand dollars apiece. My obvious first thought: Who buys this stuff? That's when a man walking by takes a look at an eight-thousand-dollar table, which has a grid of removable squares, on which sit molded miniature dungeons, forests, and rivers, not to mention pull-out drawers on each side with a space for your dice and, yes, a cup-holder. \"It's modular...\" he says, gushing, and then makes a sound normally reserved for the privacy of one's bedroom. The answer, it turns out, is lots of people. The founder, Robert, tells me that despite having 25 full-time employees and tens of thousands of square feet in production space, orders remain backlogged for months. How much did they sell? Try two million dollars' worth.\n\n \"Geek is just a term to say that we're very passionate about a specific subject,\" he says. \"Just because we're geeks and gamers doesn't mean we don't want to have nice things.\" He has a point. The growth of gaming has been cited as evidence of the parallel ascension of the man-child, the career-less couch-surfer who continues to prolong adolescence into his twenties and thirties. But products like Geek Chic imply the opposite: that boys are still building lives and becoming men, they're just taking their hobbies along with them. And if we can forgive the Entourage crew and their ilk buying matching Ferraris, can't we let these guys have their Transformer dining tables?\n\n\n\n By now it's getting late, and it's time for the concert. The lineup is a who's who of gaming bands: Supercommuter, the Minibosses, the Protomen. The crowd lining up for the concert is impressive. Standing in line (I do have to stand in line this time), I notice a very fit man in cargo shorts with unusually good posture talking to his friend. Figuring one more snap judgment can't hurt, I decide to investigate.\n\n Sam is in fact a Marine based out of a naval base in Maryland. He made the eight-hour trip because he's a devoted follower of tonight's headliner, a band called the Protomen. The Protomen are primarily inspired by the classic Mega Man series, as well as the synth-y, keytar-filled rock it shared the '80s with. Sam is not just a fan of the Protomen, he follows them around, groupie-style. \"I've been to all of the shows they've played in the last year,\" he says. In fact he's dragged his platoon-mate\u2014who has zero interest in games and looks sort of mildly, constantly chagrined by the scene around him\u2014the eight hours here to keep him company. When asked if this isn't kind of unacceptably strange for a Marine, he doesn't exactly say no; in addition to the rampant Call of Duty-type first-person shooter play you'd expect from that set, more than a few of Sam's peers are serious gamers.\n\n \"Twenty guys in our platoon, maybe seven of them play MMOs.\" Massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft are, in many ways, the ultimate expression of hardcore gaming, largely because they require an all-consuming dedication to laborious, repetitive play, or \"grinding,\" for the sake of collecting all the shiny loot that forms the core of the games' reward structures\u2014basically, if you aren't playing dozens of hours a week, you might as well not play at all. People get obsessed. Kids in China have died from exhaustion playing it. At least the Marines would have the physical stamina for it, I think.\n\n \"I've got a tattoo,\" he says suddenly. \"Wanna see?\" When I nod, he turns his back to me and lifts up his shirt to reveal a Triforce, the iconic emblem from Nintendo's Zelda series, etched on his back. \"First thing I got out of boot camp.\" I ask him how his peers think of such a show of, um, enthusiasm. \"They get it. I mean, our sergeant thought I was weird, but the guys understood.\" Hell, I'm not sure I understand. Maybe it seems daft that it has taken me all day and dozens of conversations, to still be surprised that a person from this or that segment of society is secretly or publicly an obsessed gamer.\n\n The doors open, and eventually the main theater is packed to capacity. The lights dim, and first up is a \"chip-hop\" group called Supercommuter, whose gamer-centric, white-boy rap is what is usually categorized as \"nerdcore.\" The acoustics are by a guy called Stenobot, who composes all his tunes on an original Game Boy\u2014which I now realize is as about as large as the box my last phone came in\u2014jerry-rigged to the bank of synthesizers in front of him.\n\n _Hold up now, the ship you showed me\n\n On TV shined like a trophy\n\n Plus there's one thing no one told me_\n\n One detail\u2014where the hell are we going?\n\n The song has nothing to do with games, but everything to do with gamers\u2014the lonely uncertainty of early adulthood, uniquely exacerbated in these people by the stigma that they engage in a children's hobby. Who am I, where am I going? I just want to fly an X-wing, maybe slay some dragons. The song seamlessly transitions into a new beat and a new bleep, and the crowd is rocking now. Much of the big hair and Styrofoam armor that made such good cosplay earlier just becomes cumbersome now. One girl, seated on a man's shoulders in a short silk slip, is showing a generous amount of bike short.\n\n Okay, so this isn't exactly an AC/DC-sized stadium crowd. But the audience is pumped, the music is (surprisingly) good, and the concert possesses a singularity of purpose. All day I've found myself surprised by the sheer numbers of people at PAX, but now they gain a sustained rhythm and harmony, jumping and swaying, bound together by the sheer esotericism of their passion. Hundreds of people, joined in the communal flying of a common freak flag.\n\n While the next band sets up, I step out of the hall to the windows out front. The trains will stop running soon, and I have a bar appointment with some old friends. I'm spent from a day of walking rings around the convention, and a trek up to Cambridge sounds like a bruising chore. Yesterday, I might have called such responsibilities \"having a life.\" But really, after a day spent with these people, consuming this culture, breathing in the sense of camaraderie, commiseration, and sheer joy that comes with sharing en masse the subject of all your greatest desires, triumphs, and pleasures, and coming face-to-face with the same long-abandoned facet of myself to boot, could I really say that with a straight face? It's tempting to share in all of this, even if my chances at it are long gone. The lights here are bright, the music loud, the people unified; the Protomen are calling.\n\n I look out the window into the city's fluorescent night. The video sign from this morning is showing another slogan, one I hadn't seen before: \"Welcome home.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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