The Games People Play

I went to PAX last Saturday. The Penny Arcade Expo is Seattle's premier gaming convention, and Monk twisted my arm into going.

I fucking hate gaming conventions.

It's not just because my slut of an ex-girlfriend spends her free time preparing weeks in advance for gaming conventions, raving about her vast spectrum of choices and plotting her attack like a field marshal planning some kind of military advance. It's not just because she coordinates her vacation time around going to gaming conventions. It's not just because she's one of those prominent cosplay weirdos who thrills to put on a vinyl bodysuit at the slightest provocation so she can be the center of attention.

It's not even because she puts almost as much effort into her outfits as she does cheating on me at her precious gaming conventions. And before them. And after.

No, it's largely because I hate being in large groups of people, and a convention is, by definition, a large group of people. It's noisy, confusing, crowded, and — no surprise here — all the really keen stuff is usually sold out and packed to capacity. This endless throng of computer programmers in black T-shirts is somehow always between you and where the cool stuff is, which seriously hampers your ability to butterfly around and sample whatever you feel like trying.

So to get what you want out of the convention, you have to start planning weeks in advance, deliberating your choices like a field marshal planning some military advance.

No thanks. I'd rather die, or worse, get fitted for contact lenses.

I had an OK time at PAX. I might go again next year, but probably not. Even if it weren't for the horde of gamers killing my buzz, I have a huge amount of post-traumatic stress that comes hand-in-hand when presented with a gaming convention. It puts me in a very angry mood where the only things that really satisfy me are soulful introspection and thoughts of vengeance bloody vengeance.

It occurred to me in the first wave of emotional funk that hit me early into the event that I am guilty of having perceived my last relationship (and in fact, all relationships) from my own point of view. I mistakenly held The Slut accountable to my own personal standards and, like an idiot, did not question her loyalty any more than I would have questioned my own. At the time, it didn't occur to me. Why would it? I couldn't conceive of such a thing. It was a crippling optimism, the penalty of naivete to not see things for what they really were. It still sickens me to think about it. I couldn't say if she subconsciously held me to her own lax standards of fidelity. Based on conversations we had, I'm willing to bet she didn't. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic: I don't make a peep when she'd leave for a week to go to a gaming convention in Indianapolis, but I'd get calls from her whenever she deemed I'd been away too long at Notacon, held in a hotel just down the street. After some arbitrary hour of the evening she'd get upset and call me, asking "if I was coming home soon". At the time, I just shrugged it off as either loneliness or concern, though now I realize that the concern wasn't where I was, it was with whom I was.

Bitch.