PAX Day Two

Hawk finished third in a field of 64 in yesterday's Magic tournament. What a man!

We started this morning bright and early, but unfortunately not early enough to get wristbands for tonight's MC Frontalot show. After a quick snack, we went straight to the team Halo 2 tournament. We waited for an hour before we finally had our chance to play. And in five minutes, we got our asses handed to us by guys 10 years our junior, as expected.

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon and early evening:

• In console freeplay (some fighter called Guilty Gear X).
• In PC freeplay (Hawk and I got in half an hour of Unreal Tournament 2004).
• Waiting in lines <=== [this is where we spent most of our time].

That last point deserves some elaboration. PAX is basically a cheap, populist version of E3. Its appeal is in its all-embracing vibe: if you're a 15-year-old fan who lives an hour away, then you can afford to come to PAX. But because of this limited budget (and, to be frank, because of some lousy organization), we're definitely getting what we paid for. In other words, this is an unbeatable place for a giant, nerdy group hug, but it's ultimately a frustrating place if you want to actually do things like play games.

We had an excellent dinner at the Rock Bottom Brewery. Then we found an empty table and played my first game of Chrononauts (Dan owned, but Bill and I were about to win on the same turn, so the game seems pretty random).

Finally, it was off to the main event: musical guests Conney Lin, MC Frontalot, MC Chris, and the Minibosses. We had managed to get wristbands early in the afternoon by waiting in a line, and at 9pm we happily filed into the show.

The warmup was the quarterfinal round of PAX's Omegathon, a test of videogame skill and endurance. This was a truly epic battle of Karaoke Karaoke Revolution. After that it was pianist Conney Lin playing arrangements of a bunch of Final Fantasy songs.

And then ... Mr. Frontalot. He was really energetic on stage, and the band had clearly spent a lot of time rehearsing together. Overall, the translation of his beloved studio work into a live format was much better than I'd dared to hope. Especially notable was the performance of that most scatalogical of all Star Wars-influenced raps: Yellow Lasers. Great job, MC Frontalot!

After that was MC Chris and the Minibosses, but Bill, Dan and I were out of gas and called it a night. I look forward to getting the full report from Hawk tomorrow morning.

One random note on the "group hug" comment from above. Here at PAX, you can see firsthand how the internet has transformed (what tech evangelists would call) "sparse communities." I'd put it this way: 15 years ago, these would have been 8,000 people getting their asses kicked by a geek-hating world in 2,000 separate towns. Now, they self-identify as members of an active, growing subculture with market power and even -- yes -- some sort of cultural cachet. It seems that the internet often has this effect: concentrating and magnifying fringe communities.

I think that's exciting in general. But before we get too excited about the dawning tech-driven utopia of universal joy and acceptance, it's important to remember that the internet is just an amoral catalyst for these interactions. It has transformed the hardcore video gaming community in the same exact way that it transformed the nascent terrorist community. It's cliched but true: the internet does little to change human nature. It just magnifies whatever's already there.