Trip report: the Midwest Gaming Classic

 

Due to fog in Milwaukee, the plane that was taking me to Milwaukee couldn’t take off and head to Newark, much less begin its return flight home. So I lost five hours there. I blame whoever it was at MGC who brought the Silent Hill games: those titles just emanate fog.

My plan was to arrive around 1, sign book for a bit, do my speech at 3, and then get to see the show, which closed around 6. I got there around 6:30, thinking the show was closed. I also thought “the show” was a couple of rooms in a nice hotel crammed with arcade and pinball classics. That, at least, was correct. “the show” also poured out into the hallways, lobby, business station, restaurant, bar, and all other meeting spaces. If you’ve ever seen a two-year-old apply toothpaste, THAT’S what it looked like. I say this with two immense Sissy Henkshaw thumbs up.

Even thought the show was winding down, there were a lot of vendors and game fans sticking around, so “closing” basically just meant the crowds in the hallways grew a bit easier to navigate. One of the MGC honchos told me the afterparty was going to begin: free beer, soda, and snacks, everything on freeplay. “It usually goes until about 4 am,” he said. I think I blanched at that, because he told me that I, personally, did not have to stay up until 4 am playing pinball.

Instead of giving someone else my spot and bumping everyone else up earlier, the MGC took what turned out to be a smart gamble and booked me at 8 pm. Everyone who left had the option of sticking around for another few hours of soaking in the wide world of video games.

I had recently given my talk to a college crowd, and I was aware that they weren’t born in 1971, when my talk began. (Well, the subject on my talk began: I’d like to think it doesn’t FEEL 40 years long to sit through.) They got excited for the modern games, but not necessarily the Asteroids or Puppy Pong. This crowd was different: I made a joke about Syzygy, which is the ungainly name that Atari first used. The crowd immediately nodded its head: they all knew Syzygy WAS Atari, before I had ever said so. On the other hand, they weren’t that excited when I mentioned Skyrim.

Signing afterwards went great, delayed though it was. And I got to play a lot of old pinball games I thought I’d never see, much less play. Plus, finding a Contra cabinet on freeplay is a thing of beauty. All of the units there were for sale: as the con went on, more and more had sale signs replaced with SODL signs. Some got folded over and dollied right on out for the trip home.

Pinball fact I didn’t know: it zags where the rest of the collecting world zigs when it comes to scarcity and popularity. Lemme use some Milwaukee examples: there are only five Bob Uecker rookie cards, but 10,000 Hank Aaron cards, the Uecker card would be more valuable, despite Aaron being the more popular and successful ballplayer.

But baseball cards take up very little room: You could probably store a thousand card in the same space as one Harry Potter novel. Pinball machines are bulky, and they need the whole stripe of a room if you’re going to set it up. So the pinball collector is limited to what he (or she, but let’s be honest here: probably he) can stock. And so he wants pinball’s greatest hits, his most favorite tables. Thus, assuming that the more produced and played pinball machines are the better ones, those also become the most wanted collectibles. An Addams Familiy pinball machine runs $5000. A much rarer machine, from before you were born, might be $400.

I get to visit the dealer room in the morning, and have along debate about myself about a Virtual Boy that’s in its own carrying case. Don’t have the case. But would it survive the plane ride? Do I want to check it, for an extra $25? I ultimately decide against it, but I do find out that my Tengen Tetris is still worth $50.My back was to a Tetris documentary while I was signing in the morning, but I snuck enough peaks over my shoulder to feel like I mostly sorta kinda watched it. Ask me if I HAVE watched the movie, and I'll just shut down like an Asimov robot asked to kill a human.

            Rushing through the airport, I realized I never got the bratwurst I swore I would get while I was in Milwaukee. No time, and now at the airport no places other than generic fast food. But right next to my gate was a deli with a grill. I got my brat, in a pretzel roll with handcut chips. Achievement unlocked!

Video Game Book Club: Geeks, by Jon Katz

Note: I THINK I just turned the comments field on. You can also email me: jeffryan1@gmail.com, and I'll throw up the comments in a new article. Tell me your experience with the book, or growing up geeky, or how And reminder: the next book is Smartbomb!

I first saw Jon Katz's Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho in my library in 2000. I was reading a lot about tech companies then, and flipped to the jacket copy, hoping it would be about a start-up. It wasn't. Just regular kids. I put the book down.

From a distance of 12 years I want to yell to my 23-year-old self to check that book out and read it, because it was talking about me. I didn't grow up poor in Idaho, like the two protagonists of Geeks, the electric Jesse and the quiet Eric. I didn't run away from a life destined for nothing to try my hand in a big city (in this case Chicago.) I wasn't involved in drugs or gangs, wasn't nearly as computer savvy as them, and (shocker coming up) wasn't as much of a gamer.

But I was about the same age. I moved to a part of the country far enough away from friends and family that I was on my own. And I found it almost comically hard to make new friends. Jesse and Eric had Richton Park, a Chicago exurb an hour away from anything. I had Norwalk, Connecticut, my first place on my own. Norwalk's a great town if you're rich and clubbing. it may be fine to raise a family. but for a young guy looking for other people his own age, it might as well as been Idaho.

So I spend a lot of time perusing the library, renting black and white movies, reading a whole lot, and going online to stay in touch with high school and college friends. And  I moved out after a year and a half that in retrospect I realize were the worst of my life.

Just like Eric and Jesse, and things got so, so much better with a new job, a new place to stay. I got the friends I was looking for. I met my future wife. I became me, instead of whoever I might have been id I stayed in Norwalk, boning up on nerdery and getting every sort of interpersonal door slammed in my face. Actually, no: the better door analogy would be a world where everyone was home, but no one answered when I came knocking. Still not sure if (this is the end of the metaphor, I promise) the people inside could hear me knocking or not.

Katz it perhaps too forthright in explaining how he grew invested in Jesse and Eric's lives. they were profiled in a local paper as ubergeeks. Katz visited them, and wrote about them for Rolling Stone. While reporting, he helped with some advice, and some money, enough to get them to Chicago. They needed jobs, had no idea if they could get them, but both found good-paying work. When you're 19, accomplishing all this on your own is life-affirming, life-changing, life-defining.

The second half of the book is given to two developments. First, Jesse decides to go to college, despite not being able to afford it. Out of a lack of understanding of the admission process, he chooses the University of Chicago (which might as well have a flaming moat around it), and chooses it months after their admission process is closed. Katz builds up the second-act tension expertly, using this event as an acid test for Jesse: will his drive and intelligence defeat the admission obstacle, or will the real world win, as it almost always does?

The other development has nothing to do with Jesse and Eric, but two other Midwestern high school geeks at Columbine High School. Katz finds himself a lodestone for stories about suffering outsiders, those who were picked on for being different, smarter, shy, themselves. After the shooting things got worse for many, who were branded potential shooters themselves. But the cathartic discussion ultimately seemed to help the geek society. Yes, there were lawsuits saying the doom made kids kill. But there were also denouncements against that type of thinking.

This is a short book, and even at 200 pages it includes two lengthy side-quest passages, one about Wired magazine and one about Columbine. But they both tie into Katz's grander story, how the new information culture has heightened the pocket-protector crowd. The Jock and the Cheerleader are in a decline comparable to American industrial jobs. The last decade of culture has been so geek-heavy, so many comic book and video games and science fiction on the big screen, that the subculture is now the plain old culture. Geeks takes us back to the turning point, showing how the writ-large changes of the world were bettering the lives of two kids who deserved better than what they were given.

Here's the new high school stereotype: there are jocks, and geeks, and the jocks are on their last four years of success. Once they graduate they won't play ball in college, maybe won't even get into college, and be a livelong disappointment. The geeks will go wherever they want, do whatever they want, and have happy lives. This may not be anymore true in a your-mileage-may-vary capability -- I've yet to meet a fencing athlete who wasn't an out-and-proud geek -- but this is the new expectation. And it wasn't like that when I was growing up. Katz's book is a Polaroid photograph of the change, the moment where society decided that being smart was something that would be rewarded.

Announcing the Video Game Book Club!

I got myself nominated for a video game award a week or so back, and found myself in really wonderful company. There's now a list on the internet that lists me and Neal Stephenson using the same <ul> bullets. Maybe in tens years' time I'll consider myself worthy of licking his <superscript>, but right now that list is clearly the work of idiots philistines those I am willing to agree to disagree about. (Edited because I shouldn't call people who might give me an award idiots or philistines.)

I heard that 2011 was a surprisingly good year for video game books. Just look at the nominees: Neal Stephenson, Jane McGonigal, Ernest Cline, Harold Goldberg. I've read and enjoyed all of the books nominated, and they're all great at what it is they do, which are five different things. (Teensy peek into my awards-head brain; if the award goes for best overall writing ability, Stephenson in a walk. for best world-changing ideas, McGonigal. best overall look at games, Goldberg. Most fun you'll have with paper with words on it: Ernest Cline. Best book with Super Mario on the cover: no award given in 2011.)

I have read far and wide for the video game canon. I have read all four massive books in Tad Williams' Otherland series. I've read Ender's Game. I've read just about every nonfiction book about gaming history. I've read strategy guides for games from 1982. But I haven't read everything. And I want to.

That's the purpose of the Video Game Book Club. Each month, I'll tackle another book on my own personal not-yet-read list. You do it, too, and we'll have a chat about the book. Maybe special guests will show up. Maybe I'll pretend that special guests show up. Maybe I'll just

So what's January's book? Let's do Geeks by Jon Katz. What I know about it: About two geeks who play video games. That's half of me!

February's book, by the way, is Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby. 

What'll we do in March? I don't know! I want to hear from you about that. What have you been dying to read? maybe you know of a YA book about games I haven't heard of that you can recommend. Hell, maybe we'll actually play a video game instead of read a book. "I was never really got the sense that the pigs were deserving of my anger. To me, I couldn't engage."

I'm at jeffryan1@gmail.com: let me know what you want to read in 2012!

12/24-12/31: An omnibus of Mario

First off, I'm drawing a blank for a funny way of combining Mario and Omnibus for a portmanteau that makes sense. Mariomnibus? Maybe.

Second, here's what I missed during my slothful days off:

12/24: Nintendo had a contest not unlike the famous-in-comic-book-fan-circles 24-Hour Comic Book Challenge: a 24-hour movie contest, starring Nintendo characters. it's kind of amazing how much you can do in a day*.

*Don't assume these guys were basically chewing coffee beans by the end of the 24 hours just to keep going. Making things gives you an energy that's better than caffeine.

12/25: Thought briefly of posting a Super Mario death metal cover, but let's stay with the spirit: Here's a Mario gingerbread house. While you're mentally eating it, try to imagine how many Mario games Santa has delivered over the last 25 years.

12/26: End-of-year list time: Mario's making a lot of people's lists: Gamasutra, IGN, more Gamasutra, Escapist, Pocket Gamer,

12/27: Exchanging something from Christmas that you didn't want or need? Pick up one of these with your in-store credits: Mario-riding-Yoshi plush, Mario bamboo magnets, a LOTR/SMB mash-up t-shirt, or an actual Bob-omb from the dreadful Super Mario Bros. movie.

12/28: The rumors of the 3DS's death have been greatly exaggerated. Or, to put it another way: console launch with Mario game: yah! Console launch without Mario game: boo! I'm very curious if Nintendo will have  mario ready for the Wii U. I'm guessing...no.

My suspicion is that there's some printed-on-flash-paper-so-it-can-easily-burn document showing that a hardcore minority will buy ANY Nintendo console, and Nintendo releases Mario-less consoles and gets the early adopters, and then when the momentum is waning they call up the plumber and he "saves the day." But it's no different than Syndrome saving the Incredibles city from a giant robot: it's all a show. Or maybe Nintendo is so wonderfully stymied by the Wii success that they thought that anything they touches would magically turn to gold. (In movies I think this is called the Vin Diesel Circa 2002 Syndrome, and it has fallen some greats.)

12/29: For the second year in a row, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the year's most pirated Wii game. Congratulations?

12/30: When I would do interviews for the book, people would ask me what sort of challenges the Xbox 360 and the PS3 offered to Nintendo. And I'd always have to say that it was Apple who was Nintendo's biggest competitor. Just as Apple's quietly saved the music industry by destroying the very concept of a physical music store, they've changed the downloadable game in ways that it may take a generation to change. One could hardly say that Nintendo's copying Sony's or Microsoft's online game policy -- quick, try to have an online Smash Bros. game! -- but it has taken several pages from Apple's notebook. it's WiiWare shop is very similar to the App Store, except with higher prices, a confusing play-money system, and a teensy selection. Granted, that teensy selection contains most all of the games you'd want to play, but still.

Nintendo looks to keep stealing the iPlaybook.

12/31: The mod community had for what seems like years been teased and tempted by the prospect of a Super Mario 64 mod. It would be almost as big as the original game, one of Mario's all-time classics. And now you can see for yourself: go download it. You know, if you fall on the "meh" side the equation of how much this is copyright infringement and how much a new game using existing skins paying tribute to Nintendo's IP.

1/3: The year is dead! Long live the year!

I so, so wanted to finish strong. I wanted to have tons and tons of Mario-related things to post. But my day job, family obligations (like doing things with them), 8 hours a day cruelly, cruelly stolen from my hands by that despot Dream, and if I'm being totally honest a game called Words With Friends that might as well be sold cooked into rocks and smoked with a pipe -- all of that commingled and conspired to make me miss posts for about two weeks straight.

My experiment with the blog was to see if there was enough Super Mario news to have something different to talk about every day. I think I succeeded with statistically significant proof that there is. So in case that ever comes up in conversation, you know.

What other game characters could? Still unsure about Sonic the Hedgehog, but I bet Angry Birds could sustain a daily blog. Lara Croft, no. Solid Snake, no. Modern Warfare/Call of Duty franchises: no. Despite their huge popularity, people stop commenting on them a few months after they come out. Same with Madden. Pac-Man maybe, but there almost all the talk is nostalgia-based. Of the recent (with 10 years) games, Portal might come closest. Anyone looking to start one of their own blogs -- "My resolution is to blog more about video games" -- that's my advice.

I'm not going to stop this blog, but I will slow it down. maybe once every week or so I'll throw something up here. Most of what I'd otherwise be writing about I'll post on Twitter: if you want a daily source for Mario news, @dailymario will continue to not be inaccurately named.

And I'll have one last (backdated) 2011 post, listing all the stuff I WOULD HAVE written about if I had the chance/if my brother hadn't dropped QUOITS on me, necessitating me to hit him with CWM.

I've had a blast rummaging through the world's collective cerebellums, uncovering and discovering Mario memes, Mario songs, Mario movies, Mario games, Mario artwork, Mario cakes, and (only in Belgium) Mario stamps. Hope you had fun, too.

12/23: Super Mario's Economic Downturn

Kudos to the Smosh folks (one of about 400 "funny" Web sites whose pictures always seem to link to articles of women in undress, which probably draws clicks but isn't, you know, "funny") for truly bringing the funny in this series of cancelled and never-finished Super Mario games.

And if you want a few more: 

12/22: Mario's Christmas F-bomb

Hey, guess what I just played for my daughter, because we both thought it was G-rated?

This.

On a semi-related note, do you know what appears to be g-rated until the last two seconds of R-ratedness?

This.

I have some new words to explain to a five-year-old now.

12/21: Hello, Dear Leader Kin Jong-Un!

Mr. Dear Leader Sir,

Hello, and welcome to this sad American Web site, not nearly as robust and North Koreas mighty Computer systems, which now have VGA graphics that make everyone in the West gasp at 256 entirely different colors. Truly, North Korea contains the entire rainbow of colors, all on one 13-inch CRT monitor! And with Your Nation's Glorious Zip Drive, you can store dozens of floppy discs' worth of information on just one disc! The same one Tom Cruise uses in Mission: Impossible!

I, and the world, share the global grief over your father, Kim Jong-Il, he of the tremendous height and slim waistline and very strong chin. You, Kim Jong-Un, are said to be a video game player. A gamer, as we in the depraved west, with our worship of false monarchies like Burger Kings and Royal Crown Colas would say. Hey, you're not even thirty and you're in control of the hands-down greatest nation that ever has been or will be on earth. You're doing pretty well.

But when you start ruling, and take over your wise and slender father's firm but fair hand, maybe you can take some lessons from the plumber whose adventures you played so frequently when you were in school. Perhaps you already have: your first public appearance, some claim, was inspired by the end up Super Mario Bros. 2.

Think about what Mario does: it's a lot like what your father does. Mario finds treasure from all over the kingdom, and takes it for himself. Mario attacks anything around him that moves, even those that seem to pose no immediate threat to him. He wears a series of amazing outfits. He's not that terribly tall.

I would, with great humility and humbleness, bowing so low my American forehead greasy from inferior Western beef touches the floor, maybe ask that you not copy what Mario does in his video games. Because he is not a real person. The Mushroom Kingdom is a fantasy land.

If Mario were real, his actions would be immoral. Taking from the people without reason is called stealing. Killing those around you is called murder. Wearing bizarre clothing is called being a Page 6 hot mess. Being short-- hey, not everyone gets boxcars in the genetic lottery. You're still taller than Prince.

There's a very^14 small chance you're reading this right now. If you are, you have a chance to be better than your father, to bring your country to the 21st century, to fill their bellies with food and their minds with hope, to open up your country so the outside world can share your culture with theirs. You can be a real hero, and not just in a video game.

12/20: You're no Mario, Buster

They say that comedy lives in the wide shot: the distance that allows you to see the whole person, the whole room they're in, and also gives the perspective and remove to make to emphasize with that person juuuust a little less. The "they" in question who said the quote was Charlie Chaplin, a man who knows comedy.

One of his contemporaries was Buston Keaton, who I like more. Check out his work below, compared to Mario. There's a claim that Keaton's work "inspired" Mario, which I don't really buy. The Keaton clip (from Seven Chances, remade as the Chris O'Donnell Experience -- er, The Bachelor) is a comical chase scene. Keaton pulls his cameras far away so we can see everything that's happening. Doesn't look like to many shots laid down tracks and dollied horizontally, which is what you would do to replicate Mario.

I bring this up because Paris, France has a video game exhibit goin' on right now, and in this write-up they describe Super Mario Bros. as being "loosely inspired" by Buster Keaton's film. I don't see it, myself.

Final note: when I interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto, I asked him if Mario was bald. (Because he wears a hat all the time.) He wasn't bald, Miyamoto said, but his mustache didn't match the hair on his head: the mustache is darker. Perhaps he's been dying his hair, he told me, sotto voce. Also, he thought, maybe it was time to update Mario's mustache. "Maybe a small mustache, like Charlie Chaplin," he said.

So maybe there's something to the silent-movie theory after all. Miyamoto's a fan!

12/19: 84 hours of Mario 64

Super Mario 64 is the sort of game you could play forever...and by "you," I mean a dude named Siglemic.

Siglemic is trying for the word record at completing Mario 64. Not just finishing but getting every single coin in every single level. He's playign 12 hours a day all week long, streaming his games online. The current best score is one hour, forty-seven minutes. Siglemic is using every  trick in Mario's arsenal -- jumping instead of walking, bouncing around like Ninja Gaiden, memorizing every last square inch of gamespace. He's regularly hittign times well under 2 hours, but is still a minute away from the all-time best score.

Will he make it? How close will he get? And can he teach us that backwards long-jump technique? Keep watching.

Thanks, Complex!