PAX Post-Mortem: Sunday

Friday here.
Saturday here.

Sunday

Woke up once with the red digits of the crappy alarm clock (the same one found in every hotel room on the planet) glaring into my eyes. Too early. Back to sleep.

Woke up again. Too early.

Woke up again. Way, way late.

Somehow I’d managed to screw up the alarm on my phone for the second day in a row. This time, I’d remembered to turn it off of “silent” but I had the volume turned all the way down.

That didn’t really matter, though, as I didn’t really have much going on that day. Wil Wheaton Q&A thing was at 2:30, and that was it. My flight out was at 10PM that night, and checkout for my hotel room was at noon – an hour and a half from when I was having this inner monologue from my bed. Somehow I had to keep myself busy for the whole day, and hopefully without having to sit in an airport chair for six hours.

Quickly getting dressed and packing everything up, I had all of my possessions in some kind of bag except for two: my two copies of Mind + Body that I was supposed to give away. They wouldn’t fit anywhere, but I was having second thoughts about their usefulness.

I’d written inscriptions on the first (blank) page of each of them, one to Greg and one to Wil. I’d decided against giving one to Greg Rucka, so that one was useless, and the other one I’d made out on Friday before even going to PAX. It had a lot of “good luck on your keynote” talk, and was written from the perspective of somebody who hadn’t met him yet. At this point he knew me by sight and, to my amazement, remembered my name two days in a row. If I gave it to him now it would seem kind of silly.

Plus, the handwriting was crappy.

I’d only done the writing on the first page, though, a page I’d left entirely blank (front and back), for the purposes of inscriptions and autographs. If I were to, say, rip that page out, the first page would be the title page – the page that’s usually the first page. I gave it a try on the Greg Rucka copy, it tore out awkwardly, but with my car keys I was able to dig most of the fringe out. There, now instead of a book made out to Greg Rucka with a “thanks for Atticus” inscription, there was just a plain, regular old copy of my book. With my black Sharpie, I just signed my name on the title page, under the title and above my name. Nobody would ever be the wiser.

I did the same to Wil’s copy, ripping out the first autograph and making a second, and writing (in pen this time) a more up-to-date inscription. Somehow I’d have to get rid of both copies today.

I checked out of my room and left my suitcase and laptop bag in the custody of the bellman, then walked to the convention hall after stopping at the market to buy a $1.50, 1 liter bottle of Evian (spring) water instead of a $2, half-liter bottle of Dasani (purified tap) water as was sold everywhere at the show.

Taking the previously-confusing, now rote, route to the main expo floor around noon, I saw another life-destroying-sized line for Wil. By now, they’d started marking off gaps in the line with red tape on the floor so there’d be channels to walk through the room without a lot of annoying “excuse me”s and awkward side-ways stepping between people in queue. I took one last look at the show floor to confirm that there were no games I was interested in that I hadn’t seen at E3, then left to go down to the media room to use their computer and printer to check-in for my flight that night and print my boarding pass.

On my way out, I saw Wil autographing somebody’s shoes.

Down in the media room I went to Northwest Airlines’ website and tried to figure out if I would be able to hang out in their “WorldClubs” lounge at the airport while I waited for my flight. My return trip was going to be first-class, thanks to all the miles I’ve logged flying from Detroit to LA and back every year for E3, and to Florida and back every few months to visit my sister, who has since moved back to Michigan. I could never figure out if having a first class ticket would get you into those WorldClubs (which were always called “first class lounges” back in the air travel heyday). I called up the Club at the Seattle airport and asked them that, and then when they closed. They closed at 5:30PM. With my flight leaving at 10PM and PAX ending around 6PM, 5:30 was a bit early. They close at 5:30 because the United and Continental lounges were open until 11 and midnight, and members of WorldClubs could get into those for free.

Would my first class ticket get me into WorldClubs? No, I would either have to join WorldClubs ($250 per year, $1250 for life) or buy a day-pass ($45).

Would a day-pass get me into the United and Continental clubs? No. I’d have to buy a day-pass from them?

Could I get a day-pass from them, if my flight is through Northwest? No. Awesome.

Giving up on that, I decided to forgo all forms of airport lounge patronization and simply printed my ticket. Just then, Wil was coming into the media room to begin his interviews scheduled to take place in an adjoining room.

“Hey, Wil,” I said as I was in the middle of choosing a seat for my flight. My options were 5-A and 5-A.
“Hey,” he said dismissively as he walked past me briskly, flanked by the PAX enforcers who escorted him everywhere, I assume to both make sure he didn’t get lost and to keep fanboys from ambushing him with technical questions about the USS Enterprise’s warp drive.

His first interviewers went inside the room and closed the door. I didn’t recognize them, they must not have been E3 regulars.

I folded my boarding pass and stuck it in my messenger bag, between the two copies of my book, then tried to think of something to do. Food sounded good, I’d try for that. There was another bag of bagels in the media room, or the same bag from Saturday. I passed. As I left, the media room attendant was asking an enforcer to run to Subway to get a vegetarian sub with extra mayo for Wil. Vegetarian? I thought. Hoh-boy…

I left the convention center altogether and went for my second walk around Seattle trying to find a quick lunch that didn’t come from a freezer or an assembly line. Only a block away I found a place called Von’s Grand City Café. I sat at a small table outside, ordered a cheeseburger from the menu with the only description being a quote: “This is the best cheeseburger I have ever had,” attributed to the restaurant’s owner. Well, if he likes it…

By the time I was done, I was in a bit of a hurry to get back for my 2:30 appointment so I dropped a $20 for a $16 check and “keep the change”-d, over-tipping for rather disappointing service, and headed back to the media room.

While I waited in the main media room, outside the interview room, I grabbed a Pilot G2 from a box near the printer and took a few pages from a pad of paper and started to think of questions. As I said, if there was anything I’d ever wanted to know from Wil I usually just emailed him or found it on his blog somewhere, plus I wasn’t planning on writing a “Wil Wheaton Interview” feature for Gaming Horizon, so my questions were pretty generic opinion questions.

While I waited, Robert Khoo, the business director of the Penny Arcade brand (the person who brought a small video game-based comic strip up into a gaming empire) came in and was being interviewed (in the general media room) by somebody. Khoo’s cell phone rang, the ringtone being the codec calltone from Metal Gear Solid , and somebody else in the room exclaimed, “That is the best ringtone ever.” I wished somebody would call me, so they could hear the exact same ringtone coming from my modified iPhone.

I went back to minding my business when I heard Khoo say the name “Chris Baker” once, then twice. Chris Baker is the name of the main character from my book. Surely he wasn’t talking about.

Of course he wasn’t. Apparently, I learned from the context of the conversation, there is a writer at Wired named Chris Baker. When I’d come up with the name, oh, 9 years ago, there wasn’t anybody famous with that name so I was free to take it. Now there’s one in the technology journalism field. This might get complicated in a few years.

Then the doors to the interview room opened and a video crew schlepped out a camera rig and a girl so attractive she could only be for on-camera followed them out. Then it was declared time for the 2:30 Q&A, and everybody who was waiting in the room stood at once and shuffled into the interview room. The room was long, and dominated by a huge, dotcom-style meeting table that I recognized (from my days as a dotcom dreamer) as a color called “butter” (very light wood). Wil was sitting at the end of the table, next to a wrapped up Subway sandwich and a bottle of water into which he was pouring a packet of Emergen-C. He’d mentioned having a cold the day before, the same cold that I and the rest of the world caught last week.

As I walked behind him to grab a free chair (a black, mesh, dotcom style chair) on the other side of the table, I said, “I’ve found that Airborne works better than that,” as I pointed at the packet of Emergen-C. I brought a Costco-size tube of Airborne tablets (pink grapefruit flavor) along with me and every time I retreated to my hotel room I filled a glass of water from the sink and plunked one of those effervescent diddies in. The warm, hotel sink water made it taste awful, but a quick chug avoided that.

“I’ve tried Airborne,” Wil said as I was taking a seat. Somebody perhaps younger than me had grabbed the seat nearest the end, I sat in the next one. “But my problem with those is that they have a lot of sugar in them.” No sugar? I thought. Hoh-boy…

Wil is a skinny fella, sometimes annoyingly so to somebody of my metabolism. Some sugar couldn’t hurt. In fact, he needed to bulk up so he could play Special Agent Rubino in the Mind + Body movie, coming soon to an imagination near me.

I exclaimed that I’d just gotten over a cold, and what seemed to help was this insane product called Zicam, which came as little individual gel-dipped cotton swabs that you’re supposed to rub up into the inside of your nose. The zinc is supposed to help you get over the cold quicker.

“But when I looked it up,” I started as people continued to shuffle in and take seats. Behind me, someone was setting up a small camcorder on a tripod. “I read that in a small percentage of people who use it, it completely destroys their ability to taste and smell.”
“Forever?” came a voice from behind me; the person setting up the video camera.
“Forever,” I said. “I chose to risk it, though.”
“Yeah, but it’s actually a statistically insignificant amount of people and probably not even the real case,” Wil said from the head of the table.

“It’s funny, though,” I said. “If you Google ‘Zicam,’ there are two sponsored links: one that says, ‘Zicam causes you to lose your taste and smell, click here to join the class-action lawsuit,’ and another one, sponsored by Zicam, that says, ‘Zicam doesn’t cause you to lose your taste and smell, it’s all a misunderstanding, click here to buy some’.”

The last person sat down. Besides me, there were five other interviewers.

“Google ads, you might find, are pretty much universally evil,” Wil said.
I nodded. I used to buy them, and understand the evil (well, more just stupid than evil), but didn’t bring that up. Wil and I had already gone over that in emails a while ago, when I’d first started The Electroids Co.

People began asking real questions, and after a bit of that, the kid to my right asked everybody to say who they were and who they worked for. I only remembered a few, one was a writer for “The Stranger,” a popular independent paper in Seattle, another was just a blogger of sorts, and another was the host of EvilAvatar Radio. I was Aaron from Gaming Horizon, though I was hardly “from” Gaming Horizon at that juncture.

Everybody introduced now, somebody jokingly asked Wil, “And you?” Everybody smiled and Wil ablidged, “I’m Wil Wheaton, I write articles for SuicideGirls, I sometimes write a feature called ‘The Games of Our Lives’ for The Onion A.V. Club, and I have my own blog at wilwheaton.net. Oh, and acted on some TV shows a long time ago.”

Pretending to be pretending to be writing notes, I said, “Ok, and that’s ‘Wil’ with how many L’s?”
With a grin, he said, “Uh, that’s one L.”

A few years ago, Wil was one of the contestants on an all-Star-Trek episode of The Weakest Link along with a quickly-voted-off William Shatner and some other assorted stars, back when Weakest Link was still on TV, and when it was hosted by the snotty British chick and not the dorky blonde guy. When he was being asked why he chose to vote off a certain player, British chick asked, “Were you christened, ‘Wil’?”
“No,” he said. His birth name is Richard William Wheaton The Third, though he’s been “Wil” since very young, for a reason I don’t yet know.
“Then why did you give yourself such a silly name?” she asked him.
“Leaving one L off the end of my name---“ he started.
“Is pretentious,” the host cut in. Audience laughter.

This is backstory necessary to understand my followup question: “One L?” I wrote that down, as if interested, “Now, do you find that very pretentious or just a little pretentious?”

The people in the room who didn’t understand that reference, or know that Wil and I aren’t total strangers at this moment (everybody) grew a face that mixed fear, shock, and bemusement. Had I just insulted the interviewee, about his name, for no reason?

“Uhhh,” Wil said while thinking, “I think it’s just the right amount of pretentious.” Audience laughter.

What followed that was a very interesting experience. I’ve been to a lot of interviews in the few years I’ve pretended to be a real journalist. I’ve been to a lot of group Q&A sessions, too, but the roundtable discussion we had with Wil that afternoon was something bordering on amazing. Not really an interview, it was more a collaboration of opinion. Rather than a series of questions that people asked and Wil answered with canned, pre-fabricated answers, everybody asked cerebral questions and almost everybody answered and participated in.

[I’m working on getting audio from one of the guys recording it so I can add some transcript highlights]

In the middle of one of my questions, about whether video games becoming truly mainstream would help or hurt creativity, the media room attendant peeked into the door and interrupted, announcing that it was 3 o’clock.

“I’m really fine to go for another… 15 minutes or so,” Wil told her.
“I’ve got another meeting to get to at 3,” the EvilAvatar Radio guy said, “but I don’t want to leave this.”

So we went into overtime, and I asked my question. We went on, talking about trolls and bullies. A troll is a person who feeds on negative attention, so he’ll say or do things he know will make people hate him, and a bully is somebody who uses his position to pick on others who can’t defend themselves to boost his ego. The cure for a troll is to stop “feeding” him, and the cure for a bully is to cast negative attention on him to destroy his ego. Uwe Boll, perpetual creator of awful video game-based movies is a troll, if he just made awful romantic comedies, nobody would know who he was, but he takes video games we love and makes crap movies of them, so we all hate him. If we just ignored him and stopped talking about his movies, he’d go away. Jack Thompson is both a bully and a troll, picking on video games because he can, but he loves the negative attention. How do you cure that? If you stop feeding the troll side, his bully side gets stronger; but if you bring negative attention to the bully stuff he does it feeds the troll side. He’s a perfect storm of a jerk.

Once he mentioned how the media feeds on our desire for gossip, which perpetuates talentless nobodies like Paris Hilton or tragic losers like Lindsay Lohan into a spotlight they don’t deserve.

He mentioned that he became a vegetarian a few months ago. Hoh-boy… I asked if that was because of the law in California that states that anybody who lives there has to eventually become a vegetarian. “No,” he said, “for personal reasons.” Better than financial reasons, I suppose.

After everybody was out of questions, somebody asked, “Uhh.. what’s your favorite way to cook potates?” It was a joke, clearly.

Wil looked thoughtful for a second, then said, “My favorite way to eat them is twiced baked, but my favorite way to cook them is to cut them up real thin, put them on a sheet, and cover them with olive oil, salt, and some rosemary and bake them.” He’d just described, word for word, my favorite way to cook potatoes. Actually, that’s my favorite way to cook anything.

“Kosher salt,” I said, not as a suggestion but as a fact.
“Yeah,” he said, turning to me. “That really thick, coarse salt.” I nodded.
Somebody else suggested redskin potatoes, then somebody else still mentioned purple potatoes, which kicked off a whole conversation about purple potatoes.

When time was up and questions had run out, Wil announced how cool this had been and we all agreed. The people who were filming handed out business cards so we could ask for copies.

Remembering something he’d said a few minutes ago, I scribbled down onto a blank sheet of paper:

I slid it across the table while he wasn’t looking.

While people started to leave, I got up to see if Wil had a backpack or anything with him so I could finally give him a copy of the book. He didn’t have anything but his sandwich.

“Are there any more copies of your book left, Willow?” I said as I headed for the door.
“Uh, there are five left,” he said. “Do you want me to hold onto one for you?”
“Yes, please,” I replied. “I’ll trade you something for it. Besides the money.”

He had a blank look on his face for a second, then noticed the slip of paper sitting next to his sandwich. He picked it up, read it, and laughed (for once) out loud. “This is great,” he said, eyeballing the rest of the people still in the room. “Who wrote this?”

I smiled, waved, and left the room.

I did some more looking around at the show, double-checked the theater schedule to make sure I wasn’t going to miss anything important. Earlier in the day I’d watched a pretty funny game of Family Feud on stage with gamer-themed categories. “Name something you can do with a girl,” was a pretty humorous round.

Before long Wil was back at his table, at the end of a still-very-long line. He was signing somebody’s carboard tube (it’s a Penny Arcade thing) which already had a few autographs on it. There were three copies of the book stacked on the table, and one sitting on Wil’s backpack. He noticed me there, pointed at the book on his bag, and said it was mine.

I noticed that he was signing everything in red fine-point marker. He’d had a bunch of black Sharpies before.

“Did you run out of black?” I asked, digging through my messenger bag for the one I’d brought.
After he realized what I meant, he said that he had. Sharpies run out quick during autograph sessions.
“Do you want mine?” I asked, holding out the brand new retractable black thick Sharpie I’d used for four autographs.
He took it, thanking me. I was four steps away before I doubled back and asked him if he knew where Andrew was.

He was right where Wil said he’d be, in one of the rooms reserved for table-top gameplay. I got out one of my business cards, wrote my primary contact info on the back of it, and tucked it inside the spare copy of my book, then walked into the room with the intention of handing it to him and leaving.

He was with three other people, playing some kind of tabletop card game. As soon as he saw me, he said, “…someone like him!” and one of the people playing got up and left, and I was directed to take his place.
“I… don’t know how,” I said.
“That’s fine, we’ll teach you,” Andrew said.

And they tried to teach me. The game was called Munchkins Impossible, apparently part of a “Munchkins” series from Steve Jackson games. The person whose game I’d taken over was apparently not doing very well.

With my hand held the entire time, I started to get the hang of it. Draw a card, show everybody, decide to play it or add it to your hand, something about monsters. The goal was to get to level 10 and I started at level 5. “It’d be hilarious if he won,” they kept saying. I did win. I beat a game I barely understood.

That news was less well received when I said it was the first card game I’d ever played.

One of the three guys left, and Andrew pulled out another game that he described as “UNO on crack.” It was like UNO, except it inexplicably had ghosts, bats, spiders, and others along that motif of scaring your parents for no reason. I didn’t win that one, but I was close.

It was nearing 4PM, when the expo’s biggest event was supposed to begin. As I got up to left, I handed Andrew (Wil’s editor, remember) the extra copy of my book and said, “I had an extra afterall.”
He took it, admired the cover art, and flipped through the pages.
“Cool,” he said. When he saw the business card, he said, “Do you need this back?”
“Nope,” I said. “I am literally made of books now.”
“I’ll look through it and let you know what I think,” he said.

When I left, I thanked him for teaching me the games.

That book had been meant for Greg Rucka, who would probably have put it on a shelf and forgotten about it, or dumped it in a box, or thrown it away. Giving it to Andrew, a book editor, was probably a much more productive thing to do.

Throughout the whole show there was a gigantic tournament called Omegathon, where contestants played separate tournaments of Pac-Man, Jenga, and a car racing game until only two players were left. The final event of the show would be both contestants duking it out in the final game, which was always a surprise title. The winner would receive a trip to Japan for the Tokyo Games Show and $5,000 cash. As everybody packed into the theater, the two remaining players were brought on stage and the final game was announced: Halo 3 (not yet released).

Standing about 10 feet from a 50 foot screen, I watched both players play a game that I will forever claim to hate even though I’ve never played. I thought I’d be bored, but it was actually pretty exciting watching a deathmatch between two players who later said they hadn’t played much Halo before. I think that’s what made it interesting, as if they’d both been Halo addicts it would probably have lasted 4 seconds. Four, explosive, jumpy seconds.

After that, there was a winner, and PAX was pretty much over.

I left the theater a few minutes early to avoid being part of the mob, and I waited by Wil’s empty table along with Andrew. When Wil materialized from within the mob of people exiting, he said (to Andrew), “I think I’m done here,” and started packing up the stuff he’d brought.

The duffle bag that was once full of books for sale was now stuffed with t-shirts and other wares. “I have your book,” he told me once he’d seen me. He pulled the last remaining copy of his book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives from his backpack and signed it with blue highlighter (my Sharpie had run dry). I handed him the $25 I’d been carrying especially for that since Saturday, without him asking. I then pulled the copy of my book from my bag and handed it to him.

He recognized the cover from an email I’d sent him, and already knew what it was.

“Thanks,” he said, looking it over for just a moment. “That’s really cool, thank you.”

I tried reading his face, but couldn’t tell if he was humoring me or not. I was tired still, sore still, and a little flabbergasted about having finally gotten rid of the book.

“You can put it on a bookshelf and forget about it,” I said. When I’m nervous I get self-defacing, apparently.
I can’t remember what he said. It was some variation of, “That’s really cool.” Possibly, “that means a lot.” My brain had switched off already.

“I gave a copy to Andrew,” I said as Wil bent down to stuff the book in his bag somewhere.
“Awesome,” he said. “He’s a really good editor.”

Everything packed up, and finished talking to the few people who had crowded around, he looked to me and said goodbye to me.

I nodded and mumbled something stupid in the vein of “see you later”. I was amazed at myself, at how I’d been pretty straight-minded with Wil this whole weekend, but on two instances I’d been completely tongue-tied. Once, when he’d said, “It’s really cool to meet you” on Friday and seemed to mean it, then just before now when he’d taken the copy of my book and, meaning it or not, seemed grateful.

It was around 6PM by now, and I left PAX 2007 for good. I walked to my hotel and fetched my luggage from the hotel and waited around for a Grayline airport shuttle that looped around all the hotels every 15 minutes. I found out that I was waiting on the wrong corner and, pretty annoyed, just walked to the nearest Starbucks (hey, who would have thought that there’d be roughly 1 million Starbucks in Seattle) and got ou my laptop and waited out the 2 free hours I had there.

I uploaded the pictures of Wil’s line that I’d told him I’d send him on Friday, and I sent him an email with the thanks and goodbye I saw too overwhelmed to say in person. I caught the airport shuttle, got to the airport, and to my gate, and walked right on the plane without waiting. The timing could have not have been better, and if I’d waited for the next shuttle I probably would have missed the flight, underestimating how long it really takes to get from the hotel to the airport.

Tucked into my cushy first class seat, I tried to sleep but failed. I took my free drinks, and started reading through Wil’s new book. The autograph was made out:

“Aaron –

FTW!

Wil Wheaton
PAX07”

The “FTW” (“For Teh Win”; a gaming thing. Yes, “teh.” Not “the.”), I found out, was how he was signing every book at the show. Not only would I need book-specific inscriptions, I’d also need venue-specific ones. Being an author is hard. The stories from the book were some that I’d already seen on his blog and some that I hadn’t. One time I woke the guy next to me with my laughter, which thanks to the late hour and free drinks in first class, wasn’t something I could stifle.

I closed the book and spent a while thinking. I’d come to PAX with the sole intention of meeting Greg Rucka and Wil Wheaton, and giving each of them a copy of the book they (more or less) inspired. The gaming show was peripheral to that. At the beginning, I was just wasting time waiting for Greg or Wil, but by the end I was having fun with the show itself. I played my first tabletop games and didn’t totally hate it. I watched some guys play Halo 3 and actually cheered as the guy I’d decided to side with scored each kill. I’d shared with some other journalists I’ll probably never see again one of the coolest conversations of my life. If only I’d brought a friend with me, and hadn’t already seen the future-release games, and couldn’t recognize corporate hype and manipulation, I might have enjoyed the thing even more.

Plus I’d done what I’d intended to. I met Greg Rucka, talked with him for a while about his books, and got his autograph inside one of my favorite novels. I met Wil Wheaton, too, and for a while even diluted myself into thinking that I knew him and he knew me. Perhaps I wasn’t much more than a fanboy after all (though for the writer, not the actor), but that I could pretend otherwise for a few minutes each day was worth the trip.

Usually flying first class meant you’d get a meal while everybody back in steerage could buy a snack pack for $5, but it was too late for dinner. In stead, the flight attendant brought around a tray full of chips, cookies, fruit, and other snacks. It was too dark to read any of the labels, so I asked where the pretzels were and took a few of the bags she pointed out, then grabbed a random bag that was big enough that it had to contain something good.

After I powered through the pretzels, I looked at the rest of my bounty under the incandescent glare of the overhead reading light to find out what else I’d grabbed.

They were potato chips. Barbecue style.

I hate barbecue style!