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I spent all of the first part of the year now building up what GDC could mean, I didn’t think about actually doing my job very much: trying to find some kind of story, pull on some thread, excoriate some…thing that was there. Cleave it out and leave it all to bear: an opportunity like GDC gets you high on yourself, that’s the way the show is organized. No one is there to get high on videogames, there’s a profound sense in the eyes of everyone walking passed on the show floor that the future is right in their grasp. Maybe one of these fine young men finds the right woman to talk to, the right sales exec: the future in videogames that they’ve been getting promised is right there.
Under the convention center, the clicking gears of machinery and VR booth’s serve as a distraction. The hustle is alive, the hustle is real, and just stepping foot on sacred ground means now you’re a part of the hustle. There is no one story to be told, not from this angle, there is no one bad-egg you can find in the carton worth exonerating the public with the details of their most lurid and private thoughts. There’s just a man sleeping in a Cayman Isle’s Games booth who doesn’t respond to questions.
There is no One, Single, Solitary Meta corporation. That’s just a plastic logo put up on plywood that stood in the Moscone center in San Francisco for a week of time and the confused, alcoholic, drug addicted freaks that got funneled into meeting rooms and press conferences almost against their will if we didn’t get the sense all of us were here for some of the same twisted pleasures. I want to know why the motion capture skater is exhausted, but I want to know how much they got paid. That’s all of it in simple terms, yeah?
It ends in a halfway trek across San Francisco – a city that’s eight miles long before it splinters and all of those fleshy terms we use to describe cities: arteries, capillaries, vessels….start to turn into a different kind of meaningless anarchy of trees, stoplights and strip malls while the city wraps itself down into San Jose like something expunged from the body that never quite got far enough away.
The Tenderloin district is about 3,000 feet across. Bad Parts, the ones the news are always telling you about, get absolutely choked with police officers after 7 o’ clock on the dime, squad cars pulling out of streets and parking garages that are only there once they get walked passed. Some of the unhoused set belongings and hardware out on blankets on the sidewalk, harming nobody except the wallets of whoever too awkward to pass up on a good deal out of charity. I talked to some of them, I heard stories of searches, stop and frisks, “what are you doing here?” questions that end in “I don’t have anywhere else to go” punctuated by a legal beating.
Of course the great American writers would say something about desperation clinging to the air. Maybe I’m thinking of the great writers of Western pulp novels, living in a more romantic version of the past than I am one that’s cloaked in fear and paranoia of some malicious homeless uprising. I digress: on one side of the street the rich version of shopping malls sell high priced suit-coats and watches and makeup out of buildings with carvings older than I am. A side-street of shop faces with bad stucco remind me of home. Eventually, the street from the Moscone Center turns into late night burger places just affordable enough a person who hasn’t seen a roof in a year can spend a street-paycheck on.
The Tenderloin isn’t quiet at night. I recognize a gunshot when I hear it, but because I’m American and Educated I assume it must be the police. People are moving in and out of buildings, across parks and alleyways. Just two blocks over from where I am, a crowd of blue-dressed rabble rouses associated with some kind of state backed gang beat up a bunch of malnourished delinquents, crazed from the heat and stupor of the inner-island. Some people won’t be going to where they call home tonight. More squad cars pulling in now: what deranged billionaire is funding these people? I see them in every city, a glass eyed look and no between of martial-arts nerd or pot-bellied physique.
But if you want Bacon with your burger, there are other neighborhoods to go to in San Francisco than the ones choking The Tenderloin to death. I’ve got a meeting with a true freak, an out and out mystic who’s probably tailored his coat with all sorts of bad moods that start with various letters of the alphabet and end in strange, pharmaceutical sounding terms. We settle for Alcohol with each other, and make our ways finally out of the Moscone Center and a few blocks down the road. A quiet cocktail at a reasonable 8$ in a country where you’d think all of the hatred of gods gifts like psilocybin and mescaline would mean there was a surplus alcoholics-among-us state budget or foodstamp card to keep us all in a good mood (or dead, or dead on the road, who’s counting)
I’ll play this to my chest: don’t concern yourself with this mystic, he’s there right now, behind you, and I can prove it. We’re only matched by the crazy look in our eyes we both share. A hand-held tour of the BART public transportation system, a carousing of the William Randolph Hearst building and several jokes prompted about it as we walk ourselves down the road.
Videogames subways are always so stark: I wonder who had a bad time at a subway in the 1980’s that we’re still dealing with it now. A personless ATM deals a 2.00 ticket out, a 9-to-5 attendant who owes neither of us their time or a hospitality tour tells us to have a good night as we head down a staircase. Whole shades of the world set up on strangers owing everyone a smile and a nod. It’s the republican ideal: everyone’s happy to see you, so the cities where they aren’t are these tense, inhospitable wastelands. It’s a gentle ride afterwards.
Who’s idea was this again? Well, when you’re on the trail, half-drunk from the Epic Games booth and full of more ideas than you know how to bury under a gutfall of alcohol and hallucinogenics, you start to get a little cagey about the where’s and the whens. “I think the party furthest away from GDC could have more people from the convention itself.” “I can’t make heads or tails of the list.” “It’s at a gay bar, though.” The two of us, together, wielding a shapeless kind of idea against the backdrop of the city.
On the way of the BART we’re joined by a crust-punk woman and a man with a Chaos Magic face tattoo. She’s carrying a book of Alchemic symbols. The Wizard steals pictures of the road dogs on the sly without drawing attention. Under our breath, we talk about how many ways there are to get around San Francisco
I’ve lost the plot. Somewhere on the road, I hear the worst pronunciation of taqueria I’ve ever had to be in earshot of. It’s food and drink, wherever we are. Crisscrossing over Broadway street, making our way to some kind of mixer. Confused straight boys prowl an elbow-room gay bar blaring Ru-Pauls Drag Race. Who cares, the drinks are cheap and the kitchen’s open till 2am. The Wizard and I take stabs at alternating arcade machines. Something about the noise puts me right at home and helps me get out of that high-on-yourself head space. I want to play Metal Slug 3. The genuine arcade machine, spend a few quarters on it. Even here the deep call of nostalgia can GET you.
One of those big, multi-emulator arcade machines sits sandwiched between Street Figther II and Soul Calibur II, the most nostalgic examples of fighting game history for the non-game player there probably is. The Wizard, in a shake up, kicks my ass all over the place.
Soul Calibur II, by the way, still looks and plays like a breeze. Part of the charm, coming back to the cabinet, is that the game looks like an arcade game: it’s just a little too shiny, a little higher resolution than other console games of the time with all of the effort gone towards making our martial arts mannequins look impressive even when combos are dropped and parries happen sporadically.
A cadre of local queers hangs out in a circle, while two of the pass-wearers from GDC shuffle around and have nervous conversation with the both of us. They work for Sony and just got employed in the industry, and do the same balking when I tell them I’m here chasing a story that everyone else does. Whatever they’ve got to say, loose lips sink ships. The conversation immediately turns to The Last Jedi, because of course it does. Almost stereo typically, the long haired, hippie cosmopolitan of the two of them is firmly on my side that the movies a good time. We’ve sparked gas on a road I don’t feel like being trapped on, so I cut myself out of the conversation.
I’m more attendant to Trio The Punch, a relatively unknown game that serves as a kind of parody and celebration of all of the Data East hits. I introduce the Wizard to it, still recovering from how badly I got savaged on the last cabinet. I listen to the conversations around us and finally figure it out: we never really got the chance to get into wherever the real-post shows were happening. A week after where we’re at now, we’ll both see all of the posts on twitter about the drugging and abuse that happens behind some of the more clandestine gamer parties. As above, so below.
There are no big, important faces here, just all of us scurrying around looking for something to connect with.
We’re both getting tired, Time to head off to wherever we’re going to be for the rest of the night, but it’s only 12PM and I have two hours to kill before last call: I see some badges hidden on chests, and the rest of the money kicking around in my wallet goes to sugar-fueled alcohol. I would do anything for cocaine: all of these drinks are fucking blue. A gorgeous drag-queen in a blue and silver dress thanks us all for being here, and at some point I strike up conversation with the only odd-ones-out I can find. They both don’t look the part: GDC badges but purple velvet blazers like pit-men in an old gambling heist film. Everything about them screams “Laughlin, Nevada”.
Both of them, because we’ve met before over the weekend and don’t realize it, are working on a betting-set-up program for videogames. You contact their studio with your game, and they set up all of the betting and pay-outs for you for a take of the profits. No crypto, no NFT’s, just good old honest gambling. I don’t know if it’s for real, but they buy drinks like they’ve already got some kind of mark for their service already. They’re both fine young men: no head on their shoulders yet, just a dream and the money behind it. The two most honest people I meet in the selection of noble souls looking to carve out more of Videogames are fucking Casino Owners, and they answer every question I’ve got for them with the kind of heart that says they’re in this for some kind of love of capital AAA videogames, maybe from a young age.
We talk about the industry and how we all got in it, but it’s lost in a mire of me repeatedly prodding about why gambling. I tell them about Saltybet and show them some clips on my phone, stumbling, drunk, noisy arcade bar. It’s going to go like this until 2AM and everyone goes home, and that’s it, that’s the wrap for the year.
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