A father has much to teach his son in the ways of geekitude, but this was one decision I knew I had to let him make on his own. Still, I was proud. Eli had never been to a convention of any kind before, much less an assembly of 30,000 avid gamers, worshipers at the altar of Blizzard gaming company's unholy trinity: "World of Warcraft," "Starcraft" and "Diablo." But he knew without being told that his choice of T-shirt for such an august occasion was no trifling matter.
We're all familiar with negative stereotypes of the geek -- obsessive behavior, crazed attention to detail, a seeming inability to socialize easily -- but if there was one thing I took away from BlizzCon, it was that an essential thing defining geekdom is the capacity to be enthusiastic. Geeks want to be enthralled, and more than most people, they open themselves wide to that kind of ensorcellment. The bond that Blizzard has with its fans is built from the company's routine delivery on its promise to be ever more epic, to be ever more awesome, ever more enthralling, without sacrificing an iota of its total devotion to quality, to story, and to the art and craft of fantasy and science fiction.
Right around that time, my father even brought home a Magnavox Odyssey, the very first home video game console ever made! It was clumsy and cumbersome and fairly quickly gathered dust. It didn't really hold a candle to Atari's Pong, which arrived a few years later, and it is a complete joke compared to what you can do with an iPod Touch today, but it all fed the same hunger for play and fantastic escape, for a glimpse at the mysterious sci-fi future. More than three decades later, I see how my father, who could play the high culture game with anyone, who was the smartest, most well-read man I ever knew, paved the way for my passage into geekdom. He threw kindling at the fires of my imagination, and that conflagration has never sputtered.
We compared the profiles of Disneyland tourists with BlizzCon attendees and pondered the history and future of geekiness. I wish my father was still around so I could tell him all about it.And I wish he'd been with us for the events of the next day. On Sunday, we drove from Anaheim to Long Beach, to visit my my father's mother in her new nursing home. "What kind of a place is this?" Eli asked as we parked. "It's a place where people go to die," I told him. It was tough. My grandmother has declined tremendously since Eli had seen her last, at her 90th birthday party a year before. She recognized us, she seemed pleased to see us, but she had a hard time carrying on a conversation. "I'm too old for this!" she exclaimed at one point, rolling her eyes to encompass, well, everything.A nursing home is a scary place at the best of times, and Eli, who had never been in one before, got quieter and quieter.We stayed for half an hour and then traveled to the suburban town of Lakewood where my grandmother had lived for more than 50 years, to pack up her personal effects -- photographs, letters, artwork -- for transport back to my home in Berkeley. The house was completely empty of furniture. A "For Sale" sign stood on the lawn. I've been visiting that house since I was 7 years old, and it was, as Eli noted, "creepy" to see it suddenly empty.We die a thousand deaths in a computer game and it doesn't mean anything. But when I held in my hands a box of letters written to my grandmother from her father, who died when she was 12, it was difficult to keep from trembling. When I considered that I would probably never again drive down the street where my grandmother lived, it was hard not to feel a little overcome by it all.
The seductive power of the entertainment machine has never been more powerful, more immersive or more addictive. And that's something to watch, because it is by no means an unadulterated boon. A rather hefty subset of BlizzCon attendees could definitely benefit from an improved diet and some exercise. As I noted not so long ago, after years of gaming, I traded in my own Blizzard-induced obsessions for my bicycle, motivated by a desire to get away from the computer for at least a few hours a day. There were some attendees at BlizzCon who blinked under the bright lights of Anaheim as if they had just emerged from caves in which they had burrowed away for months or years. I recognize a kindred spirit in them, but worry that they have gone a little too far over to the dark side. And somehow, while I still can, I know that even as I feed my son's appetite for geeky thrills in virtual wonderlands, I must balance it with shared experience of the real.
the exquisite delight of the shared experience. This is not particularly profound, I know. It's why we hang out with friends, why it's more fun to go to movies in a group than alone, why a World Series game in a bar full of strangers is more satisfying than when watched by yourself alone on a couch. That's one big reason why multiplayer online gaming is so popular: A solitary activity -- gaming alone in front of a computer at home -- is transformed into a social act. BlizzCon -- which is only in its fifth year of existence -- is a huge success because it feeds that sense of community and sharing.
