Woo hoo! This here webloggy-thing is now the first link that comes up when you Google “polytropos.” It ain’t much, but it’s something. Next milestone: climbing to the top of the “Bruinooge” pile. The current king of that hill is my uncle Bill.

While we’re on the subject of comic books, here’s Neil Gaiman’s priceless description of Frank Miller and Alan Moore:

I all-too often fail to recognise Alan in pen-portraits done by other people — he’s larger than life already, but sometimes in interviews or articles I read he suddenly turns into someone who looks like the photographs. When Frank Miller realises someone is taking a photo of him, he looks at the photographer like a mad falcon who’s just focused on a tiny dot of a mouse a long way below that is just about to be dinner; and when Alan gets his photo taken he sort of looms grimly, and shadows wreathe around him, and he looks like Santa Claus’s thinner, more murdererous, magical younger brother. Whereas in real life and out of photos, Frank Miller is someone who, in conversation, mostly guffaws with delight, and has the sense of fun and continuous wicked grin of a really dangerous eight-year old who has just realised that the Grown-Ups can’t stop him now; and when I think of Alan, I think of the way he grins, in real life, like Maxwell the Magic Cat, the strip he used to write and draw (as Jill de Rais), and of his enthusiasms, and unfailing politeness and lack of bathroom carpeting.

Gaiman’s going to be giving us lots of love in the near future. 1602 debuts August 13 — it’s a “what if” scenario where the heroes of the Marvel canon come into their own in the year . . . you guessed it. Another month down the pike we get Endless Nights, a new batch of Sandman stories. Good times.

The rumors are true. The Planetary / Batman crossover kicks all kinds of ass. But if you have no idea what that means you’ll have to back up a bit and read some Planetary. (Some of you may need to back up even further and discover why you should be reading comics in the first place.)

Planetary is somewhere in the neighborhood of Hellboy with a little bit more of a superhero vibe, and not as gothic, but still with that Gaimanesque penchant for raiding the reference books and basing each issue on an obscure legend or story or place that gets a new perspective or a new twist.

I used to think that Planetary was cool but didn’t measure up to Hellboy. Now that I’m caught up I give Planetary the slight edge when it comes to story, though ain’t nobody touching Mignola in the art department. But it’s all excellent, and if you still have no idea what I’m talking about, I envy you, because you have a lot of great reading in your future.

Alan Sullivan of Fresh Bilge made some comments on my original Liberia post that deserve a good response:

I disagree with your premises here. The U.S. had every business (including oil business) in Iraq, but it has none in Liberia. Yes, the “nation” of Liberia started as an American resettlement project, but consider its history. The returnees lorded it over the locals for a century, until this artificial order broke. No one would want the Tubmans back. What would you have Americans install in their place? Some local version of Aristede? Haiti has not exactly “healed,” and there’s no reason to expect any positive result of an intervention in Liberia. Taylor will soon be done, then Monrovia will improve from calamitous to tragic.

Alan knows his Liberian history — up until 1980, Americo-Liberians served as a minority ruling class. They built plantation houses modeled after the homes of their erstwhile masters, many of which are still around. Samuel Doe’s coup was a bloody but inevitable response on the part of one of the local tribes (he was Krahn). A lot of the conflict since has been inter-tribal in nature, including the attempted coup in ’85. (Somebody must have already written a definitive book about the way tribalism and ethnic conflict undergird so many regional problems worldwide, and the way that these things inevitably erupt when the oppressive colonial power is no longer there to keep a lid on things. Anyone know what the book is?) With Taylor, we’re back to an Americo-Liberian, though their power base as a social class has been shattered.

Alan is right — no one wants the Tubmans back. And there’s very little chance that having the U.S. hand-pick a leader will turn out well. But I don’t think the case for intervention rests on that. The case is admittedly more short-term: people are dying. Many more will probably die. It’s going to eventually end and things will be a little better, but can the U.S. do something in the meantime to reduce that loss of life, and should it? Stepping in will inevitably burden the U.S. with additional nation-building responsibility, but as far as that goes, I don’t think our involvement will make the outcome any worse than just letting things play out. (Let me to rush to clarify that that’s my opinion in this specific case, not as a general rule.) Three factors tip the scales in favor of intervention for me:

1. The U.S. has a high degree of individual responsibility for Liberia, not just for historical reasons but because of the current extent of political, economic, and social involvement.
2. Though there is no significant self-interest involved here, there is humanitarian interest, and the relatively tiny amount of money and military force that it would take to stabilize the situation makes it worth the effort.
3. The majority of Liberians, especially the innocent, noncombatant citizens in the line of fire, want and even expect U.S. involvement. I don’t have any absolute proof of this, but it’s what the media has been reporting, and unless Liberian public opinion has swayed significantly since I was there, the extent of this desire is being understated, if anything.

Ultimately, then, the positive result I hope that intervention will provide is simply that fewer people will die, not that all Liberia’s problems will be solved. And if someone is going to do intervention, I would much rather see the U.S. do it than Nigeria, the only other power who’s stepping up. I trust Nigeria far less to act with the best interests of Liberians at heart, partly because of that country’s own instability, and partly because of their spotty track record when it comes to West African intervention. U.S. involvement is certainly fraught with problems, but in this case it’s the best of a bunch of bad options.

I have an assortment of observations, notes, and vignettes about Gencon that, with a bit of effort, could probably be turned into a coherent and organized essay. Instead I’m going to toss them in, one after the other, with nary a concern for transitions or the unified whole. Structure Police, come get me if you dare!

All the links in this entry are to pictures I took with my trusty Powershot s45.

The Block Party: your typical outdoor music festival type of scene, complete with fans packed up against the music stage. But behind them, the tables are filled with guys playing CCGs while they listen to the band. Which was, by the way, AC-D-She. Four girls, none talented, playing covers. The organizers didn’t exactly break the bank with that one.

An observation at the bar that night, from friend and loyal reader Greg Bush: “Ah, Gencon. The only place where there’s a line for the boys’ bathroom but not the girls.”

Wish-I-had-played-it-Dept.: Over in the boardgame room, there was a two-day martime wargame campaign setting up, with all the ships built out of Legos. (Here’s another picture.)

The Marriott had a small pool and, more importantly, an adjoining whirlpool that was actually hot enough. Perfect for winding down after a long day. One night I found myself in conversation with a physics teacher named Leroy who was at the Con to compete in the MageKnight National Championships. We commiserated about the trials of Nationals-level competation as the whirlpool slowly filled with a bevy of chatty goths. I wasn’t all that surprised that even their bathing suits were black, though I was impressed that the one girl’s neon hair didn’t stain the water even a bit.

Mildly Disturbing Dept.: The U.S. Army had a recruitment booth in the exhibit hall. They also had a bunch of computers where you could play America’s Army, their freeware first-person shooter.

The House of Cards is a regular fixture at the Con. Anyone can help build it. It’s made entirely out of common cards from defunct collectible card games — a telling statement about the economics of CCGs.

The Costume Contest is something that everyone should see once. Unfortunately they didn’t allow flash photography, and consequently all my shots of it turned out blurry. The costumes range from impressive suits of armor and dazzling and intricately woven medieval dresses, all the way down to the Irish bard who slipped in and out of his accent and the kid who needed a few more muscles to fill out his Daredevil outfit.

There were quite a few Star Wars-inspired costumes, and by and large they were pretty impressive. It speaks to something ironic and a little tragic about that whole universe — it looks really really cool. Even the prequels have an excellent sense of visual design; if you hadn’t seen them yet and were shown a bunch of stills, you’d probably be very impressed. Watching the Jedi and aliens and bounty hunters pace the stage, I found myself wishing that there really was a story behind them all that was worth watching, too.

This costume exemplies the diversity of gaming geekdom. Or the obscurity of it. Or something. It’s a handmade costume that must have taken hours and hours to make, very impressive when you see it up close. I didn’t know what she was supposed to be when I took the picture, but later learned that she was depicting a Force Witch. “Force” as in “The Force Be With You,” though you won’t see one of those in any of the films. Force Witches are described in a minor sourcebook for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. So this lady drew her inspiration from a book about a game about a movie that nobody liked, and still made something that looks really cool. I like that.

And finally, a grab bag of other pictures:
A typical shot of the exhibit hall.
A shot from downtown Indy, whose architecture was quite interesting, actually.
Crazy Igor’s, the best place to buy anything old or out-of-print.
The requisite chainmail bikini. [UPDATE: Picture removed because it was generating insane amounts of search engine traffic that I wasn’t that interested in getting. Safe to assume that anyone to comes here looking for a picture of a chainmail bikini probably isn’t going to stick around for the articles, right?] Also, a dwarf, a Klingon, and the Ghostbusters. Plus some folks out of the Old West, I think. I don’t know why the girl has whiskers, though.
A giant Settlers of Catan board.
Jason only hugged the Hulk because I asked him too. Thanks, Jason!

A definite high point in my Gencon weekend was the time spent playing “My Time with Master,” an indie roleplaying game by Paul Czege. The players take on the roles of the sycophantic minions of an abusive Master — think Igor or Quasimodo. The ultimate goal of the players is to rebel against their Master and destroy him. A minion’s main attributes are Self-Loathing and Weariness. In the course of the game they must routinely attempt to resist the Master’s heinous and possibly horrific orders; they will usually fail. In order to build up the will to thwart their Master, they must build up their third attribute, Love, which they do by making connections to normal people in the outside world. My friend Ed, who found the game for us and ran our session, blogs about it in much greater detail — check it out.

“My Life with Master” is bizarre, twisted, and brilliant; incredibly dark but, in the end, genuinely uplifting. I’m still trying to sort out what made playing it such a singular experience. Part of it was a clean, elegant design, but I think a bigger factor was that the setting and themes provide a surfeit of tragedy, comedy, and pathos with just a bit of effort on the part of the players. I highly recommend it, whenever Paul gets his act together and makes it purchasable online.

Who are these people?

That’s what they were thinking. Gencon mornings, I sat at the back of the Einstein Bros. a block from the convention center, sipping coffee and watching the regulars watching all the conventioneers who were clogging up their line. The suits, the nurses in blue scrubs, the soccer moms, and the guys from Schindler Elevator Corp all gawked with varying degrees of subtlety at the gaming riffraff and asked themselves that question. I’ve been to Gencon five times, now, and I still don’t have a good answer for them.

It’s painfully easy for observers to see all the throngs attending Gencon and lump them into one simple category: gamers. What makes this easy is that two-thirds of the people there don’t vary by more than one detail from the following archetype: male, white, mid 20’s-mid 30’s, slightly overweight, longish hair and/or beard, highly intelligent, devotee of an obscure hobby or activity. Mixed in with all that are the folks in costume, of course, and those are the ones that make the Entertainment page of the Indianapolis Star. But the physical uniformity of so many Genconners still strikes me, year after year.

The other thing that strikes me every year is that this physical uniformity obscures a dizzying diversity. Walk down the wide halls of the convention center. Glance to your right at the group of people sitting on the floor in a circle, chatting. Four guys, maybe a couple girls too, with backpacks and a couple open books. Maybe some cards, maybe some dice. What are they here to do? They could be roleplayers — old-guard RPGA types, d20 fans, World of Darkness aficianados, Forge-reading artsy narrativists. They could be here for the collectible card game scene, playing Magic: The Gathering or Lord of the Rings; they could be Yu-Gi-Oh freaks, or kids playing Pokemon, or still slavishly devoted to some out-ofprint CCG like On the Edge. They could be wargamers or boardgamers or exhibit-hall prowlers or LARPers. The could be dice addicts, Anime junkies, Babylon 5 fans, or signature-hawking eBay auctioneers. They could be obscure Star Wars celebrities, SCA nomads, computer gamers, aspiring game designers, actual game designers, artists, or dealers. Most of them probably dip their toes in a few of these pools. The only thing we can really say about all of them is that they love to play games that most people haven’t even heard of, let alone know how to play.

Intense devotion to an obscure recreational activity gets most gamers pegged as “geeks” in the pejorative sense. This is odd and frustrating to me — it’s not as if our society doesn’t have vast numbers of people already devoting time, effort, conversation, and the bulk of their morning newspaper reading to a recreational activity they don’t even participate in — they’re called sports fans. A guy walks down the street wearing a football jersey or a baseball cap from his favorite team, and it’s perfectly normal. A guy walks down the street wearing a shirt with a picture of a samurai from his favorite collectible card game, and people stare and laugh. (I saw it happen.) Sports bars are ubiquitous. Gamer bars aren’t (but we can always dream).

My sense, though, through a lifetime of gaming and a few years of attending Gencon, is that gamer culture is slowly mainstreaming as well as diversifying. I get a big kick out of seeing people showing up at Gencon with their kids, ushering in a second generation of gamers. Can’t wait ’till I can do that, too.

One guy in line at Einstein’s had a t-shirt with the following words on the back:

You get a victory point whenever the Methuselah who is your prey is ousted (no matter how or by whom your prey was ousted).
— V:TES rulebook, 2003
Section 9.1

As t-shirt quotes go, this one was baffling. To a non-gamer, it’s completely nonsensical. I was enough of a geek to know that V:TES stood for “Vampire: The Eternal Struggle,” a card game about vampires, and that in that game “ousting a Methuselah” was roughly equivalent to “knocking another player out of the game.” But that still didn’t explain why the heck you would put it on a t-shirt. So I asked him.

His answer, much shortened, was “It’s a reminder of the goal of the game.” He and his friends were all wearing the shirt, which they had had custom-made. They were there to compete in a tournament, and in previous tournaments had perceived a style of play they didn’t care for — targeting players other than the one who’s your “prey” because it’s more difficult for them to retaliate. The statement, then, was less a reminder of a rule and more an exhortation of how they felt the game ought to be played. In other words, it was talking about a question of style, which is as sure a sign as any that they saw their game of choice as as much of a social activity as a competitive one. That’s a common theme for gamers — the stakes are not high here, so they participate for more than a sense of the win. They’re drawn to games that have a strong narrative component, even if they’re not RPGs per se. They’re drawn to the communities that form around the games — communities that the Internet has made ridiculously easy to perpetuate.

I’ve been dancing around the fact that it’s far easier at Gencon than elsewhere to find social misfits — folks who are incapable of carrying on a normal conversation with a stranger, or who have yet appreciate society’s basic mores concerning body odor. They’re the minority, and become more so every year, but their existence serves to reinforce a lot of stereotypes for the observer. If the guy in the V:TES t-shirt looks like a geek, is it because he has chosen an odd community to participate in, or was it his social awkwardness that drew him to a fringe community in the first place? You’ll find as many answers to that as you’ll find people at Gencon, I imagine.

What they’ll have in common, besides a deep love of games, is that they’ll be smart, and open, and friendly, with (White Wolf possibly excepted) a refreshing absence of pretension. That’s one thing that keeps me coming back, and that makes coming back feel just a tiny bit like coming home.

Yesterday was a true Gencon day. Two hours walking the exhibit hall, only managing to take in a fraction of it in the process. All afternoon at a CCG tournament. Later that night, in the board game room, untold hours playing a game that would be impossible to afford otherwise until 3:30 a.m. Whatever else, I’m gettin’ my money’s worth. Today: the costume show.

Downtown Indianapolis is a place that’s trying very hard to be slicker and hipper than a city in the middle of, well, Indiana. They are partially succeeding, but this is the logo on their street banners: “Indianapolis: Amazingly Always New.” Is it just me or shouldn’t ‘amazingly’ and ‘always’ be the other way around?

Just a quick note from the sole working Internet station at the Indy Convention Center, which is FREAKIN’ HUGE. The gamers are all here, but somehow they seem less concentrated, because of the size of the place. Fewer Klingons and chainmail bikinis per acre.

A hearty welcome to all of UO’s loyal readers who have come here after reading his generous piece about Polytropos. You’ve arrived just in time for the geeky Gencon reportage — Erudition and Depth will be coming along in a few days. Weeks. Whatever.

And as for actual Gencon observations and musings — a proper entry will follow, tonight or tomorrow morning.

The Polytroposmobile is a 1992 Toyota Corolla. When I stuck my head in it just now, I was hit by a staggering sense of deja vu. It was the smell. Something car-ish about it, to be sure, but also something a little musty, a little old. Not old-car faux-leather smell, but whatever smell the stuff makes that car seats are made out of that isn’t faux leather. It was dignified, somehow, and more than a little comforting.

And I just realized why — it’s the same smell that Smaug had. Smaug was my college car, a white 1979 Chrysler LeBaron with a red interior, a noisy engine, and a whole lotta room. A car of legend. The Corolla (whose name is Peter Quince) doesn’t quite measure up, but now that it has aged into such a hoary, noble odor, I think I’ll like driving it just a little more.

This also means that P.Q. is as old now as Smaug was when I first got him. I can’t quite figure out if that makes me feel old or not.