All's fair in love and gaming conventions

We do odd things for love. I never expected gaming conventions, or "cons," to be one of them.

A month into dating my now-husband Mike, we met at MIT’s Johnson Athletic Center. It was September 2017, and the occasion was Boston’s Festival of Indie Games, or FIG Fest. I had no clue what a “con” was. I knew less what “gaming” meant. I imagined it did not refer to my mom’s Tetris obsession in the ’90s.

That year, I was mid-divorce, prey to the romantic fantasies peddled by Bumble and Hinge, so I had seen my share of personality-molding. Once, six months prior, I’d rushed to REI to grab waterproof boots for a snowy trek with a mountain bike racer. A budding lawyer once proposed I hop on his upcoming business flight to Utah—for a second date; his treat. I declined.

For our own third date, Mike grudgingly trudged the Skyline trail at Middlesex Fells Reservation. We were both playacting outdoorsy-ness, and our feet ached as we drove home, south along I-93. So when Mike prodded me to get my nose out of a book and my body over to Cambridge for FIG, I acquiesced. This would still be uncharted territory—but at least indoors, and local.

I can’t remember what we did at FIG, but I do recall the aura. Millennials and Gen X-ers hyped on Red Bull and geek pride. Long lines for burritos. Plenty of smiles. It would be several years until I’d be hooked on cons, yet looking back, there were signs.

Mike is a gamer. In high school, he organized LAN sessions with his buddies. (He had to teach me that LAN was not the acronym of a secret cult, but rather when a bunch of nerds got together in one kid’s basement to connect their individual desktop computers on a shared “local area network” to engage in a multiplayer game.)  He jumped onto the first World of Warcraft servers when that massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) launched in 2004, and has been on there since. His OkCupid photo even featured a mid-game setup of Catan. (I was distracted by a different pic: sky-blue eyes and a Mustang convertible.)

Ironically, our next con after FIG, in early 2020, would be the last social encounter we’d have for over a year: Two weeks before coronavirus would lock us all at home, the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center welcomed 50,000-plus attendees for what would be my first of a now annual pilgrimage to PAX East.

By the time Mike dragged me to PAX, I had warmed to the gaming scene. I’d joined his Dungeons and Dragons campaign. (For the record, I can pass for a pew-pew ranger.) I’d learned tabletop board games like Scythe and card games like Munchkin. I absorbed the jargon and the vibes by osmosis. I still preferred my book. But PAX shifted that.

Descending on the escalator into the PAX East Expo Hall was, and continues to be, my favorite moment of the con.

We purchased our 2020 badges for Friday and Saturday—two of the event’s four days—and booked one night at the Sheraton. We flew in Mike’s parents to babysit. I did a snack run at Trader Joe’s.

Descending on the escalator into the PAX East Expo Hall was, and continues to be, my favorite moment of the con. Two stories above the fray, our senses ratchet up all at once. Giant neon screens flash new releases from franchises like Final Fantasy. Thousands of fans swarm around exhibit booths. An ambient acoustic buzz smacks like an invisible wall. The sound will linger in our eardrums long after we leave. By night’s end, walking those emptied, carpeted hallways after closing time, the filtered air will reverberate with the day’s energetic residue. And in just a few hours, everyone will wake up to do it all over again.

Down on the floor, the Expo Hall is divided in two. The front portion is dedicated to computer and console games (on PlayStation, Xbox, etc.), the rear to tabletop (board games, Magic, D&D, Lorcana). In between: vendors selling snarky t-shirts and fantasy-themed teas. We pass through the sensory overload up front and make our way toward the back, where we will spend our days seated at folding tables as developers demo their latest published games and indie creators brandish their in-progress wares. Some sessions will last twenty minutes. Others, hours.

From mid-morning through midnight, I become absorbed in what I can only define as a state of mindfulness. We flow through an unending present. Beneath the convention center’s fluorescent lights, our sense of time dissolves. We have to remind ourselves to eat and drink. We forget about that stressful conversation with our boss or that friend’s annoying text or the dumpster fire of reality. The con is a secreted world unto itself.

Five years on from that first PAX, and 8 years into our relationship, I still have to admit: I’ll never be a full-on gamer. My brain doesn’t thrive on role-playing games (I can barely remember our D&D campaign’s storyline). I’m impatient with legacy games. I struggle to detect engine-building from worker-placement mechanics.

Nevertheless, cons speak to my soul.

With each passing year, cons continue to turn up my volume, on aspects of my personality otherwise muted. That cutthroat competitor whom I quell. The part that chats coolly with strangers. The part that’s willing to learn new things and suck at them. The unapologetically selfish and intense and free-spirited and aggressive parts. They come out to play because there are zero stakes—aside from a bruised ego. At gaming cons, there’s the chance to regain a speck of power, when so much of the world makes us feel powerless.

And so, now, I am even the one to prod for more. In 2022, it would be me, not Mike, who’d hold off on giving away our badges when PAX came two weeks before our wedding and pandemic numbers spiked. It’s me who stalks PAX’s hotel-booking portal and who nabbed five-day badges upon release for this summer’s Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio.

As time goes on, Mike and I will continue to relish FIG and PAX and Origins for different reasons. But I guess that’s the point. Cons have a kind of ineffable magic, one that brings together the white-haired locomotive enthusiast and the spindly 20-something cosplayer under the same roof. Because gaming taps into that unique kid part inside each of us that’s maybe kept too quiet the other 51 weekends.

This year, PAX East came late: Instead of battling the wind whipping through Seaport mid-March, we battled the traffic scuttling to university graduations as we headed to the Convention Center on Mother’s Day weekend. Those additional two months of anticipation created an itch that could only be scratched by four days fueled on Wild Bill’s root beer and chocolate-covered espresso beans. For this, I was happy to stash a bookmark in my novel and jump into the real world.

Well: a real world that plays pretend.

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