This weekend is the annual Penny Arcade Exposition (PAX, to aficionados) in Seattle, a massive gathering of geeks and computer gamers from around the world who come to get a glimpse of new and upcoming games, listen to nerdcore rhymes at after-hours concerts, and generally geek out with others of their kind for four glorious days.
Hotels are sold out all over town, and flights to and from Seatac have been long since booked full. PAX itself, when tickets went on sale in April, sold all full-event passes in 23 minutes flat… with no pre-announcement made.
If you’re not a nerd, you may never have heard of it, but for my people, PAX is a big deal. There have been nine of them since 2004, and I have managed to get tickets and attend every one here in Seattle (PAX “Prime” to distinguish it from the newer, additional shows). Every year I count myself luckier to find myself in that select group that actually gets tickets.
But while my brethren are scrambling to book transportation and find rooms to share with fellow attendees of questionable hygienic disposition, and bemoaning the circumstances that force them to drive over from hotels in Bellevue each day and fight for downtown parking spots, I have solved the PAX problem in another way: I sailed placidly up through the Locks, under a couple of bridges, and dropped my docklines over the cleats at our marina on Lake Union, adjacent to downtown Seattle. I’m a short walk and a streetcar ride away from the heart of PAX… and it’s costing me about seventeen bucks a night.
While I’d like to gloat, the fact is that being a gamer and a boater has presented more obstacles than advantages. Sad as it may seem to most folks, one of the hardest parts for me when it came to moving aboard our boat was losing my cavernous basement office/game cave and the high-powered PC, big-screen monitor, and sound-system that went with it. Although many laptops these days are plenty powerful enough to run games, you just can’t fully appreciate the glory of Crysis on a 15-inch screen with a pair of headphones.
And besides, my tastes had run to heavily over-clocked, aggressively cooled machines that no laptop could replace. Not only wasn’t there room aboard for such a computer, but it would be impossible to power it on our meager 30-amp circuit. What I have room for is a Mac Mini; not exactly a game-crunching monster.
Besides power, Internet is a problem; many new games require constant or near-constant Internet connections, and marina wireless is notoriously slow and intermittent. And, increasingly, the top-flight games are coming out for dedicated gaming consoles like the X-box and Playstation… we don’t even have a TV aboard, much less room for a dedicated entertainment box of that sort.
Changes had to be made.
With a lot less computing power to hand, and that modest engine dampened even further by the necessity of running most games in emulation (although this is changing, most PC games have traditionally been released initially and exclusively for Windows, and can be played on Mac OS only by running a mimicking layer on top of it), I’ve found myself revisiting many older, less graphically-demanding titles: Halo, the Half-Life series, SimCity.
Among newer games, I seek out small independent games which get by less on horsepower than on cleverness; FTL, Gratuitous Space Battles, and Shadowrun Returns, among others. Bellevue’s Valve Corporation’s Steam platform has been a god-send in this regard; not only do they provide an easy venue for finding such games, but they also encourage cross-platform publishing, which means many of the games will run natively (thus faster) on my Mac. And having purchased them once for the Mac, I can download the PC versions for free if I move back ashore at some point and get a full-size PC rig again.
I’ve even found myself playing, god forbid, Solitaire.
Little of this adaptation helped scratch my itch while we were actually out sailing, however; even a Mini requires shore-power for any extended operation. So, I set about configuring my tiny Asus Eee PC netbook to get its game on. It’s the most unlikely of gaming platforms… a tiny screen, microscopic memory, a dramatically under-powered processor, and, as the kiss of gaming death, the un-loved, poorly supported Linux operating system.
But, with a few tweaks, it actually runs a few games. And the tiny footprint means it draws almost no power… I can keep it charged up and going easily with our solar panel, after all our other power needs have already been met.
So it’s not all bad, gaming afloat. For instance, I believe I can quite confidently claim to be the only person in history who has played Dwarf Fortress in the remote Klaskish Basin. And my inability to immerse myself in the latest and greatest of online computer games has led me back to my roots, the good old-fashioned pen and paper role-playing game. This year at PAX, I plan to spend as much time playing Dungeons and Dragons as sampling the cool new hi-res wonders on the show floor.
Although, I do have to admit, one of the things I look forward to the most now at PAX is the huge grid they set up with high-end gaming PCs every year in some secluded cavern of the Washington State Convention Center, each PC networked together and loaded with a selection of popular new PC games. At some point over the weekend, I will wander down there, put on the headphones, sit in front of a 20 inch monitor, and relive the glory days of the gaming cave.