Like anything, PAX has bad seeds

The Penny Arcade Expo (or PAX, as it’s known to most) is the largest video-game convention in North America. Started in 2004 by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of the web comic Penny Arcade, the event initially started with a modest 3,300 attendees, but has exploded to dominate the entire Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle, Washington with estimates of 75,000 attendees at PAX09, which took place from September 4–6.

As the largest event of its kind on the continent, PAX has become, in many ways, a home for the North American gaming community. Major game developers showcase upcoming titles to build hype, and the entire weekend — from legendary developer Ron Gilbert’s keynote speech, to the two nights of nerd-oriented musical performances, to the multitude of discussion panels — is designed towards creating a sense of community and belonging amongst gamers.

The bulk of the panels, from actor/writer Wil Wheaton’s ruminations on important moments in his life, to UBC psychiatrist Dr. Tyler Black’s enlightened discussion on children, psychiatry, and video games, did an admirable job of engaging the community, through both laughter and serious debate. However, no community is without its less palatable members, and they were also present at PAX alongside everyone else. Titled “Sex in Videogames: A Comparative Study,” the panel by Nathan Paine and Japanese game importers Pink Gorilla was touted as a legitimate comparison of sexual materials in North American and Japanese video games. However, immediately after the panel began, attendees were presented with a “guess the video game sex scene” competition hosted by “Hard Gay,” a PVC-clad man whose only roles were to, in this order: prance, stick his rear end in people’s faces, and yell.

After numerous technical difficulties, the body of their panel started with a history of sex in North American videogames and comparisons with Japan. Their verdict? Japan’s liberated sexual culture is far preferable to North America’s sexual culture. Japanese “love hotels,” “compensated dating,” (a practice where schoolgirls sell sexual favors to older businessmen) and video games centred around raping virtual women, all featured prominently in the panel’s presentation.

Where Dr. Black carefully dissected statistics to show how to avoid being deceived by “noisemakers,” the panelists from Pink Gorilla eagerly spouted numbers to argue that these “liberated” sexual attitudes could reduce sex crimes, without any concern for causation or alternate possibilities.

To say this thesis shocked me would be an understatement. Gamers periodically attract the stigma of the creepy, sexually frustrated loser, and surely I’ve met a few that I would categorize like this. However, I’d rarely seen anything approaching this disturbing level before. The closest I’d come to hearing things like this, truly, was listening to group therapy sessions of convicted sex offenders years ago as an intern.

Watching the panel proceed, I became increasingly uncomfortable. How would the audience react? I grew worried that Pink Gorilla would be met with warm applause and pleasant comments, that I would finally discover this seedy underbelly of the gaming community I’d been sold by what I thought were misguided news anchors for years. If that happened, I started to think, I wouldn’t be able to really enjoy the rest of my PAX experience.

Somebody stood up. “I don’t mean to come off as rude,” a young man interjected, “but what are your credentials? Who are you to be giving this panel? What’s the point of it?” The panelists declined to give an answer about their credentials. At this point, audience members started leaving, and by the time the formal question period started, only half remained. Almost every question cut into the panelists. One person asked about the lack of any women on the panel. A few more repeated the question of what the point of the panel was trying to make. Nobody was rude. In fact, everybody was exceedingly polite in their questioning — except for the panelists, that is, who with each question seemed more curt and defeated. Along the way, I discovered that their only expertise was that they owned an import games store, and that one of them lived in Japan for an indeterminate amount of time. At the end, many people simply left the room instead of applauding.

This, I began to realize, was where the heart of the gaming community lies. The audience wasn’t comfortable with the idea of compensated dating or rape video games. The wholesale rejection of the panelists’ ideas reinvigorated me, and I left the panel more appreciative than ever of the video-game community and comfortable to be a part of it. Oddly enough, this despicable panel helped me find the connection PAX promises.