That Summer Camp Feeling
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #182. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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The Burnt Offering is where Stu Horvath thinks too much in public so he can live a quieter life in private.
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This story originally appeared on vintagerpg.com.
I spent a day and a half at PAX Unplugged, got home and pretty much immediately want to talk about the experience. Even allowing for the diminishing effect of the horrible odyssey of my 18-hour bus journey home from GenCon…I did not feel the same way about that show. I enjoyed my time at the MIT Press booth and meeting everyone who came to the signing and hanging with Wizard Van Wayne, but the stuff that lingers in my mind about the first weekend in August are things that happened outside the show. Going to the Eiteljorg Museum with my pal Clay, Uber-ing out to the ‘burbs to watch Longlegs in a deserted theater, the sunset in the back lot of the theater (where the Uber app wanted me to meet my ride back, for some sketchy reason), the many bar and restaurant conversations I had with my MIT editor Noah and my Unwinnable partner Sara.
Of all those things, the only one that really required me to be in Indianapolis for GenCon was the museum trip. The convention itself largely washed over me, a blur of faces, endless corridors and aching feet. It’s too big. And everyone there is too in the groove of their established convention agendas. I met cool people, but only briefly, and it took an effort to track down every one of them (except Wayne, who was always easy to find and, like some sort of TTRPG psychopomp, was able to lead Sara and I through barriers we would have been otherwise unable to pierce).
I initially thought that my problems with the show were likely the fault of my approach to it, which was basically to dive in without any prep. I could remedy that. But I approached GenCon in much the same way I used to approach videogame expos like GDC and E3. I’ve always wanted to see where these events could take me, assuming that if I went in with no real agenda, then the natural currents of the thing would eventually bear me to its secret heart. That didn’t work at GenCon at all; my two-word summation of the experience is probably: “mildly alienating.” Or maybe that is the secret heart of GenCon.
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PAX Unplugged is a smaller show. Almost cozy – perhaps because it’s situated between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I got light “holiday market” vibes. For the most part, there was room to walk and that also meant it was possible to browse the booths while walking past them (an entirely impossible feat at GenCon). More importantly, there was space to stand and talk. I had so many conversations! Sometimes, we would walk while we were talking, and the conversation was normal and I didn’t have to shout over my shoulder at all.
A great example of this is Rick Meints, president of Chaosium. At GenCon, I introduced myself, we shook hands and then the press of customers made further conversation impossible (which, no shade, folks attend these shows in large part to buy and sell!). At PAX, we stood, him behind the table and me in the aisle, and chatted for quite a stretch about all sorts of stuff; I’m still chuckling at the fact that his kids who do RPGs both primarily play D&D. Now, granted, I saw Rick at GenCon on the first day, not long after the doors opened, and sauntered over at PAX halfway through the second day of the show. But still.
This pattern repeated at several other booths: the lovely folks at Choose Your Own Adventure, Jess Carrier at Thunderworks Games, Benji Corless at Osprey Games (worth noting that Jess and Benji were on the long list of people who were at GenCon that I just…never found). All of these chats weren’t just pleasant ways to pass the time; I walked away from each with new things to think about regarding the workings of our shared industry.
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The highlight of the show, by a stretch, was the Exalted Funeral booth.
Now, whenever Exalted Funeral comes up, I’m supposed to explain that, yea, they sponsor an essay series at Unwinnable with American dollars, they’ve wholesaled Unwinnable publications and published one of my own zines. I understand the need to disclose that sort of relationship! But I also feel the need to disclose the fact that I’ve been hyped on Exalted Funeral, their products and their place within the industry, for years before we worked together; it’s the reason I wanted to work with them.
I’ve known Matt Funeral the longest, probably. David Hoskins and Beckett Warren I know from before their time at the Funeral. Cristin Funeral and Tiger Wizard are more recent. All these folks have two things in common. First, I haven’t a clue what any of them actually do, in terms of titles and duties. I have some guesses, but really, through their collective, mysterious efforts, they (and some other folks who weren’t at the show) somehow make Exalted Funeral go. Second, I have never met any of them in person. So, before PAX U, they existing in some half-real state; like a character in a Philip K. Dick novel, I could never be absolutely sure they existed outside my own (possibly delusional) perception. Meeting them in person after thinking thoughts like that was…strange. But really joyful too. It’s a relief to find out I wasn’t constructing a parallel reality after all.
I’m only partly kidding. It’s extremely disorienting to put a face and a voice to people who previously, for the most part, existed only as a 2D avatar and some text. I’m not new to the experience, though – the old videogame shows were populated by an ocean of people I’d only ever talked to via email, chat apps or Twitter. Having such a concentration of these people, all united by a similar set of common interests, all in one place, created what I refer to as “that Summer Camp feeling.” Someone else came up with that term at a long ago GDC (I honestly forget who) and my embrace of it is somewhat ironic considering I never went to summer camp as a kid; maybe that anemoia makes the invocation even more apt.
Anyway, that Summer Camp feeling was palpable at PAX, and sharpened as I left. Why can’t we all hang out every day and talk about games and draw skulls and play games?
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Daisy, my wife, came along. After the disaster of my trip home from GenCon, we had talked about the possibility of driving out to Indianapolis as a family. We just got a new car, the kid would, in theory, enjoy it. The trip to PAX Unplugged was sort of dry run, sans kid, to see how we’d approach something like GenCon.
While Daisy got a media pass to be my personal photographer (all the photos accompanying this essay are hers), the practical plan going in was for her to hit the show only as much as she wanted. If she hated the crowds or got bored, she could to go to a museum or meet up with some local friends. She wound up staying on the show floor the entire time, though, chatting, checking out games, buying stuff and, I think, gaining a better understanding of the industry and my interest in it. She met Tim Fowers, for instance,the designer of Burgle Bros (one of our staple board games) and wound up buying one of his new games, Typewriter. At home, she lamented that it seemed more complex than she hoped from the demo, but had no regrets, pleased that she supported Fowers and that the game is just as portable as the portable typewriter that inspired it.
The most interesting thing, I think, happened late on Sunday, when we wandered over to the section of the show floor labeled “Miniatures.” We both naively thought it was where the folks selling miniatures were located, but it turned out to be where the tables for miniature skirmish games were set up. Daisy was immediately taken with the many set-ups for Star Wars Shatterpoint which, admittedly, were pretty impressive with their fallen AT-ATs and streams of familiar troops. They appealed to her in a way similar to how doll houses did when she was a kid (similarly, they tug at my own childhood memories of HO-scale train tableau). We chatted about wargaming in general, then Warhammer in particular. There was a Warhammer sales booth, but no Warhammer being played (turns out it was in its own area in the meeting halls) and she was disappointed to not see it in action. Jeremiah, our son, currently spends his playtime building elaborate environments then populating them with small unit counters he makes out of Plus-Plus blocks, an example of spontaneous wargame generation. Graduating to a hobby like Shatterpoint seems like a predestination, and he was intrigued by the table photos I took. But his reaction to the merest mention of Warhammer 40K, and the litany of questions that followed, was both amusing and alarming. I told him I wouldn’t answers any of his lore questions until he reads enough on his own to have a favorite traitor legion (I might disown him if he doesn’t pick the Thousand Sons). Daisy spent some time with the Rogue Trader manual that night, admiring the art, seeing the potential of it all.
Have I inadvertently introduced a plague into my home? I think Daisy is pretty inoculated against playing a game that A. involves rulers and B. requires the player to paint all the pieces first. Only time with tell with Jer, though. What I do know is that the family GenCon trip is probably off indefinitely. And maybe my solo GenCon 2025 trip. Jer’s probably got another year or two before he can really enjoy a show like this, but Daisy and I will both be at the PAX Unplugged summer camp in December of 2025, hanging out, drawing skulls and talking about games.
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Stu Horvath is the publisher of Unwinnable. He reads a lot. Follow him on Bluesky @stuhorvath.com.