2008 being my first Penny Arcade Expo, I made the trip up to Seattle not really knowing what to expect.

I had just spent the past year conversing (or often, arguing) with media experts much older than me about where new media and fan culture were going; I had written about the Omegathon in my graduating thesis, going off Kotaku reports and Youtube videos. In my mind, attending PAX was a way to confirm or deny not just my own theories on the state of game culture, but the impressions held by a large contingent of academia as well.

My con-going experience has admittedly been a little more limited than some: I've attended San Diego Comic Con twice, as a child and once as a teen; I've attended Anime Expo once, just after my freshman year of college; and I've worked as staff for a local convention from the age of 13 to 19, even working in chair and co-chair positions. Mind you, the local convention was tiny, so great insight into the inner workings of the con experience it most certainly was not.

Nevertheless, my conception for PAX flying into Seattle was that it would be large --maybe not Comic Con large-- and it would be annoying and uncomfortable, and the staff would suck, and the scheduling would fall apart, and I'd leave wondering why I ever became UCLA Film's insider-outsider ambassador for this subculture.

Well, as everyone who attended is aware, the staff at PAX certainly did not suck-- they were some of the hardest-working and considerate con staff I'd ever had the pleasure to encounter. But what really intrigued me --and I'm not sure if the kudos go to Robert Khoo, Dimitri, or Tycho and Gabe themselves-- was that these organisers understood how to get content to match context.

Let me tell you: from what I saw, Anime Expo didn't have pipe-cleaner art contests, balloon volleyball and haiku challenges to make their long, long lines more bearable. Comic Con didn't ever seem to have plush lounges to plop yourself down and start trading Pokemon with someone. And a con like the one I used to work for definitely didn't have something as brilliant as a Distributed Tournament System where the entire convention centre became one huge, open gaming competition.

And yes, there were definitely not enough Nintendo DSes at those events to create a landscape like this one:

What I'm getting at is that AX and SDCC don't really infer this kind of design, but PAX does. At its core, Penny Arcade Expo is not a video gaming or even all-medium gaming convention-- it's a meta-game, an entire collected atmosphere of ludic optimism and sense of discovery.

"Ludic" might trip your spellchecker, but it's a word in use by some ludologists (see the cognate there?) to describe not just a behaviour or demeanour, but ultimately a sort of raison d'etre. Strictly speaking, we might translate it as "playful", or even "gameful" if such a word existed in our language: a predisposition for and love of gaming as gaming.

And here's where my pretentious film student side comes out. If you ask me, PAX is the ludic philosophy made manifest. We saw it from every angle, from the Distributed Tournament System to the balloon volleyball in the queue room to the convention maps scattered around the hallways, amusingly labeled "WORLD MAP".

While I was waiting for the con to open on Friday, I found myself exploring the convention centre obsessively, like I was trawling for a map completion trophy. I would occasionally ask an Enforcer ("talk to everyone", remember?) what was down a particular hallway and if it was open, and when they expressed uncertainty, I joked to them, "Well, I'll just keep walking till the invisible wall stops me."

Just as intended, the convention centre became a game space, and everyone within it was a player. This would not have been half so convincing if most of the attendees weren't savvy enough to play along. If those around us in the lines hadn't wanted to keep that balloon in the air, if so many of us hadn't made a mad dash to recite our haikus about Dimitri in a utilikilt, if half of us weren't on the look-out for someone to trade pins with in The World Ends with You? PAX as we know it would have shattered.

Every now and then, those parts of academia tentatively interested in the frightening beast they call "new media" (basically, everything after cable television) throws the "virtual reality" softball around: when will we see it, how will it handle, will it lead to the breakdown of all morality like in The Thirteenth Hour?

One of the more convincing treatments I've seen for the future of gaming and fandom is found in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End, where computer-assisted perception of reality has advanced to such an extent that an individual can see the world just as his fannish tastes dictate. Like Discworld? You can access the library's graphical overlays so that you suddenly find yourself in the magical library of Unseen University. Like Pokemon? Map some polygons over some construction equipment for your very own Dialga.

What is particularly interesting about Vinge's treatment of fan perception is that with more people contributing to a particular world view, the stronger and more convincing that perception becomes. Call it a computer-assisted mass hallucination.

Putting things in fannish terms is a concrete answer, but the "virtual reality" at PAX was a bit more abstract: not Final Fantasy, but the more nebulous "RPG"; not Pokemon, but rather the general imperative, "gotta catch 'em all". Draw out 58,000 attendees with strong senses of imagination, curiosity, and, yes, quite a few obsessive-compulsive disorders thrown into the mix, and what you get are a bunch of people fascinated with exploration, discovery, collection, competition, and the pure, ludic pleasure of play.

Suffice to say, I left Seattle with my faith in gaming culture remarkably intact, even revitalised. I wouldn't say anything so naive as that any collection of gamers can leave this kind of positive impression, but the fact that it's possible should encourage gamers and theorists alike.

Gaming is more than a hobby-- it's a state of mind, and in the right circumstances a healthy and amazingly productive one. More than being a fun, laid-back convention, PAX proved that egoism and community can coexist by striking the perfect liminal half-digital, half-real environment, by understanding and catering to the tastes of its attendees, and by sincerely caring about fun.