In Graves We Trust

As it turns out, I had my information wrong, the Khoi Vinh presentation wasn’t for another few hours—during the potentially rad Should I Build My Start-Up on Rails presentation, as well as a really great-sounding web typography panel discussion featuring Elliott Jay Stocks.  Decisions decisions…

Instead of sitting through that unhelpful and rather irrelevant presentation, I went and checked out the Screen Burn arcade, which was kind of neat.  It was actually neat in ways that I hadn’t anticipated, and not neat in the ways that I had expected it to be.  For the most part, I’d expected it to be a literal arcade, where I could just walk in an entertain myself.  It was kind of like that, but there was this really annoying announcer guy screaming play-by-plays during a 4 player Bionic Commando tournament (it’s a new Xbox 360 game that comes out in May).  He was soooooo unnecessarily loud—it just dominated the entire room.

There was a really cool game art installation featuring the beautiful art work that accompanied games like Fallout 3, Guild Wars, etc.  The sweetest thing about this otherwise kind of lackluster “arcade” (several lcd tvs + several xbox 360s make no an arcade my friends) was the old school video game set ups that they had going on.  No, scratch that, these were more like art installations, so let’s give them their due.  I noticed a dude sitting on an old couch playing Super Smash TV for SNES, and then realized that someone went to great lengths to replicate the traditional living room setting as appropriate for the time that game was released (early 90s).  I walked across the room and saw a similarly detailed installation for the Pacman era—played on a rugged, junky old floor model tv from the 70s.  Super awesome, really impressive concept.