Labor Day weekend, Atlanta. Dragon Con. For seventeen years I’ve been coming to this thing, immersing myself in the human stink of genre fandom, wandering through hotel after hotel and wondering how it is that so many people rely on various forms of media to find identification, belonging, a sense of social completion, a way to connect with others when hygiene fails and awkwardness prevails. Their heroin is garbage TV, purple prose, leather corsets, rolled-up characters, and any other way of escaping truth, reality, and honesty. When I was a kid, I came to Dragon Con Gothed out in black eyeliner and a spiked dog collar. These days, I wear pressed shirts and designer jeans just so I don’t look like one of them.

But I love Dragon Con, no matter the psychic damage that such a profound survey of human wreckage might incur. There are good people there, and in abundance. But out of 25,000 or more nerds, it’s inevitable that there is going to be some good folks, and I’ve met a lot of decent people there. And this year, William Shatner and Patrick Stewart went as well. So good people do go to Dragon Con- it’s not just furries, “browncoats”, and 35-year old basement dwellers who insist that you call them “Ravenwing”. My friends all go and most of their friends do too. In fact, I go more to reunite with my friends than I do to “geek out” or engage in any of the formal convention activities, all of which start late and almost inevitably disappoint, like the incredibly boring panel I sat in on given by Terry Gilliam. By this point, I could frankly care less about the panels, events, and guests that a hundred dollars buys you access to for the weekend.

I’ve only gone to Dragon Con for free twice. Once was in 2005, when we took almost everything in stock at Atlanta Game Factory down to the Atlanta Hyatt and turned it into over ten grand in profit. The other time was this year, when my credentials as a writer for Gameshark.com and a letter from Editor Bill Abner earned me a press badge. I even got to sign a guest log next to writers from big magazines, all of whom also got to save a hundred bucks and wear a neon yellow ribbon all weekend. But it almost didn’t happen. “We don’t give press badges to video games websites” they told me. I had to produce a copy of last week’s MIDDLE-EARTH QUEST review to prove that I was there for the board gaming.

Gaming is just one small component of the Dragon Con equation. It’s billed as a “celebration of popular media”, but I wasn’t aware that paintings of nude dog men or the musical stylings of any of the sub-cutout bin con-circuit bands that perform each year qualified as “popular media”. Regardless, down in the meat-locker cool of the Atlanta Hilton basement where sometime around 1993 or 1994 I played a LARP in a trash-bag maze, throwing hackey sacks at “goblins” that looked like actual trolls, it’s all gaming all the time. For almost four days straight. Practically every strain of gaming is represented, from the Mr. Suitcase School of CCG Dominance to the wistfully lonely yet hopeful guy who has a full game of STARFLEET BATTLES set up, waiting for someone to sit down. I don’t know if that guy ever found anybody to play with him.

At any given point, you’re likely to find Will Kenyon down there; an Atlanta area gamer and a good friend who does insane things like play TWILIGHT IMPERIUM almost every day, online and face to face. Last year I saw him playing DESCENT at 5 a.m. Monday morning. You’ll find Steve Jackson Games demoing their awful games, usually a new MUNCHKIN variant although this year they also dragged out REVOLUTION to eager crowds. There are numerous tournaments for everything from BATTLETECH to PUERTO RICO, and a vast lending library means that most popular games are within reach for all attendees. Miniatures tables are set up in exquisite detail, and everywhere you look you’ll see gamers cracking open the shrinkwrap on the new games they’ve bought over in one of the dealer’s rooms over at the Marriott. Smelly con-scum hippies sit around, Indian style, playing endless sessions of WEREWOLF. Pizza boxes and sub-sandwich detritus litters the floor and stains the games. Hawaiian shirts and comfy clothes as far as the eye can see with only a few wayward girls to possibly pass judgment on the bad fashion and worse hygiene. It’s a gamer’s fantasia, a bacchanalia of dice, plastic figures, wooden cubes, cards, and everything Fantasy Flight Games has ever published.

But one thing you won’t likely find down there in bowels of the Hilton is me. Believe it or not, gaming is slated almost dead last in my “things to do” list when I hit the convention floor, but it’s still well above “discuss FIREFLY with fellow nerds” and “attend panel about the cultural impact of THE CROW.” I do always make a point to cruise the gaming area and connect with former AGF customers and to get a sense for what’s being played and by whom. I game every week with my friends as it is, so it makes no sense to me to spend four days doing something I do all the time when I could be gawking at failed and fading celebrities such as John Schneider and the Iron Sheik, eating at one of the best pizza places in Atlanta, and wandering around alternately admiring and admonishing costumes in equal measure.

Of course, gaming is one of the key “nerd” activities I’m involved in, so it is inevitable that I wind up leading my friends through a round of REALLY NASTY HORSE RACING GAME (one of our traditions) and this year we actually played a half-assed game of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA although I find that I can barely concentrate on a game when people I haven’t seen all year walk up to say “hi” and catch up, let alone when I’m under the influence of one of those lovely 750ml bottles of Chimay. During the game the most hated man in all of board gaming, Steve Weeks, walked up to say hello and after that the humans lost all of their morale and the Cylons won. My friends and I packed up and our mob wandered elsewhere to find or start some kind of good-natured trouble.

I don’t even buy a lot of games or gaming paraphernalia at Dragon Con. After working in the business, I can barely stand to pay retail price for a game, let alone exaggeratedly “hopeful” convention prices like those that one notorious internet retailer exhibits. They had a copy of Leading Edge’s ALIENS board game, a pretty rare and sought after item, marked at $225. Component-wise, both of them together are worth about fifty cents. The expansion was $160. I laughed out loud. I laughed even harder when I found a copy of the 25th anniversary edition of DIVINE RIGHT underneath a movie poster vendor’s table and bought it for ten dollars, since it was missing the rulebook. The previously mentioned crooked retailer sells it on Ebay for a “buy it now” price of $400.

But there’s plenty of gaming stuff there to blow your money on, if that’s what rolls your d20. Chessex usually comes and brings about five million dice of every conceivable description. One vendor has, I’m convinced, every D&D module ever published. You can buy “funny” t-shirts and bumper stickers with gamer slogans and iconography, in all sizes up to XXXXL. You can even buy a spiked gauntlet, where the spikes are glued-on four-sided dice but the price in human dignity is probably higher than the cost of the item. Some of the vendors also go to Gen Con and Origins and show up with games that you thought weren’t supposed to be out yet, like the small pile of CHAOS MARAUDERS copies I saw. I think FFG has that listed for October.