Culture Shocking a Cultureless mind

I almost missed it when I first drove past the place. There was nothing about it that made it stand out as anything. It was simply a bare concrete building tucked away next to a train underpass. For all intents and purposes the place look like an inner city warehouse. It had all the natural stereotypical doodles to lend itself well into that façade, the run down industrial dumpster bin, the rusted rail underpass, an open derelict parking lot, and most importantly, a door with no handle. When my friend first took me there I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, this place looked a little too hardcore for me, sure I played computer games and I currently own 73 computer games excluding console games and old previous games that my computer cant run anymore. Of the 73 games about 48 of them I bought in the last 3 years. So at roughly $99 per game, I’ve got about $7,227 worth of computer games sitting either on my desk or shelf. So computer gamer I maybe, but I don’t think I was hardcore enough to go to a place like this. We parked under the under pass and in true cliché form I got out from my friends run down Datsun, flipped up the collar of my coat, donned on my fingerless gloves and prepared myself for the experience. We walked up the sidewalk and crossed the street in slow motion Reservoir Dogs style. He pushed the door open and my world became black. When my eyes adjusted to the disappearing light of the outside world I looked around. The place was bare with open tie supports running along the ceiling with specifically located blue lights to illuminate locations like the toilet, lounge and pool tables. In the darkness I made out the shimmer of banks and banks of computers and the bale eyes of their precision optics and an interesting musk, which I guess, was an infusion of pizza, sweat, coke, and other things. Taking all this in the few seconds I had before I followed my friend to a counter. There was an Indian guy behind the counter who looked out of place being clean cut and neat. The sort of person you’d imagine at a country club kicking back after a game of tennis with his friends sipping his gin and tonic fondling the mindless heiress his going to marry because their parents made an economically drive decision 10 years ago now solidified in contract form. Behind him, the Indian guy or “Curry”, which I found out was actually his avatar not a derogative name which I first thought it was, was what looked to me a never ending supply of sugar. He and my friend talked for a while in a language I could just understand never calling each other by their real names, and never actually wanting to, it seemed that only avatars were acceptable here. As they talked I looked around the room again and notice stuff I’d missed such as the pool table at the end and the couches in front of me, and that the whole place was blue. Though they had little lighting, the common motif was blue, the sort of blue you’d find on strobe lights or customized cars, even the computers had blue lights installed inside them that pulsated out this artificial heartbeat through the Perspex side panels. After a while I got registered on their sever and got an avatar which enabled me to log on and use their machines. Moving off into the sea of computers my friend and I sat down in a quiet little corner. It was nice; my experience of places like this wasn’t the best. Places I’d gone before could only be described as dilapidated at best. Seats where broken and ripped, computers in a state unfit even for something that doesn’t live, a corner of cannibalized pc’s scrapped to boost the power of the already depleted resources of the place and generally a fog of scum clung to everything. This place was nice in comparison. It was clean, looked efficient; we had comfortable chairs, computers that looked like they could power NASA and an air of serenity often heretical to be associated with a Lan center. I stayed there for a while, that being about 7 and half hours, and it was pretty quiet for the most of it until about 9 at night. The place started to get crowded and the noise level which was none existent before hand except for the light conversation a few people were having had risen to a cacophony of laughter and abuse. People started to come in and each one greeted by Curry, and like with my friend, always an avatar, never their real names. What was surprising was the demographic of people present. The assumption is that predominantly Asian customers and children populate these places. The running joke between my friends and I is that computer games are as much of a national sport for Asians as cricket is for the commonwealth countries. And from my experiences of other Lan places this assumption seemed to hold its own ground. But it was different this time. There were children there, but very few, and those that were there were around the ages of 15 or 16, the rest were people my age or older, that being 18 to about 25. But the most important thing though not disturbing was that they were mostly white, the disturbing aspect was that this place was clean, I can’t stress how unnerving it is to have a place that did what it did that was clean. Could it be that I stumbled across a secret gaming center for white Anglo Australians where they could hide and play computer games way from the shameful gaze of their football man groping brethren or the Australian branch of Internet savvy KKK members?As I sat in my little corner with my friend who was happily headshotting anyone who he could find with his M60 in Battlefield Vietnam, I sat and just watched people come and go and having spent a life watching people coming and going due to my constant traveling in my youth, I began to get use to the whole situation. Not that I’m racially intolerant, but it’s like seeing a group of people suffering from dwarfism trying to play basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters. Such was the irony and the absurdity of the situation that I was more or less under some form of paralysis until I became numbed to my new surroundings. Later on that night as I left the place with my friend at 3 am when apparently the place was just starting to come alive my friend told me that it was clean because it’d just recently opened about 3 months ago. Now that was January 2004, its now September, and I can safely say that place hasn’t changed at all, it still has that peculiarity above all peculiarities. But that’s just a place, it really doesn’t serve any other purpose than a physical vessel to transport the people there to another reality, the virtual reality populated by nerds and geeks of all sorts because lets face it, if you spend so much time in front of the computer like me and have become at least faintly aware of not just “internet” culture but of individual game culture and further into that community clan culture, you’re a nerd or a geek, sure you may play the occasional football or get off your arse to walk to the fridge and that constitutes your daily exercise, the point is you only occasionally play football and if walking to the fridge and back is that taxing you really must come to terms with the sole fact that you’re a geek or a nerd or just really really really really really unfit. But it doesn’t just stop there, even within this minority group of nerds and geeks there’re smaller groups who often don’t like being associated with other groups. I met this one guy at Minitour, a connoisseur of comic book collectables who was adamantly against me saying that he and that Treky in the black trench coat in the corner were the same. No he would tell me, I’m not like them, to which I would reply, but sure you are, you shop at the same places, you dress a like, watch the same tv shows and really you could both hold long and intense conversations with one another about your respective interests. No Charles you don’t understand, I collect comic books and the like, I’m not a Treky, they’re different, they’re intense. Intense I thought? This coming from the man who once beat up a little kid to get the first issue of Venom published by Marvel comics back in the heydays of the 90’s when comic books were celebrating their silicon breast and macho men phase. Interesting, truly if he could see a difference and I could not, there must be something more, perhaps in the nuances between the two, where one would whisk out his wallet Captain Piccard style to pay for his complete DVD box set of Star Trek while the other would web-slinger style his wallet out to pay for that oh so hard to find limited edition Spider-Man #253 where Spider-Man and Mary Jane get it on in a tree house only to have the Green Goblin pumpkin bomb it to smithereens. How is it that I was so blind to this stark difference? I, too an avid lover of the comic genre, did I miss something during my life that made me retardedly unable to discern this sort of thing? Or I’m just not hard-core enough to understand? One thing I am certain about is that these people didn’t have it easy through high school.