The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [4]
MARK LAURENT (BLUE), HAWAII | THE GAMER
Mark, better known among students as Blue, was hanging out with his usual friends at the arcade, their typical after-school activity. Well, “hanging out with” wasn’t exactly accurate. While the rest of the guys huddled around Street Fighter, Tekken, and Battle Gear (for which Blue held the machine record), Blue was absorbed in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. The others made fun of Blue for playing Tatsunoko, calling it a “button masher” because it involved only four buttons and a joystick. Blue was one of the few people he knew who could “see the beauty in the game.” The skill in Tatsunoko was to know when, where, and how to attack your opponent. Choosing combo breaks took precision, rhythm, and imagination. Gaming was an art, really; at least some games were. It just didn’t look that way from the outside.
That was one of the reasons why last year, as a junior, Blue founded Arwing, Kaloke High School’s first gaming club. He wanted to change people’s minds about gaming—and gamers. He wanted to demonstrate that gaming had integrity and valor, that it could be elegant. He had no idea that the results would be disastrous.
At first, Arwing thrived. One hundred seventy people signed up within weeks. Blue, as president, assigned his friends to the remaining officer slots and cajoled them to accompany him to a local senior citizens’ home to play Wii Sports with the residents. Blue made posters to advertise the club. One read, GAMING IS MAINSTREAM. GAMERS ARE MAINSTREAM. IT’S THE PEOPLE WHO ARE SURPRISED BY THIS THAT HAVE SUSPECT SOCIAL LIVES.
Quickly Blue’s friends grew apathetic toward the club, as they were toward most things. They said they would build the Web site and then didn’t. They ruined an event because they didn’t hand out the promotional fliers for fear of looking “stupid.” One day at the mall, Blue was sitting with his friends when he put his head down on the table and fell asleep. When he woke up ten minutes later, they were gone. Thereafter, Blue’s friends started ditching him for fun—at the mall, at school. From their posts on Facebook and Twitter, Blue could see when they went out together, intentionally excluding him. He was closest with Jackson, who attended a neighboring school, but even Jackson was less likely to socialize with Blue unless Ty and Stewart were there, if not Herman and his two followers.
Blue tried not to let this treatment faze him. He had become accustomed to social setbacks in middle school after his closest friend, who had nicknamed him Blue after a Pokémon trainer, moved away. Uninterested in the superficial chatter that dominated classmates’ typical middle school conversations, Blue turned to technology and other solitary pursuits. He discovered outlets such as speedrunning video games: beating a game as quickly as possible, from beginning to end. (He could beat Portal, a game that took decent players at least two hours to win, in twenty minutes.)
Blue also expanded his offbeat interests. He listened to trance and shoegaze music and religiously watched Internet shows, machinima, and anime. He spent hours drawing, mostly Fox from Star Fox, as well as characters from other games. He liked Fox because, “When I see his image, I fill in the gaps: he’s heroic, skilled, caring, and has a lot of close friends that amplify his power as a hero.” Drawing led to photography. Blue loved the camera’s precise machinery and that it could evoke a memory or emotion that meant more than the camera itself. Eventually Flickr featured Blue on the front page. When