The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [5]
Initially, Blue spent the money on computer parts and camera lenses. When he was fourteen, he bought a three thousand dollar car: a 1983 alpine white Audi Quattro. He couldn’t believe his find. The car was in excellent condition: no body damage, a pristine engine, low mileage. Nevertheless, Blue decided to take it apart and rebuild it. Since then, he’d been doing so regularly, starting over about every six months, dismantling the car and replacing every miniscule part, exchanging rubber bits for urethane pieces, making it better in every way he could. He hardly ever drove it, however. (Even now, he didn’t have a driver’s license.)
The more Blue engaged in non-mainstream activities, the less he had in common with his classmates. He drifted among groups—jocks, skaters, punks—becoming friends with one person in a crowd and then assimilating into the rest of the group for a while. But he couldn’t seem to achieve a level of total comfort with anyone. As a result, he spent a lot of time at home on the Internet becoming, in his words, “a geek/otaku.”
During his sophomore year, Blue met his current group of friends at a video game store where they gathered most days after school. At the time, Blue assumed the others were gamers like him; he didn’t discover until much later that they weren’t serious about gaming. He knew now that those friends were not the friends he was looking for—people who would understand Blue’s inner elegance the same way he could see the beauty behind Tatsunoko. He was sure, however, that senior year was too late to establish a new social circle.
For months, Blue worked hard to organize a fundraising LAN (Local Area Network) party that would be Arwing’s signature event. Inspired by a video of DreamHack, “the world’s largest computer festival,” Blue envisioned a party with rows of hundreds of PCs, neon lights, strobes, live dance music, and people of all ages and types playing individually, gaming together.
Blue labored tirelessly for months, lining up sponsors, locating equipment, and advertising and promoting the event. He gave a presentation to the PTA. He renamed his professional gaming tournament team after the club and won several competitions, racking up publicity and money. He worked hard to get the word out about the party. At least five hundred people were scheduled to attend.
In the spring of Blue’s junior year, a Kaloke staffperson heard about Arwing. Concerned because she believed video games were a bad influence, she Googled Blue’s name and found his personal blogs, game records, photos, tags, forum posts, and other information. She printed them out, circled everything she interpreted negatively, and distributed the pages to other school employees. She told the principal that Blue was a pedophile and that the club was corruptive. She and Blue had never met.
Mr. Pakaki, the Arwing advisor, showed Blue the pages the woman had submitted as evidence that Arwing could corrupt the school. These were some of the items the woman highlighted:
“Kill count,” a gamer’s term, and Blue’s game statistics.
The age on Blue’s MySpace page: 69. (“Hardy har har, I was like 13 when I made it,” Blue said later.)
“Gamers at school,” a title of a blog post by a student Blue didn’t know who called the club “dorky.”
A caption to one of Blue’s Flickr photos about “a pedo.” The line was an inside joke; Blue’s friend wanted to date an underclassman.
A caption to a photo of the club: “woop woop.” (Blue could assume only that the woman wrongly thought “woop woop,” meant as a sarcastic cheer, was a sexual reference.)
“First period teacher,” which was written on another student’s blog about nothing that had to do with Blue. This item stymied him.
On the side of one of the printouts, the woman had written in large letters “BLUE IS MARK,” as if she had solved some giant mystery.
At first, Blue didn’t believe there was a problem. The woman’s accusations were so ludicrous that he didn’t