GAMER LIVE 2010 - Day One
If anyone thinks that smoke, running around, shouting, and the cafeteria –
these are Tajiks on a construction site, then they are deeply mistaken.
Ksandr\_Warfire, a witcher from Kharkiv
Prologue
My first personal encounter with the GAMER.ru team took place back in spring. Therefore, the question of whether to go to GAMER LIVE was never in doubt for me. At any cost, but preferably at someone else's expense. :) Thanks to the administration, which provided a whole bunch of completely legal options to minimize costs. Find a sponsor? Done. Organize a clan? Done. Plan completed and exceeded. Achievement unlocked, bonuses deposited to the account. This means I can rush to get tickets and squirm in anticipation.
A few days before departure, the world around me began to brighten up. Smoke covered Moscow and the surrounding area, the client informed that the money would only be available next week, and a couple of hours before departure, my phone charger finally died. Accept the circumstances and stay? – No way! Let’s go-go-go to the station. Behind me a backpack with the minimum essentials, and in my pocket, a passport with tickets.
Heavenly bureaucracy apparently decided that I hadn't had enough adventures. The Russian customs, it's really something… First comes a guy who stamps migration cards almost without looking, and ten minutes later, two ladies come by to check the stamped cards for the second time. The slightest inaccuracy – a candidate for getting off the train. "You misled the border guard! You are violating federal law! Fine 3000r!" – the lady exclaimed, examining my card where I accidentally indicated 'tourism' as the purpose of travel instead of 'private visit'. Twenty minutes of mutual brain wrestling, and a calming gesture from Aksiy (which, according to witnesses, suspiciously resembled the primordial Russian 'kúkis') calmed the lady and convinced her of my total incapacity for bribery. I was allowed into the country.
Deart, Kitty\_Venom, Ksandr\_Warfire
Welcome to Moscow!
The capital greeted me with open arms amidst dense smoky haze. A thought flashed through my mind: "For once, the news didn’t lie." There was still plenty of time before the gathering, and I headed to the previously packed squirrel meeting with Kitty\_Venom and her boyfriend, also an old acquaintance of mine. Washing the smoke from our lungs with cola, we quietly built plans to conquer the world. Later, Maxim aka Deart joined us. He was just as interested in world domination as we were. Unfortunately, Olya could not go to GAMER LIVE, but she sent her greetings to everyone. During the course, Max and I managed to get a bit lost like hedgehogs in the fog in the Moscow metro, but eventually, we found the right line and rushed to "River Station".
Actually, this is a special elixir for cleansing the lungs of smoke
The surface met us with clouds of smoke. And already with warm air. For some reason, I thought that Blizzard had started a pretty good PR campaign for Diablo III. But all misfortunes suddenly shifted to the background when from the haze of this stinky calamity appeared the indomitable Sveta and Company. Cheerfully treating us like family, we were handed participant bags with various goodies, and I was also given a bundle of clan badges.
As the crowd gathered, badges in hand decreased, while on participants’ necks they increased. While the organizational process was underway, I managed to snatch time to rummage through my participant's bag. Thanks to grand chance, the contents of the bags differed a bit, but quantitatively everyone had the same. Personally, I got a Final Fantasy t-shirt, a collector's edition of Red Alert 3, Fire and Sword, and Divinity. For smaller goodies: a cool Guitar Hero 3 keychain, an nVidia notebook (this time not replaced), and a 1C pen. Additionally, there was last year's GAMER.ru brochure, spam flyers, and a new GAMER LIVE 2010 brochure. At this point, I want to send a shoutout to the designer and inform them that printing should be done at least in 300dpi resolution, not 72. Otherwise, this creation would look slightly less rubbish when printed. But let's not dwell on the sad. Let’s focus on the beautiful. It’s beautiful when you're asked to get on a bus, where the air conditioning is not turned on yet, to take attendance, holding you there for about five minutes, and then letting you back outside. At that moment, you realize that outside, it’s actually cool and the air is fresh and not stuffy. The central joke was the assumption that this was a tutorial, and next, they would hand us shovels and buckets of water to go put out the peat bog.
What’s not like Fallout?
Go-Go-Go
It should be noted that throughout all this, participants almost never stopped laughing and joking with each other and about everything that was happening. Theo was especially on fire. Among the losers and outcasts, there were merely three people who called and declined participation due to the smoke… Well yes, sitting in smoke is much better in scorching Moscow than going to nature, where, by the way, the stench turned out to be several times less, and the temperature lower. However, the rest were rewarded royally. Two and a half hours in a comfortable bus, breathing clean, cool conditioned air after the hell of Moscow, was an epic win.
Sveta even manages to speak softly into the microphone
Everyone was engaged in their own activities. 1001smile was arguing with the driver over the music, Deart was grumbling through his teeth at Teodorix because he was from Yandex. And Yandex was messing up again with the tIC update (don't ask what that is, but the fact that it’s a failure is horrible, believe me). Mr. Darrggon and I discussed the pros and cons of modern games using Dragon Age and The Witcher as examples. Others were also entertaining themselves as they could. Somewhere in the middle of the journey, we remembered that we had a clan presentation ahead. In the end, in literal terms on the knee, a draft version of the script was hastily sketched out, which later helped us a lot. Outside the windows, at first, urban landscapes of Fallout continued to drift past, later turning into landscapes of Silent Hill in the countryside.
Designers, not wasps – the greatest evil that has happened to the "Vympel" camp
Arrival at the Base
The "Vympel" camp pleased me by living up to 100% of my expectations. Preserved since Soviet times and renovated in our time, it reliably repelled lovers of gloss and glamour. At the same time, it provided everything necessary for representatives of the rugged gamer breed. The House of Culture, cafeteria, barracks residential building, and gazebos became the key checkpoints of our future entertainment. Guided by cheat sheets and indications from the hoarse voices of the clan leaders, our friendly crowd dispersed into rooms. Six beds, three nightstands, a wardrobe, a sink, and a half-crazy wasp greeted me and my companions in the room. A bright room in the spirit of the best traditions of pioneer camps certainly maintained the first impression: this is not a place for wimps, but true gamers are not intimidated by the lack of locks on the doors. And what could we take from each other? Sweaty t-shirts? Half a kilo of DVD boxes? The camera of Cannoneer? In all rooms, the stuff was roughly the same. I had a deep confidence that here, belongings were as safe as our computer characters after pressing the magic Save Game key.
Elixir of vitality. Very strong.
Like zergs on protosses, GAMER LIVE participants rushed to farm dinner in the local cafeteria. From some corners, there was grumbling about the absence of "defloupe" and "croutons"; others eagerly grabbed trays and stomped off for portions. Your humble servant, still shuddering at the memory of his collective farm childhood with barley porridge, devoured dinner and regretted only that they didn't give seconds.
Don't believe LaCTuK – everything was quite edible.
Full and relaxed clans strolled to their respective gazebos. The witchers, however, tried to cheat and, without straying far, occupy the nearest gazebo. But the NoFate clan, shaking their map, forced us to relocate. The dinner was being digested too actively in our bellies to spark an epic fight. The one and a half hours allocated for introductions and brainstorming the clan presentation flew by unnoticed. No wonder, as at least half of this time, we were laughing uncontrollably at the jokes that kept coming in as we composed. The creativity just flowed. Here, a digression is warranted to briefly introduce the members of the clan.
Clan Presentations
So, our clan included the best representatives of Homo Gamerrus:
Ksandr\_Warfire – that is, me. Clan leader and all that.
Deart – artist, creative person, and fighter against creative idiocy.
AQuaRity – our talisman of luck.
dmit – Starcraft guru.
Cannoneer – a man of the camera.
Magrat – the true LKIschница and combat friend.
Lenins – young source of positivity.
Darrggon – one of the most creative witchers in all history.
Slava Kozlov and Vova Tortsov – fighters from the Snowball company, perfectly blended into our team.
The tough Witchers are so tough
The guys from "Snowballs" were even offered to switch to the "Veterans of the Industry" clan before the event, but the boys stood their ground and demanded to be kept in the witchers' clan. They brought along two bags full of awesome t-shirts from The Witcher 2, which at first half the camp envied. Later, the generous Snowball guys pulled out several dozen more of the same t-shirts from their supplies and started giving them out to everyone who wanted one. I will tell about the clan and our achievements in a separate post. Here it’s appropriate to recall the words of Slava Kozlov, who said that he had not had so much fun from self-activity and the overall atmosphere in a long time.
Slava Kozlov approves
Did you think that all witchers are as tough as Chelyabinsk, cool as a cliff, and sharp as diarrhea? No, guys. Times change, monsters change, and so do we. The scariest monsters sit within us: morose swamps, lethargic laziness, and terrible flat-bottomedness ruin just as much as strygs, drowned men, and other more familiar evil. This thought was the basis of our presentation, which earned two fives and one four from the jury. Among the presentations of other clans, the "Compote" clan, especially Teodorix, who publicly confessed that he was a passionfruit and that he didn’t have… something or other. But I didn’t hear exactly what :) The mega dance of 1001smile also made a big impression, leaving a huge scar in my memory cortex (or whatever is responsible for memory). It was spectacular! The veterans' demobilization album was memorable for the terrifying word "Zapuskatr", which not only was difficult to understand but also hard to pronounce at first! In short, the entire event with its immediacy and positivity sharply reminded me of school years. Self-activity is like that. But when your friends and like-minded people are around, you laugh and rejoice in the performance as sincerely as if the best representatives of modern pop music gathered there.
1001smile, we will remember this dance for years
Evening Bell or Nighttime Tale
Strangely enough, hardly anyone showed enthusiasm for the upcoming disco. Exhaustion and the simple desire to leisurely chat, play Munchkin and other board games, or even just go to sleep prevailed. But before letting people drift freely, clan leaders still had to conduct evening discussions. We needed to discuss the day’s results and remind ourselves of what awaited us in the upcoming day. One of the interesting features was that each participant was offered to tie a knot on one of four ribbons: yellow, green, blue, or black. Each color symbolized the participant's impressions from the first day from best to "fucia-shit." Despite all the journey's hardships and minor organizational flaws, my boys from the witcher clan were still shaking with laughter when reminiscing about the gazebo. Almost all yellow knots were tied in positivity, with only a couple of knots on the green ribbon reminding me, as a clan leader, that alongside euphoria, I needed to convey some objective criticism to the GAMER.ru administration. Among the other clans, there were, of course, some pickier gentlemen and ladies. Apparently, these were those who dreamed of living in Rublyovka, while in our cafeteria futilely searching for sandwiches with red and black caviar. The guys were commanded to rest, while I, cloaked in the night like a true follower of Black Cloak, went to a secret gazebo for clan leaders and those equated to them, to discuss the outcomes of the day.
Photos from the meeting of clan leaders were devoured under cover of darkness by wild wasps. But it was roughly like this. Honestly.
On a Black-Black Night...
The gazebo welcomed me and Company with a strategic supply of cola and… cola. There was a lot of it. I personally guzzled it until I felt nauseous. All this time, my inner voice purred that I was right not to be afraid of the responsibility of being a clan leader. Next year, I highly recommend all charismatic personalities. The responsibility placed on you will return tenfold. In the friendly company of representatives from the GAMER.ru administration and the veterans of the industry clan (who probably went for a walk, and here we are – whoa, what a meeting), we discussed the outcomes of the first day. The discussion smoothly flowed into casual conversations about life, news from the gaming industry, and film. Laughter and chatter were periodically interrupted by tragic shouts from different corners of the gathering: "72 points!" along with wishes for a certain Nomad and Tuzik to burn in fire with their reviews (names changed for the sake of conspiracy). The topic of adequate evaluation of computer games was very current that night... What happened next is already vague in my memory. It seems the bubbly cola mixed my recollections pretty thoroughly. I only remember that it was fun; I argued about something with Viktor Zuev, for some reason praised DiCaprio, and somehow organized a mini-disco for the most energetic in the House of Culture. Fatigued to death but happy as a herd of elephants, we spread out across our rooms…
The best remedy for surprises
But the surprises didn’t end for me there. In my room, a clearly foreign body awaited me on my bed. As it turned out in the morning, it was my fellow clan member who had stumbled in for a chat and fell asleep. I was in too good a mood to kick my comrade off my bed at half past four in the morning. So, with the blessing of Nastya, who fortunately hadn’t yet fully read Hrapovitsky, I went in search of an alternative resting place. Fortunately, there were plenty of empty rooms. In the end, I spent my first night in proud solitude in a personal room. I woke up three minutes before the wake-up call, feeling fresh and well-rested despite the eventful day and equally eventful night ahead. The second eventful day awaited me. But that’s a completely different story.