The other weekend I attended a covenant of video game enthusiasts. This convergence is known as PAX EAST. Among the many intricate homemade costumes, low-ranking Twitch streamers, and gaming-related booths were several corporate sponsored booths featuring exclusive looks at upcoming games and panels of all different kinds. I visited many booths, the most vital of which was the “Gaming Church” where I met a pin that taught me that Jesus loves gamers. After a forced convergence to the Gaming Church (meetings 10am every Sunday, Jesus loves gamers), I attended a curious panel called “Romance in Videogames” or something like that. Most of the panel was spent listening to the panel-runners talk about their qualifications of having written and made semi-erotic app games. Then we got into an interesting topic of people’s attractions to fictional characters in video games. There is psychological research that could be related to this. There are studies on transportations into narratives, one specific 2017 study by Mahood and Hanus, that define transportation as a higher perception of a fictional reality than the real world. Mahood and Hanus have findings indicating that video games, specifically role-playing games (RPGs) can have real emotional consequences for players. Emotions such as love have a possibility of being derived from these immersive experiences so I was expecting some interesting discourse on the topic. Instead what I got was a group of people discussing what Dragonborn characters they were attracted to and what they found attractive about these literal art pieces depicting sculpted human beings. After 45 minutes of what can only be referred to as “horny fluff,” they finally opened up the floor to questions. Thankfully they had eaten up so much time discussing their attractions that they had time for exactly 2 questions. A goddamn panel and they have time for no more than two questions. The first question was consumed by more discussion on yet another handsome Dragonborn character.

At this point, I thought of a question I wanted to ask. I remembered a theory on emotion from psychology describing how emotional stimulus is mentally assigned to different stimuli in the environment. This theory includes an experiment where men were interviewed by an attractive woman and later encouraged to ask her out. One group was interviewed on the ground and another on a scary rope-bridge. What they found was the men were more likely to ask her out when they were on the rope-bridge. The conclusion was that the men took the physiological reactions to the rope-bridge fear like accelerated heart-rate and attributed it at least partially to them having a greater attraction to the women. What I wanted to posit was that the mix of the RPG immersion and transportation may be allowing for an interaction where the emotional stress of the events in an RPG was highly likely to be attributed to attractions to the fictional characters in the RPGs, especially since they are fictional and designed to be attractive. Now I had this locked an loaded when the question-monkey who was calling on people stopped a single row short. Up rises a real gamer boy, a true mouth-breathing piece of trash who states that he “strongly supports the ship” of two characters from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Ephraim and Eirika, who are goddamn siblings. He concluded with stating “Incest, Wincest.” To no one’s surprise, the message fell on grody, deaf ears so the panel-runners had him repeat the entire statement, silencing the entire room, as he concluded for a second time “Incest, Wincest.” I remain flabbergasted. My flabbers. Good lord. The worst part to me isn’t even that he was called on instead of me or that he repeated everything he said a second time. No. The worst part is that the siblings he picked come from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones when in the year of our lord, 2016, mere months ago, Fire Emblem Fates released. This game allowed the player to MARRY any of EIGHT siblings. This was the incest Fire Emblem game and yet he chose to have this brother and sister bone down in his mind and no one else’s. The confidence with which this man delivered his dark sermon is truly concerning and upsetting. PAX East 2017 was ruined by this man alone.