Goatees and Black Trench coats

I never put much thought to gamer fashion. At least here in California, it tends to be the same stuff you see anywhere on the streets – t-shirts and jeans or shorts.

Sometime in the late 90’s I noticed a strange fashion trend in gamers. Around 1998 or so I had gone to a handful of GURPS sessions in West LA. This was a rare move for me; for most of the 90’s I had decent sized groups and consider it the heydays of my D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions campaigns. But my group was slowly petering out towards the end of the decade, and a couple of strong players had moved away or got married or whatever. So I will admit that I looked for some local groups to game with and maybe troll for and cull some decent players for my own group. What was I to do? I still wanted a large group, and I didn’t go to cons or hang out at game stores. At the time I had no idea of what was going on in the gaming world outside my circle, besides the occasional trip out to Long Beach to The Warhouse (for some of the reasons I would not set foot in the more local Aero Hobbies of Santa Monica, look at this old experimental post).

So there I was sitting in on sessions of some kind of GURPS games, run by a dude who used no notebook and made it up as he went along. And not in any kind of good way. It was some kind of science fiction thing where all science fiction things existed at the same time. Sounds like a great idea (which I think the dude stole from Nexus Comics, but he denied it), but the execution was pretty poor. You would go out and do something, and he would brainstorm on what to have happen to you. The host of the games thought this GM was “imaginative,” but I did not agree. Over a couple of games my guy would go out jogging or out to a bar, and the only thing the guy could think of was “a predator from the Predator movies is jogging there too,” or “a predator from the Predator movies is on the barstool next to you. “ I guess Predator was on HBO the night before or something.

Ugh. Horrible. But here is the rub, the guy wore a black trench coat. Not bad you say? It’s fucking summer here in So Cal, dude. Really? A black trench on a warm summer night? OK, not that big a deal. Columbine was still a year or two away, and the black trench was yet to be thought of nationwide as the gear of pathetic loser geeks who got picked on and went batshit instead of lifting weights or taking karate or whatever. it struck me as weird. But hey, I’m a lifelong beach dude, so what do I know of trench coats?

I did not last long in that little group. My gaming life with my own group continued on.

Sometime around 2001 or 2002 I went for a couple of hours to the Gateway convention over at LAX to do a little shopping for miniatures or what not. I parked a few blocks away, and I noticed groups of the pretty much all-male convention goers heading back and forth to the Jack in the Box across the street. Of the 20 or 30 guys I saw in that few minutes, 90% of them (I’m not kidding) were wearing black trenches. OK, so I don’t recall what time of year it was, but this is Southern California. In deepest winter it is often 75 degrees. Jeez.

Now, keep in mind this was not all that long after columbine. Granted, Columbine had nothing to do with goatees. The Columbine jack-offs were pretty clean cut and studly compared to the squirrely dorked-out trenchers I saw around that con hotel. And at the time I did notice a lot of goatees in various fandom gatherings in general, especially at Renaissance Faires. So I guess that is neither here nor there (outside of the fact that combined with the coats it made the con dudes look like a bunch of clones).

Not long after Columbine I was partying at the So Cal Ren Faire one night and saw the head of security giving a hard time to a pair of black trench donning teenagers for being so stupid as to adopt the fashion of a pair of losers who shot up their school because they were the only two kids in the school who couldn’t get laid. And those were teens, lots of these con dudes looked well into their 30’s at least. I remember also thinking about the crummy “imaginative” GM from those GURPS games, who attended that same con from what I understood. But at least that douche was doing it without the stigma of the shooting hanging around.

I only had a pass for the shopping area, but from what I could see there was an ocean of these black trenched yobbos at the tables.

I just didn’t get it. Why would you want to wear anything associated with the biggest high school losers in human history? It was mind boggling. Maybe after 10 years or something, but a couple? C’moan. Some of them in addition also seemed to like to wear those fingerless driving gloves with the coats which was just extra weird.

Next week I am going to be in attendance for a couple of days at a So Cal game convention. No shit. That’s right, hell froze over. And this isn’t for lack of my own decent group. I’m actually trying to get out there more in the game community since I blog and all that. I’m getting older, and who knows if this is my last big hurrah for gaming. I’m not sure I can see myself doing this at 50. But of course, I said I wouldn’t be doing it at 40 when I was 30. My, how time flies and we lie to ourselves.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the latest con going fashions. If it’s just t-shirts and shorts I guess I might secretly be a little disappointed. Hmmm…maybe I’ll drop by the thrift store and see if I can find a trench in my size.