You wake up at Lambert International Airport.

At the sound of the bell, a garrison of business travelers snaps to attention for the agonizingly slow race to deplane. You enter the Terminal and weave a blue streak between strange faces dragging rolling suitcases. You make a b-line for the luggage carousel. Nothing off mission. No coffee. No pitstop. Your first appointment is in two hours. At the rental car desk, you score an upgrade with a kind word and pleasant demeanor. You’re in the game with a V-6. It doesn’t come equipped with a tailgun, which is fine, as you have no gunner. There is no hydrogen-injected ice in this model, but it will do.

Merging onto a highway that you’ve never driven, on the way to a destination to which you have never been, you red-line the bastard. You’ll never see this car again, might as well punish it – no reason not to drive it like you stole it from Red Base on a respawn. As you thread your way through the alien landscape, a GPS calls out the shots in a soothing feminine tone. It provides the same comfort that Cortona does when she plots waypoints on the heads-up display of the helmet that you left at home. You half-expect her to tell you to show them who they are dealing with.

You enter the city of St.Louis for the first time. The fabled Arch looms in the distance, a sinuous loop of steel with graceful lines that glint in morning sun. It dwarves the buildings in the skyline like a Halo ring. It occurs to you how surprisingly interesting this is to survey. It also occurs to you that you must be playing quite a lot of Halo, if that’s the sort of thing that occurs to you exactly 13.6 miles away from a big meeting.

And meetings happen. Many of them. You rush from client to client, having the same conversation every other hour. You check into a hotel. The same day is to repeat itself in twelve hours – minus the aeronautical insertion at dawn. None of these events are notable. They have occurred in almost every other city in the Nation. The potential for the novelty of how this hotel room might be different died during the second fiscal quarter of 2005.

The in-room entertainment portal taunts you with the promise of playing the role of Mario in his fantastic adventures, right in your room! But that’s not your game. The power ups in your game are not mushrooms.

You wake up in the dark.

More meetings happen. More new faces with the same questions populate Day Two. As your computer cycles down after a projected presenation, a client sees [for just a second] the image on the desktop.

A helmet lies in the sand. An explosion scatters the soil like a bloom in the background. Your client looks dead into your eye for a split second – a glint in his. He knows. You want to ask him how he games. Online? Do you roll deep with an ally on your six? Is there someone on the other end of your headset that talks about something more useful than how gay they think you are?

But you do not talk about Fight Club.

At least not until you get to dinner. You arrive at an Irish Pub handpicked by a Gunslinger – a local. This sets you right at home, as if you could hail a cab and hang your hat on your own rack on the other side of a seven dollar cab ride. A man you have never met in person strides into the bar. A nod leads to a handshake and a clap on the back.

You get to talking like old friends. The stories are of combat. About flags tossed and bombs dropped. About medals won and challenges lost. The gossip is about soldiers’ fights, and how hard the veterans are on the reinforcements. Everything that you discuss with your new/old friend is a shared fantasy enabled by pixels and code. It’s bizarre talk for a first drink, but it flows like drunken chatter among friends in a post-game lobby.

Dinner ends. Checks are paid. At his invitation, you follow your new acquaintance to his homebase. In any other situation, a showing of trust such as this would seem insane. It occurs to you that this one has never betrayed you with thump on the back of the head for his favorite weapon. It’s not likely he’s about to run a burn on you now.

Plus, he’s got the cure for what ails you. At the Gunslinger’s homebase, he seats you in front of a box. You spike in, and the game is afoot. Each game in notable. Your team is in fine form tonight, pulling tricks out their sleeves at the buzzer.

Walking back to your car, you realize that this unfamiliar city is no longer alien. There is a sense familiarity and welcome on the night air. You realize that it’s not about the game. Hasn’t been for some time, really. The game is still grand, but it’s now more about the people with whom you play it. You realize that Xbox Live is not just a battleground for whacking strangers, but a place where friends might actually be found on a Friends List – as good a friend as any other, even.

You wake up at Lambert International, you meet up with Ma Deuce 50. You wake up at LAX, you seek out Kaja. You wake up at MCO, you look for pickup from DTS Wheels. You wake up at LaGuardia, you check up on DrPachango. You wake up at ATL, you send word to DTS Pastor. You wake up at SeaTac, you give VoltRabbit another try. You wake up in Chicago? You kick out the welcome matt for chickachicka or Locomotive, on the bounce to their own big meetings.

There are times among your gamer friends when having host means more than being quicker on the beatdown.

Say Thankya.

Posted by XerxdeeJ