Hentai Cafe or "How we're all doomed"

GenCon 2011 had one event I had never attended before - the Hentai Cafe.  I was young, I was inexperienced, I was curious - BULLSHIT, I wanted to see some anime porn, /sigh, I knew better. 

What I didn't want to see was a bunch of guys leaping on chairs, screaming "pick me, pick me, pick me".  Why were they screaming this, well because instead of the original soundtrack for the selected scene, the MC would *sometimes* pick appropriately gendered individuals from the audience to voice-over the scene: 2 girls & 1 guy, 1 guy & 1 girl, 2 girls.  It was entertaining for about 45 minutes, then it became much more about observing the audience than the hentai.

Dude, you were watching the audience (about a 4-1 male to female ratio)?  Well, yeah, cause 45 minutes of anime porn is all I could really handle.  Ok, so what was interesting about the audience?  I'm glad you asked.  For starters, hentai is freaky stuff, aliens, demons, bondage, slavery, etc. in the form of cartoon characters - yes, I know it's anime, general readers may not be as familiar.  What's really freaky is when members of the audience says, "what the fuck?"  If you have to ask that question at a hentai show, you don't need to be at a hentai show.  Why's that?  Well for one, you should know to expect freaky shit.  The other reason is you've probably never had an adult relationship in which you trusted your partner (and in the process tried some freaky shit on each other), excepting of course uber-religious couples (why were you at the hentai event in the first place?).  Second, the countdown: 5-4-3-2-1-FUCK!!! is just sad and possibly a little misguided depending on the hentai.

On a positive note, the MC was great.  He was personable, funny, self-deprecating and generally seemed to be having a good time, even when he had "to piss like a race-horse."

So why are you saying we're doomed?  Because we even have things like this.  Look at all the *great* societies in history - Rome, Greece, Egypt.  Almost from the moment they started having enough "free-time" to come up with shit like this, their society came crashing down - granted it may take 100 years+ but in the scheme of things, that's not that long.  What are you saying?  I don't know, I'm still working on that.

When it comes to gaming geeks, you are generally dealing with some of the most creative, intelligent, socially-inept people on the planet.  On the Thursday GenCon opened, I would have put the combined intellect and problem solving skills of the people in the Indy Con Center against just about any other single building on the planet: NASA, JPL, the Pentagon, Microsoft HQ, Google HQ, Oracle HQ, you name it, I'll take the GenCon attendees.  Now to just figure out a way to focus all that potential into playing catch-up for the 800 years of progress the Dark Ages cost us.