Final Round XIII Arcade Game Tourney Is "Old School" Video Game Competition

I am going to a video game tournament today...

...despite the fact that I have never played a modern video game.

The first video game I remember playing regularly was on the campus of the then South Carolina State College. We lived two blocks from campus at the time. The student center was a short walk. Inside there were ping pong tables, a pool table or two, and a Pong machine off to one side. Pong was the electronic version of Ping Pong.

For a quarter, you bought the exquisite privilege of getting to turn a black knob to the left or to the right to control a small gray rectangle that served as your electronic paddle. There were only two trick shots you could make. One involved violently spinning your knob just when the "ball", a gray square, hit the surface of your paddle. The other trick shot required precise timing, and involved ramming the rectangular paddle into the "ball" from the side just before it sailed past the end line and off the court.

So why am I going to a video game tournament, if all I've mastered is turning a little black knob on a Pong machine?

Because S.'s son is in town for a video game tournament he and his buddies cooked up about fourteen years ago called Final Round. Even though they are now all in their thirties, they all head back to Atlanta every spring to put on the southeast's biggest fighting game tournament. At this year's Final Round XIII, the competitions are being live streamed. As I write this, they seem to be setting up stuff for today's events. The Twitter news feed for the hashtag "#FinalRound" is a drama in and of itself.

I understand the basic concept behind the genesis of the tournament -- as exquisite as it was to play Pong inside the AIR CONDITIONED student center at SCSC back in the early seventies, you would eventually begin to lose interest in feeding the machine quarters if you thought you were wasting them on someone who didn't provide any real competition.

But these guys are for real. They have all been serious gamers since grade school, when they played at the arcade against each other. And when we ride down to the hotel later today where the event is held, it will be hard to get a park. And unless things have changed a lot since last year, there will be lines of young African American, Asian and Caucasian men streaming into the building, toting their controller consoles under their arms as if they are Fender guitars.

I remember visiting some friends of our family in New Orleans a few years after my love affair with Pong. The father was a pharmacist who owned a couple of pharmacies, and his son, who was about my age, had reaped the benefits accordingly -- he had a room in the back of the house with three or four arcade games in it that he could play all day without putting a single quarter in them, or having to wait his turn. I was envious all the way back to South Carolina.

Nowadays, kids have more gaming capabilities in their pockets with the Nintendo portables than we used to have in an entire arcade in the seventies. The buddies who have put together this Final Round tournament have all the latest games, from PlayStation to Wii, with all the attendant accessories, and the latest hi-tech, high touch controllers, but they seem to revel in the old schoolness of the games they built the tourney around. And the participants seem to rejoice at the amount of money they win for outfighting everybody else.

As nice as some of those joysticks look, though, I don't think they will ever top my beloved black knob on the Pong machine.

Who knows where this might lead? Video games show no signs of losing their appeal. And if the "X" Generation or "Y" Generation or whatever name some advertising exec has dreamed up this week for this demographic is anything like us, they will long for the nostalgia of arcade video games the same way us post baby boomers gravitate towards old-school rap music these thirty years later.

"Brown Man Thinking Hard" Featured On TV One Election Coverage

Tonight, Brown Man Thinking Hard will be one of the featured political blogs on the TV ONE Election Night special. I'll be providing regular updates on last minute voter suppression efforts and voter reactions here in Georgia.

Silver Spring, MD -- TV One will offer comprehensive coverage of the Presidential election returns November 4, beginning at 7 PM ET, with Election Night 08: A Vote for Change, anchored by team members from its highly successful Democratic convention coverage in August.

With seven different remote locations around the country, including live cameras at the McCain and Obama headquarters and coverage from the Associated Press' national vote tally center, TV One is ready to document this historic night from all angles. Arthur Fennel and Joe Madison , of TV One DNC Coverage, return as host along with Jacque Reid anchoring from the TV One Election Newsroom. The anchor team will be joined by Tom Joyner, Michael Eric Dyson and more who will provide commentary all night long. Shawta Walcott, one of the top pollsters in the country, will be on board analyzing the votes and exit polling.

As the first polls close in the East at 7 pm (ET), TV One will be anchored in Sen. Obama's election night headquarters in Chicago, ground-zero for this historic event. In addition, Roland Martin, who TV One shares with CNN, will be reporting live from CNN Election Headquarters in New York.

This election is expected to have unprecedented turnout among young people and African-Americans, and TV One has responded with remote broadcasts from two colleges in battleground states: Florida A&M and North Carolina A&T . Here, we will hear and see first hand how these groups are responding to the election in real time.

Finally, TV One Online offers late breaking developments in the campaigns and around the world. A special correspondent in the Election Newsroom will be reporting what's going on online with the election in real time.

With news, analysis, insight and historical perspective, TV One will chronicle what could turn out to be the most important event in the African-American community in this century. TV One's election night promises to be one exiting and compelling ride.

Witness history take place only on TV One, November 4 at 7 pm (ET).

I've had a whole lot of fun with this blog since I started it. I hope all of you who read this blog regularly have enjoyed it half as much as I have. I can't think of a better way to have my efforts recognized than to be asked to participate in the national media coverage of the most important moment in black history in my lifetime.



NOTE: Shoot me an email at brownmanthinking at gmail dot com or comment on my blog if you want to express how you feel tonight - who knows, it might make the broadcast.

I Wore My "Obama 08" Shirt To Work Friday

I wore a t-shirt two days ago. This should be nothing out of the ordinary, but (a) two days ago was Friday, and (b) I don't normally wear t-shirts during the week.

But my company is downsizing, like many others in the mortgage industry, so I ironed my navy blue" Obama 08" t-shirt, the one with the Obama logo over the right breast, and took the long way to work.

I live and work in Alpharetta, one of Atlanta's northern suburbs, where it is pretty obvious that African American men are a distinct minority. But if you are groomed and dressed like the rest of middle America, which means close cropped hair, clean shaven face, a wardrobe of conservatively cut slacks whose hues revolve around the primary colors for men - blue, green, brown and khaki - and a collection of polo style shirts to match, your brown skin doesn't seem to call much attention to itself.

My company's office is located in the Windward office park. I work for a small, struggling nationwide mortgage brokerage that sits among the massive operations centers of GE, HP, AT&T and other corporate giants whose names have boiled down to acronyms. Many of the jobs at the middle management level in these companies pay well enough to allow these employees to maintain their households on one income. So this live/work/play development has a large contingent of women who are stay at home moms.

When I walked into one of the breakfast joints on Windward Parkway to eat, the hostess looked up, and her eyes widened as she focused on the Obama logo on my t-shirt. A big smile leapt across her face as she nodded her head up and down. She seated me in the middle of the restaurant, where I proceeded to spread out my paper and check the headlines. From where I sat, I could see about half of the place. Patrons who had to go to the bathroom had to walk my way for about fifteen feet before they could begin to veer off towards their table, or the exit.

One woman, who sat on the other side of the restaurant, had a seat facing mine. She stared at my shirt for a few minutes - just stopped eating, a look of disgust on her face.

Many of the women had small children - curious, full of energy - who were attracted to the red white and blue circle on my chest that stood out from the navy background. Several of the women shooed the children along, looking down or away as they passed me , as if they were trying to avoid eye contact.

The waitress arrived. She had an amused look on her face. "Nice shirt," she said. She laid the menu down in front of me. "You work for the campaign?"

That threw me - I never would have thought that I looked like I worked for the Obama campaign. "No. I'm just a supporter." After a couple of seconds, I added, "you know, like trying to get people registered to vote?"

She drew her shoulders up and professed that she was registered to vote. Her eyes still twinkled. "I been watching all this on the news for months."

Normally, when I go somewhere, this is how I am - I talk to the people around me. If I catch someone's eye, I try to make conversation, try to say something positive or funny to make a quick connection. But to do that, you've got to be able to look at the person's eyes. Even the people who were seated next to me, who seemed affable enough, and looked like my neighbors, or the kind of people who worked in my building, seemed a little stiffer than usual.

Was my chest stuck out farther than normal today? Had I forgotten to do that thing which larger than average professional black men all over the country are experts at, that act of compression, of compaction, that made outsized shoulders and forearms less threatening, that made outsized thighs and buttocks less potent?

When I walked into the office, one of our remaining staffers saw me as I came through the lobby. She usually waved without stopping if she was en route to someone's office or the break room. Today, she broke stride for a few seconds. "Obama 'o8, huh?" She kind of half smiled, as if I was revealing something in public that she'd already suspected.

I don't usually mix politics and business, but when your company is on the rocks, this is the least of your worries. Wearing this t-shirt, which might ordinarily have been a source of debate, didn't even seem to register with most people - we were all busy scrambling to close out the business we had in our pipelines. For the few who did notice, the lettering across my chest seemed to be magnetic - every time I saw them, whether I was at the copier, or the fax, they would gaze at that spot on my chest for three, four, sometimes five beats, as if they needed to reread it ever time they saw it.

An older black woman I work with, who normally looked like she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, smiled from ear to ear when she saw "Obama '08". "Great shirt."

"Yes ma'am," I said, "that it is."

With business slowed to a trickle, I'd done all I could do by three o'clock. I took the long way home, stopping by the Barnes and Noble that was a few miles south of my office, right by Northpoint Mall. Just getting into the store was interesting - several drivers snapped their necks around to look at the shirt, one of them going so far as to start talking to themselves as they passed me. Inside the bookstore, it was like I had my own Secret Service detail. I started to understand how The Emperor Who Wore No Clothes must have been treated - no one, it seemed, wanted to look anywhere near me.

The clerk looked at the cover of the latest issue of New York magazine I laid on the counter when it was my turn to pay - the word "RACE" was in big red block letters, superimposed over a black and white rendering of Barack Obama's face - but her face looked more concerned about the number of people in line.

Later that evening, out of the blue, S. wanted to go out to eat. I thought about changing - she was still dressed in the same clothes she'd worn to a business luncheon earlier, and I wasn't sure where we were going - but I said "what the hell". We went south, about five miles closer to Atlanta, to a little bedroom community called Norcross. It had been a whistlestop back in the heydey of train travel - now the depot still standing in the middle of the single square block that comprised the commercial district of downtown Norcross was a restaurant. A few mini-mansions had been recently tucked into a few corners here and there, but for the most part, the town had retained much of its original character, a mixture of newly renovated Victorian homes and well-maintained Post War ones.

The walk down the sidewalk produced the same non-looks from most of the people scattered along the sidewalk who were waiting to get into the storefront restaurants we passed, but there were a few raised eyebrows that were paired with sly smiles. Entering the pizza place on the corner, it was the family hour - kids everywhere, some tables filled with three generations, the waiting area full. Other than a couple of mothers at the front, who looked at us as if they were officers of the Nazi SS Waffen corps, most of the people were too busy trying to avoid getting tomato sauce on themselves to care about us.

By the time we left, it was getting dark. We strolled down the sidewalk. I hadn't seen another Obama t-shirt all day. In fact, I hadn't seen ANY Obama advertising or campaign signs all day. The sound of music seemed to be coming out of one of the storefronts as we got further down the street. We came to the window of a coffee shop. It was packed with people, and a small combo was playing.

S. suggested that we go inside. The combo was on one side of the door, the audience on the other - we had to walk right down the middle to get to a raised landing on the other side of the room. A few women's faces on the lower level strained as we entered. The woman at the door called us back after we had crossed in front of the crowd to give us tickets for free drinks.

Standing in line to get a couple of glasses of red wine, I felt someone bustling towards me. "Nice shirt" said the man. The girls behind the counter smiled. We traipsed back towards the rear of the building, where we spied a courtyard. The owner was parked in front of a huge chocolate cake that announced the one year anniversary of the coffee shop. "We've got a lot of your people here all the time," he said, gesturing towards my t-shirt.

Two middle-aged black women sat at a table near the entrance to the courtyard. They gave us slow motion nods as they ate their slices of cake.

The courtyard had two sections, half of it covered by an awning, half of it open air, dotted with the kind of wrought iron tables that featured the umbrellas in the middle. Baby carriages and running children dominated the covered area, so we navigated our way through the parents who were milling about to the open air section.

S. sat - I stood at the railing along the rear, looking up and down the narrow one way street that ran behind the storefronts. A few more people trickled outside - a tall, severe looking couple in matching long sleeved Brooks Brothers shirts with the cuffs turned back, and a more casually dressed trio, one man and two women. The severe woman spilled her wine setting it down on the table. They ate fast and disappeared.

The trio had been in conversation for awhile when the man caught my eye. "We're pulling for him," he yelled across the courtyard. The parents in the covered courtyard didn't turn their heads, but he was loud enough for them to hear him. "We are too," I yelled back.

A few minutes later, a couple of mosquito bites convinced us that it was time to go home. We had to pass the trio to go back through the coffee shop. The man reiterated his earlier comment. "We're from Jersey," he said. "We're used to thinking differently than the people down here." The five of us ended up talking for about ten minutes, the political patter giving way to the basic who what when and where type of stuff you talk about when you first meet strangers.

I was ready to go home, but since I'd mentioned the bookstore visit earlier, S. wanted to get a new book by one of her favorite authors. So we swooped into another Barnes and Noble that was between downtown Norcross and home. The Starbucks I passed on the way to the bathroom was filled with Asian teenagers and college students. They all had a name on their chests too - Hollister or Harvard or Georgia or DKNY - and appeared to be involved in such intense conversations that they didn't seem to notice me at all.

No one in this bookstore moved out of the way. Pretty much everyone here, even those who frowned at the sight of the Obama logo, would look back at me instead of down at the floor. On the way out, we ran into S.'s old boss, an ex-CEO of a satellite communications manufacturer. A small, handsome man with a shock of white hair, he looked tired in the way that sixty something year old men do when they have children under the age of ten. He was cordial, as always, filling S. in on the whereabouts of the other officers of the company who had departed.

It wasn't until he'd walked to the register to pay for his book that a thought crossed my mind - of all the people I'd run into all day, it had been mostly women, in particular women who looked like they were not in the workforce, who had demonstrated the most visible signs of animosity towards the logo on my chest.

But the most interesting thing about Friday to me was, of the five black people I ran into that day - which says a LOT about what part of the Atlanta metro area I was in - that of those five, only one, my co-worker, was openly enthusiastic about seeing the Obama logo.

The two black women in the coffee shop? They had had looks on their faces that said to me, "negro, why are you trying to get these white folks riled up?"