Sixty one – Geekpub

‘I’ve got a signal!’ exclaimed Grace. I turned to look at her iPhone. She pushed a couple of buttons and managed to call up the Meetup calendar. I couldn’t believe that my Valentine’s Day date was going so well!

‘We need to go to the first event that is at three o’clock. Wait…That’s it!’ I giggled and pointed, all excited.

‘Where is it?!’ asked Grace.

‘Caledonian Road… That’s on the Piccadilly line? How do we get there…?’

I thought for a moment. ‘I know: we cross the Hungerford Bridge to Charing Cross, catch the Northern and then change at Leicester Square’. I suddenly realised I had internalised a part of the London Tube map. London, it seemed, was starting to get under my skin.

‘I don’t ever think I’ve been to this station before…’ said Grace, as we negotiated our way through the crowds at Charing Cross.

‘Ah, that’s one of the things about doing this crazy stuff; you get to visit parts of the city that you never thought you would expect to go’.

During our short Tube ride we talked tech. Grace told me a bit more about her job as a civil servant and I told her more about mine at a university. We traded stories about different geeky professional certifications: she told me that she was updating her virtual machine qualification, and I regaled her with a story about a Cisco networking lab I had recently attended.

When we emerged from the Tube, Grace took charge. She had plotted a course on her iPhone: it was around four hundred metres heading south, towards Kings Cross, on the left hand side.

‘That’s it!’ I pointed. I could see our destination: a pub called Meltdown that looked nothing like any pub I had ever seen before. I stepped inside, and was confronted by a number of huge video screens. The screens showed a number of weird games that were currently in action.

‘Are you here with the Meetup?’ I asked a chap who was standing by the bar.

‘Yes. Are you going to do the tournament?’

‘The tournament?’

‘Yes, the Hearthstone tournament’.

He lost me.

‘I’ve only just heard about it…’ I blustered. ‘Hello, my name is Chris and this is my friend Grace’. I offered my hand and received a manly handshake in return.

My new friend was called Alan. Alan was a research student, studying neuroscience at University College London and lived nearby, It was his first time to the Geekpub Meetup, which had the tagline ‘Pub socials, LAN parties, arcade sessions, and much more!’

Hearthstone, it turned out, was a virtual card game that you can play over the internet. I looked at one of the screens that were installed above the bar. I could see a Korean chap, who was wearing headphones, dealing cards and dealing damage points on a random internet opponent. Cards were being exchanged. Energy was being won and lost, and attacks were being made. It looked unfathomable. I asked whether he could talk me through a game. Alan chuckled and gently shook his head in mild disbelief, in what seemed to be an impossible request.

‘You see that? That’s the card deck, and each player has their own set, which you build up over time, and you can only play them when you have enough money points, which are crystals. You get new crystals each turn’.

‘Is it like Netrunner?’ I asked.

‘What’s Netrunner?’ replied Alan.

‘It’s another card game’ I replied, putting aside my mild curiosity about whether different card game tribes knew of each other. ‘So, each player has a deck that they customise, right? And there’s money, in the form of crystals?’

Alan deftly introduced me to Rob, who was the barman. I couldn’t shake a feeling that Alan was passing me to Rob because I was asking ridiculous questions and he wanted a quiet afternoon. Rob, it seemed, knew all about Hearthstone. I had never met a geek barman before.

‘You get better cards when you go higher in the game. When you play, you either attack the other player directly, or you go and attack the other cards that then come into play after a game. You with me?’ I stared at Rob. I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Perhaps Frank could show you… FRANK! You play Hearthstone, don’t you?’ Frank turned around. Another round of introductions. Grace appeared to be bemused, but still faintly interested.

Frank was a chap in his mid-twenties who sported a neatly trimmed beard, black rimmed plastic glasses, and wore a baseball cap. He spoke with a gentle Dutch accent.

‘The best way to explain it is to go do the tutorial which takes around twenty minutes. I could talk you through that now if you like’. I looked at Grace and she looked back. ‘Shall we do it?’ She seemed keen.

Frank took us over to a bank of computers that were located at the other side of the bar. Apparently, anyone could use these computers to play video games. They had huge screens and special gamer’s keyboards.  There was thousands of pounds worth of equipment that anyone off the street could come in and use. Frank talked us through getting an account, and clicked on the demo games which showed the operation of different cards. I struggled to make sense of it, but understood where randomness came into play, and could see how and where strategy became important. When we had completed the first two ‘training levels’ Frank left us to it.

‘Would you like a go?’

‘Okay’ said Grace.

As Grace played the game, I chatted to another guy who had joined us: Kevin. Kevin was also a geek, but a maths geek. He had a maths degree from Cambridge and was training to be a city accountant. As long as you were interested in numbers, machines, technology, games, or fantasy dragons or energy crystals, you were welcome. My insistent questioning and expressions of confusion had been met with warmth and tolerance.

Grace and I played a few games before deciding that we were both hungry. We returned to the bar. I gave Rob my empty glass, and I said goodbye to Frank and thanked him for his help. On the way to the Tube, Grace and I chatted about going to see a movie. Knowing that there was a cinema in Camden, we caught the Piccadilly line, heading south to Kings Cross.