I’ve just caught the train from Providence to New York City, having spent the weekend at Intercon, a larp convention in Rhode Island. I’ve got one more night left in the United States before I’m off, and New York seems like the place to spend it, given the choice.

I’m not thrilled about the hour; Intercon, like most conventions, features a tiring field of activities during the day and a robust party scene at night. On the plus side, I’ve managed to crank my wake-up time down to 8am by the simple expedient of drinking heavily¹ and staying up until 3am. And while I’d be happier on the 10am or noon train, there were things I wanted to do in New York today. So 9am it is.

Sadly, that means missing most of the final day of Intercon, and not getting a chance to say goodbye to my friends. But I’ve been saying goodbye to a lot of people over the past couple weeks. It’s probably better to focus on the hellos, anyway.

Intercon was the usual mixed bag. It’s focused on games rather than theory (unlike Knudepunkt), so there’s more to play and less to listen to. And there’s definitely a house style to Intercon games that’s still lingering, despite increasing influence from other styles.² It’s not a style I’m particularly fond of,³ so I’m finding myself intentionally not booking many slots of games, giving me time to just wander around and hang out with people.

The problem with that is the hotel which hosts the convention isn’t really designed well for it. The on-site restaurant is expensive and has a bad selection of food. The spaces to hang out are kind of separate from each other, and the games are run in enough geographically disparate places that the hotel can feel positively empty while games are running. I’d find myself wandering through the center of the space with a couple hours to kill and eventually just heading back to my room and taking a nap, since there was nobody around.⁴

But for all that, I got what I wanted from the convention. I saw at least a dozen people I hadn’t seen in six months. I played a few games, made some new friends, talked design with designers I respect and theory with theorists I respect.

I suppose if there’s a golden lining to my itinerary it’s that America’s Crumbling Infrastructure™ has really cut down on my regret at soon leaving the United States. Flying from Copenhagen to Toronto — both shiny, new airports with decent signage and reasonably comfortable seats and a selection of actually edible food options — only to turn around and fly to Logan Airport in Boston is downright embarrassing: crowded, claustrophobic, and decidedly unwelcoming. And I’ve been catching Amtrak down the East Coast,⁵ and I’m flying out of JFK, so this won’t improve.

There’s been buckets of ink spilled on the crumbling infrastructure of America, but there’s nothing like being ushered through the middle of it after having seen alternatives to really drive that home. It’s not the age of the infrastructure (JFK is newer than Kastrup by nearly a quarter century), but a kind of grander collapse of vision and investment.

I’m reading a history of America⁶ and one of the constant threads is the disagreements over what a government of the people actually means. Is it a Republic or a Democracy? A loose confederation of sovereign states or a unified nation organized into administrative subdivisions? Do you rely on the broad promises contained in the plain language of the Constitution, or is the government founded on what the common understanding of those promises was at the time?⁷

I’ve frequently brought up the fact that you can’t really compare any given European country to the United States; the United States is much too broad with too many regional quirks and cultural differences to really understand in that way. It’s more fair to compare each state to a European country, with the national government serving in the role of the EU. This isn’t quite right either — US military and foreign policy isn’t run on a state-by-state basis, for example — but I think it’s closer to reality.

I suspect the failure of American infrastructure, in large part, comes from this divide. Large infrastructure projects are naturally funded by the government. In Denmark, there’s really no question who’s responsible for keeping the Copenhagen Airport in decent shape. In the United States, though, you’ve got this weird tug-of-war between the state government and the federal government over who should be paying for JFK.

There used to be at least a general consensus in the United States that these large infrastructure projects were good for the country. Both federal and state governments kicked in. If we’ve lost that vision — if we no longer believe in building these shared spaces to improve everyone’s lives — it really makes you wonder what the point of a government is in the first place. And why would anyone choose to live here?

Next: New York City (JFK) to Mexico City (MEX)
Prev: Toronto (YYZ) to Boston (BOS)

Footnotes

¹ I’m realizing, looking back at the way I write about this stuff, that I’m probably coming across as a bit of a lush. In this context, “drinking heavily” means 3–4 drinks over 4–5 hours. It’s more than I’m used to, especially when I do it a couple days in a row, but it’s not exactly The Lost Weekend levels of excess.

² Intercon games — meaning the sorts of games the community which attends Intercon tends to write — are frequently built around a bunch of characters with secrets and a bunch of mysteries to solve or disagreements to smooth over. These may involve hard personal choices, but they’ve largely been preplanted by the designers, as opposed to being generated by the players.

³ I can’t really remember the details in a 5-page character sheet, let alone do it three times a day for a weekend.

⁴ Contrast this with this year’s Knudepunkt, where the arrangement of the space kind of naturally forced everyone through the same open areas, and the event space was clustered close enough together that there was a constant flow of people. It still wasn’t especially easy to find specific people, but it was reasonably easy to find someone you wanted to talk to or hang out with. Easier, anyway.

⁵ Not actually as bad as its reputation. I mean, European trains are usually (although not always) nicer to ride on, and it’s far slower than it needs to be, but it’s fine.

⁶ These Truths, by Jill Lepore. Highly recommended.

⁷ From Dred Scott v. Sandford:

“… [blacks] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them”

By the way, if your general sense of American history is that it was frequently pretty racist, I can confidently tell you that you are vastly underestimating the scope of what “pretty racist” can entail. Shortly before the Civil War the Louisiana House of Representatives voted to reopen the African Slave Trade and Arkansas passed a law requiring all free blacks leave the state by 1859 or be reenslaved. I don’t recall that being brought up in my high school history classes.