Inside the Koelnmesse, Everything Is Virtual

Walking into Gamescom is like entering a city built entirely for one purpose and slightly too large for any individual to comprehend. The Cologne convention center fills up with cosplayers in full armor, professional esports players staring into monitors with the focused blankness of surgeons, and lines—so many lines—of people willing to queue for forty-five minutes to get five minutes with a game they could probably watch on YouTube. I understand why they do it. Recorded footage is not the same thing.

The year 2016 was the year VR stopped being a promise and became something you could actually put on your face. Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR—all three playable on the floor, all three drawing the longest queues. The technology was genuinely impressive in a way that was also faintly unnerving, the way things are when they work better than expected. You put the headset on and your brain accepts the fiction immediately, without negotiation. That tells you something about brains.

The backdrop that year was unusual. A summer of attacks across Germany had everyone recalibrating what large public gatherings felt like, and Gamescom wasn’t exempt. Bags above a certain size were banned; weapon replicas were prohibited even for cosplayers in full costume; security checks at every entrance added time to queues that were already long. There was something odd about the contrast: inside, virtual worlds designed to be inhabited completely; outside, the quiet procedural reality of threat assessment.

It didn’t kill the atmosphere. The floor was loud and bright and packed with exactly the kind of people who exist most fully in this particular context—the ones who know these digital worlds the way other people know geography or family history. Gamescom always has that quality: a city within a city, with its own culture and social codes. The real world is out there somewhere. In here, there are dragons to find.