I want someone to play with.
Ryan, myself, and several of our friends went to see the seminal Batman Begins on opening day and to while away the time we, of course, brought our PSPs and our copies of Wipeout Pure. Being in San Francisco, we thought we'd conduct an experiment and play with our little bundles of joy unabashedly in the open and hope that either a.) someone would approach us and ask us what we're playing in the hopes of joining in, or b.) a random somebody would just happen to be looking for a Wipeout game while we're sitting in the multiplayer lobby waiting to begin. Realistically, of course, the second of these scenarios is very, very unlikely to occur, and while we saw a few others jacked in over their miniature 16:9 displays, there was no spontaneous multiplayer. Which makes me weep. Mostly on the inside. Mostly.
To be clear, Ryan and I are in San Francisco--the, supposedly, most wired city in the country and we were seeing the show at the Sony Metreon where you'd assume other PSPers may possibly feel comfortable playing their portable systems in public. Granted, we're kinda dorky-looking and I can't blame people for not wanting to walk up to adult men playing with "children's toys" and ask for a game, but we've decided to be determined when it comes to spontaneous, public gaming and will continue to pull out our PSPs while waiting for dinner, in line for the cinema and on the subway in an effort to promote a method of open multiplayer that has an aspect no other multiplayer experience has yet to match: that of actually meeting flesh-and-blood people face to face. Is this a misguided attempt to surrounded ourselves with the like-minded in order to validate our own existence or is there something to really be said for taking gaming "to the people," as it were, as a social tool beyond just 0wnx0ring some n00b?