The underground double bus on Boston’s silver line is filled to capacity with an unusually homogeneous crowd this morning. Mostly male, mostly twenty-something, mostly white, mostly dressed in slouchy windbreakers, cargo pants, and baggy jeans. Their T-shirts mostly depict pilated cartoons and mushrooms, and esoteric catchphrases. It’s the uniform of a certain social subset, the kind of attire that suggests acne where there is none. I am standing in the accordion hookup between the two bus sections, which creaks and rattles in a way that suggests imminent disaster. Next to me are two people who do not fit that description: a tall, built man wearing a Bruins jersey and what is presumably his girlfriend, whose streaky, highlighted, flat-ironed blonde hair seems synonymous with the phrase "body shots." Noticing that something is up, he turns to his other side and asks someone, "Where’s everyone headed?"

"It’s PAX," the addressee says, giving the guy’s blank stare a moment before adding, "It’s a convention? For, like, video games." And maybe I’m projecting, but his voice seems to contain exactly that kind of haughtiness you’d expect, an Oh, you’ve probably never heard of it vibe that existed long before hipsters roamed the earth. The Bruins guy doesn’t pay it much mind, though. And it’s not all pimply pale dudes and the jocks they sneer at, either. Seated not too far from me is a pair of black guys who for a minute might seem to be the only other people going somewhere else—until I listen in and hear: "Nah, dawg, it’s like a first-person adventure/fantasy. You’re saving these villagers from like an evil sorcerer..." and so on.

They are a certain kind of person, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t come to the Penny Arcade Expo without expecting to find them. I tried not to make this into a faux-zoological study, a David Attenborough documentary that depicts the geek, that socially outcast sub-species of the young American male, in his natural habitat. But if this scene weren’t peculiar enough to warrant such a treatment, you wouldn’t be reading about it. Besides, if this bus is any indication, the stereotyped could hardly care what we think. They’re here, with their gear; get used to it.

The Penny Arcade Expo is a case study in gaming culture if there ever was one, a sprawling three-day convention featuring new releases, developer panels, gaming tournaments, and more. Unlike other shows, like E3, it is open to the public, making it more of a populist, community-driven experience than an opportunity for industry titans to hawk their wares—though hawk they still do, of course. There are two PAs now; the original Seattle-based one, now called PAX Prime, drew 70,000 attendees in September of last year. While Prime opened in 2004 with a scant 3,300 guests, PAX East here in Boston began just two years ago, and is now comparably sized to its big brother.

Cresting the overpass from the subway station, the sight of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center is the first sign that PAX is serious business. It is an enormous stadium-sized building of steel and glass, its façade an enormous, windowed second-story overhang that looks, somewhat fittingly, like the bridge of an interstellar spaceship. An 80-foot-tall video tower displays the PAX logo, with a game controller’s directional pad composing the "X" and a rotation of slogans below it: "Why Your IT Guy Is ’Out Sick,’ " and so on. The second sign is the massive flow of people that can be seen from hundreds of yards away, all converging on the booths and signage that lie just past the front doors. Then, you finally get to the doors to find that Chevrolet is an official sponsor of the event. An Aveo compact is parked in the courtyard and covered in PAX stickers; predictably, all of the cars present are small, fuel-efficient hatchbacks and hybrids. There are no Cadillacs here. The marketing implication is clear: The attendees here are young, and they aren’t investment bankers or soybean farmers.