INDIANAPOLIS, IN—"The Reavers in your bed," sang the kilted duo, "are going to eat your face!"

Sitting in the back row of a windowless conference room packed with 125 Firefly lovers, I listened to this demented lullaby while duly jotting down the chorus: eat... your... face. And I wondered, not for the first time, what I was doing among the 50,000 other attendees at Gencon

I mean to say, when your job involves listening to a percussionist with more than a passing resemblance to Smee play a djembe while singer Marc Gunn strums an autoharp and belts out Irish drinking songs with lyrics like, "It's good to have Jayne Cobb on your side," certain questions inevitably arise. Chief among them: after seeing this, could I even call myself a 'nerd' anymore?

I certainly showed every early nerd tendency. At eight, I organized a rock club with friends from school. At 14, I used an Apple IIGS and an Imagewriter to launch my own sci-fi newsletter. At 16, I taped every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation onto stacks of VHS tapes, using the pause button to edit out the commercials while recording.

I wrote my own computer games. I read books on desktop publishing—for fun. And on one memorable occasion, I wore a black-and-gold Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt above a pair of truly startling Bermuda shorts. Sound the nerd alert klaxons, right?

But there are nerds and there are nerds.

To put it another way: it took only minutes in the main Gencon gaming hall to spot a guy sporting green hair and less clothing than Lara Croft while playing a miniatures-based World War I air combat game with intense concentration. The effect was not unlike the moment I got my first electric guitar, learned to bash out three chords and the truth, and then heard Van Halen's "Eruption" for the first time. In both cases, I immediately realized: I'm never going to compete with that.

Gencon

56,614 people attended this year's Gencon, making it the largest gaming convention in the world. 14,000 separate events were held across the four days of the show. The official program guide, listing every single one of these events, was 354 pages long.

This remarkable variety meant that, at any given time, you could join:

Hundreds of role-playing adventurers from the Pathfinder Society, "a legendary league of explorers, archaeologists, and adventurers dedicated to discovering and chronicling the greatest mysteries and wonders of an ancient world beset by magic and evil."

The 53 people hoisting (miniature) canvas sails as they attempted to set a world record for the largest single game of Sails of Glory. (Overheard dialogue: "The wind direction is coming from room 212!")

A panel discussion featuring the Christian Gamers' Guild. Guiding verse: "We may throw the dice, but the Lord determines how they fall." (Proverbs 16:33)

Archer: The Board Game. It is... not for kids.

A Savage Worlds tabletop RPG mashing up the Realms of Cthulhu rules with everyone's favorite meddling kids. For four hours, you could join the gang from Scooby-Doo as they try "to find out who's scaring off guests at a posh mountain resort. Hint: it's not Old Man Smithers." (Second hint: It's probably an Elder God!)

An oversized floor-mat version of Catan: Star Trek.

Demonstrations of every board game on the planet. Want to play the upcoming Xcom: The Board Game? A Kickstarted game in which you attempt to marry Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Darcy before the other players? Dreaming Spires, a game about Oxford University's 700+ year history? The Castles of Mad King Ludwig? You can!

The Train Gamers Association, who were hosting a (quite serious looking) con-long Puffing Bill Tournament on titles like Spectral Rails, Days of Steam, and Santa Fe Rails.

A line so long that you have no idea what's at the other end.

The sheer size of Gencon dazzles, and I spent my first several hours sort of stumbling through convention halls and exhibit floors until plopping myself down at a demo for the My Little Pony collectible card game. This was a mistake, because 1) I know My Little Pony only as a set of plastic horse figurines with manes that my daughters like to brush and 2) it was still too early in the morning to figure out if I should play the Combat Hat on Rainbow Dash or if I would win my faceoff against Apple Bumpkin.

I played long enough to know that becoming a brony was not in my future.

I had come to this massive Sto'Vo'Kor of gaming to take my first serious dip into a gaming con and its culture. Was I still the childhood nerd I used to be? Would I actually enjoy doing the sorts of things that would subject me to nothing but slack-jawed stares of disbelief from relatives across the Thanksgiving dinner table? In other words: was I a part of this world?

Not yet. This feeling was confirmed as I watched the parade of amazing T-shirts pass me by. Every third Gencon attendee appeared to be wearing a shirt that I would only wear beneath another shirt. Here were a small sample:

"So be it, Jedi"

"Of dice and men"

"So much Cthulhu!"

"Keep out of direct sunlight"

"Nyan apocalypse!"

"For a good time, insert coin"

"There's no place like 127.0.0.1"

"It's a Kilt! If I wore something under it THEN it would be a skirt"

Feeling out of place in my polo, I picked up my badge and swung through the exhibitor hall to pick out my first bona fide nerd T-shirt, which advertised the "34th Annual Kessel Fun Run" held on behalf of the "Wookiee-Pox Awareness Foundation." I was quite pleased with the design, which didn't call attention to its nerd content in the way that, say, a shirt bearing the logo of a Cylon raider's head might.

Which, I supposed, was confirmation that I was a nerd—not a nerd.

But I resolved to drink deeply from the goblet of nerdy delights anyway—and that meant it was time for True Dungeon.

True Dungeon

I have loved role-playing games ever since blasting my way through the robot hordes in Origin's dystopic 2400 A.D. on an Apple II. But I've always stuck to the computerized version; tabletop Dungeons & Dragons under the command of an arbitrary dungeonmaster never appealed. But I was tempted by the universal acclaim lavished on "True Dungeon," a live-action role-playing experience in which you join a party of 10 human adventurers and travel together through a series of combat and puzzle rooms to defeat the evil dragon lord or whomever.

True Dungeon brought two of its adventures to Gencon 2014, taking over its own massive hall to stage them, so I plunked down my $48(!) and mustered in with my company at the proper time. Character creation came first. Using tokens given to newcomers or those earned from playing True Dungeon on previous occasions, you fill out a character sheet.

Everyone else in my party appeared to be an old hand at True Dungeon, with some bringing tokens earned in previous encounters, and I felt adrift. Was someone going to explain the pros and cons of the various classes? The weapons? The spells? Without documentation or anything in the way of a tutorial, I had a moment to panic—what would my party do to me when it came to battle some Balrog and I just stood there with my bag of tokens, saying, "Uh, so what should I do?"

But the warrior to me left helpfully leaned over, broke down the classes for me, dug up an extra bow token he didn't need, and showed me how to outfit my rogue with it.

"Don't worry, you'll figure it out," he said, and I was grateful not to have joined up with a group which looked down on anyone who didn't know their 5th edition D&D rules from the 4th edition.

Each adventurer wore a card around the neck, on which one's current hitpoints were noted with, err, a paper clip. Take a hit from some undead skeleton and you had to move the clip down the requisite number of points; use a healing potion and you could slide it back up.

When the Horn of Someoneorother sounded—the storyline here not being exceptionally strong, it hardly mattered—we filed out of our room and into the Viper's Den, before a temple devoted to a snake god. The game was afoot. In each room of the experience, a dungeon master waited to oversee a party's progress, to coordinate battle with the many monsters within the temple, and to hurry you along if your group was moving too slow. This first room featured a puzzle involving pillars and letters and bowing. Despite my initial confusion, I was able to use my special roguish ability to play a live-action minigame that involved tracing a pattern in a box lid without touching the pattern's wall—and thus to earn a clue that helped our group solve the puzzle. After losing several hit points for being too slow, our group figured out the path into the snake temple and pushed aside the thin black curtain into the next room.

There we faced combat. In True Dungeon, enemies appear as outlines on tables, with different body parts marked with different numbers of hit points. You attack them by placing a weapons token into a plastic cradle and sliding it down the table. The dungeonmaster then looks at the hit points and applies the modifiers belonging to your character and weapon choice. It is, essentially, a game of dungeon shuffleboard—fun, but a little odd.

During our two-hour dungeon crawl, my party of nine men and one woman journeyed deep into the heart of the snake god's temple. Everything was going swell—monsters were dispatched, puzzles were defeated, treasure was acquired—until the second-to-last room. As our party entered, a silk screen lit up with the silhouette of a snake-headed woman. The dungeonmaster said nothing, so our party stood and watched, waiting for whatever monster was about to appear so we could get to the real business of placing crossbow bolts into our shuffleboard cradles.

Unfortunately, when the woman appeared from behind the screen, the dungeonmaster announced that she was a Medusa-style gorgon and that everyone looking at her (as everyone was doing) had just been turned to stone. We all made saving throws; my rogue failed. I got to the spend the next ten minutes sitting on the floor.

When the group finally defeated the gorgon and entered the final room, I naively assumed my curse would end. It did not. Our party did battle once more, this time with some kind of evil enchantress as her 30-foot high pneumatic dragon hissed and jerked in the background. I had a good view of the dragon, because I was sitting on the floor once more, still a statue. One by one, party members joined me as they were slain. Soon all 10 of us were down and the dungeonmaster wrote TPK—Total Party Kill—in large black letters on our party sheet.

And with that, True Dungeon—fun, frustrating, and unique—was over.

While the mechanics had been new, the basic play element—rogues, dungeons, mini-games, enchanters, dragons, and hit points—were not. This was bog-standard, Tolkien-ripoff storytelling dressed up with foam pillars and dark curtains. In the end, True Dungeon had not out-nerded me. In search of something truly novel, I turned my attention to a Gencon-recommended program in the main ballroom that evening.

It was labelled "nerd burlesque." My only thought was: it can't be. But it was.

Take off that trench coat!

Sitting in a darkened ballroom at 10pm, moments before a Glitter Guild stage show was about to begin, I figured I was missing some kind of joke here. Surely 500 people had not gathered to watch a woman dancing round a stripper pole while wearing the Slave Leia bikini from Return of the Jedi, right?

Reader, they had not—but only because Slave Leia and her bikini had been featured at the Gencon burlesque last year.

This time around, the event opened with a different sexy Star War character: Oola, the Twi'lek dancer otherwise known as "the woman with the giant head tentacles" from Jabba the Hutt's palace. As the music began, a dancer emerged from the wings in a hooded robe, removing it to reveal authentic headgear above a purple dress. The purple dress didn't last much longer than Oola did in the rancor pit, however; it was soon stripped off to reveal the mesh outfit worn in the film. Then it was off with the mesh—and the act ended with an LED blazing out from whatever the word is for Twi'lek genitalia.

This hilarious—and somewhat unnerving—display was quickly followed by a woman in a red trench coat doing unspeakable things to my fond memories of Carmen Sandiego. (Let's just stipulate that the original Carmen Sandiego probably wore more under that coat than red panties and blue pasties.)

Next up, as the punk stylings of The Offspring song "Come Out and Play" blasted through the ballroom, a woman swayed onto the stage... dressed as a giant die. She was followed by a man from St. Louis who quickly stripped down to a salmon-colored thong and proceeded to writhe with abandon up a portable metal pole, from which he extended himself horizontally, supported only by his legs squeezing the pole in a death grip.

The pièce de résistance of the evening, however, had to be the moment in which a man dressed as the cop from The Walking Dead crooned a zombie-slaying song into the microphone while wearing nothing but an assless black codpiece adorned with a shiny gold star—while 10 zombie backup dancers shambled about behind him.

This was just bizarre. Though the show continued, I had done my journalistic duty and decided that sleep was more important than watching a woman in a green dress strip down in the presence of a balloons-for-tentacles Cthulhu. I headed back to my hotel and dreamed dark dreams.