It's the GC 2006 Exhibitor Party in the Volkspalast Leipzig — an evening of pedestrian decadence swaddled in a level of mundanity surprising from such a creative industry.

Am I an exhibitor? No. As my attire — dirty jeans, red Converse All-Stars, a t-shirt emblazoned with a crimson Asiatic cryptogram which (I only learned from a Chinese menu many years after purchase) proudly proclaimed me to be Number One — all attest the fact that I am a bum.

It's really not my kind of party. My kind of party involves having punk rock girls spit swigs of whiskey into my mouth on the dance floor. But I have come in search of a scoop — I have been told it will be athrob with game developers, some of whom might drunkenly spill some insider secrets which might very well make my name in gaming journalism.

As I first walk in, four stern Aryan godlings, naked and spray-painted gold, dangle on rope swings from the ceiling. "Yo, how's it going!" I say to one of them. She cracks a grin, which threatens to compromise the ostentatiousness of the entire event. A beefy security guard quickly advances, shrugging his mighty and magnificent shoulders as if to loosen them up before clobberizing me. "Woob woob woob woob!" I shriek as I run off.

The booze is plentiful and free, so I begin sucking down scotches as I wander the club. The dance floor is the nexus, violets spakling on gleaming ebony; While the Bright Young Things of Gaming twirl in shafts of light like vivid butterflies caught in a column of deep forest sun, I find my abortive attempts to join the pirouette thwarted by sneers, violently waving fists and cries of "What the hell is wrong with you?" Slam dancing does not appear to be the rhythmic melee of choice for an event like this.

Depressed, I wander around, looking for a "scoop", like someone notable and drunk enough to make out with me while I take pictures with my camera phone and upload them to Kotaku. But I don't recognize anyone... although ostensibly an industry party, the industry — like most industries — appears to be comprised entirely of an anonymous armada of vapid, pretentious poofs.

Biomasses of chicness tend to have their own natural filtering mechanisms, which sucks more desirable socialite particles to the center while naturally expelling viral elements that might pollute the party with their own inherent lameness. The crowd has not sucked me in; it's spit me out. I find myself on the fringe of the party, sitting with the losers of gaming. I am already drunk.

This group includes one of the Rockstar Vienna guys, now apparently jobless. He hands me a depressingly plain business card that has obviously been printed on his personal printer and tells me to send him an email in two or three months, when maybe he has a job. He mentions how surprising it was that Rockstar Vienna was closed down...

"I mean, it's not like we didn't release some great games? Right?" He grabs my arm and squeezes it, indicating a desperate need to be validated. "RIGHT?"

"Dude, totally," I assure him. Then it hits me, "Hold on. Didn't you guys do Max Payne 2 for the PS2?"

He begins twitching all over, "That wasn't our fault, that was Sony, and that's the reason I'll say until the day I die that Sony are a bunch of TOTAL FUCKING ASSHOLES."

This is the single best quote of the entire conference.

Our group also includes a couple of paunchy, balding Germans: these guys created the Settlers series, apparently. They seem like earnest dorky dudes, and I like them immediately. We talk about the Settlers 2 booth babes, mostly about just how adorable they were with their whole sidewalk-laying act. They mention to me that even though they are now up to Settlers 5, Settlers 2 proved so popular that they just had to remake it. I continue to call over more scotches, hoping that my delirium tremens will pass for interest in a game series about which I know absolutely nothing.

Finally, the loser corner is rounded out by Barry, the earnest webmaster of a British Xbox fansite, 360monster.com. I actually know him from the Major Nelson teledildonics party at the Microsoft Tiki Hut. He is one of many European webmasters who has accepted Microsoft's dime to go to Leipzig; I have seen this group consistently escorted by Microsoft from developer interview to developer interview over the course of the conference. Despite the fact that Microsoft is actually paying people to escort the Xboxmonster.com guy around, it is obvious that he has been ditched.

Barry's a really good guy, but I'm feeling very much out of my league at Leipzig, and he's spending a lot of time bragging to me about his exclusive preview of Bioshock, or his hands-on time with Assassin's Creed, or the way he got Unreal Tournament 2007's producer to accidentally slip the fact that a PS3 version was, indeed, in development.

"And what scoops did you get?" he asks.

"Well, I posted a pretty good story about an erection I got at the SOCOM 3 booth..." I start. Barry cuts me off with a patronizing look of kindness and actually deigns to reach over and pat my knee comfortingly.

"Don't worry," he soothes. "You have to start somewhere, right?"

But before I can smash my snifter of scotch into Barry's face and force him to chew the shattered glass while I sit atop his sternum, wide-eyed and screaming, a huge fat man reeking of a thousand flabby folds of oozing putrescence drunkenly stumbles up, then unapologetically crashes down on the back of my chair.

"Oi oi oi!" he says. He sounds exactly like a fat, British Rerun. It immediately becomes clear that he knows Barry intimately and is positioning himself to join our conversation. His foul, swollen belly lays like a moist sack of instant concrete on the nape of my neck. Simultaneously, he silently but noxiously farts, and I smell the rotting corpse of the hog he devoured that morning. The stench causes me to experience a truly curious evolution of the gag reflex: the instinctive desire to vomit out my own brain.

This, gentlemen, is what hell is like.

But then I see Will Wright.

Gangly and awkward, with the adorable bumbling grace of a walking stick insect, he pushes by our table in the crowd, unassumingly dressed in jeans and a tucked-in green shirt. Wright's hand trails behind him, grasping the slimmer, whiter hand of an attractive blonde 15 years his junior.

I do not like the games of Will Wright. My lesbian lifemate Eliza Gauger once summed up her feelings about his games so expertly that I'm better off just parroting her: "Will Wright makes games I play for three hours and then put away for two years."

But I have 1000 euros worth of credit card expenses to turn in to Gawker for the debacle of sending me, a totally out-of-place misanthrope, to Leipzig. I need a "scoop" to justify my 130 euro a night hotel room, not to mention my endless cab rides and bottomless minibar bill.

"Fuck this!" I sneer, "MOTHER FUCK THIS."

I launch to my feet. I am going to interview Will Wright if I have to hold him down on the floor and shriek questions into his face.

Following a fleeing Will Wright and his girlfriend proves more difficult than I expect. There appears to be an equilibrium problem, introduced into my system at the end of a half a dozen double scotches. Nevertheless, when they pause at a doorway, leaning in for a kiss, I grab my chance. I thrust myself forward and disrupt what ought to be a magical moment of romance between the creator of Spore and his girlfriend by shoving my outstretched hand between them.

"How you doing," I salute. Will Wright blinks in shock; his girlfriend's lips press into a thin line of contempt at the drunken, disheveled jackass interrupting them during a romantic moment. Will Wright, though, is a champ. Recovering quickly from his shock, he greets me with a smile and puts his hand into mine. He has a drier and more powerful grip than I expect.

"Hi!" he greets. He is extremely pleasant and has the demeanor of a kindly but slightly befuddled college professor. In fact, he bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Donald Sutherland. I like him.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, but my name's Florian Eckhardt and I just wanted to tell you what a big fan I am," I say. This is not strictly true — I don't really enjoy his games. But I do admire his dedication and his imagination. It's not a total lie.

"Oh, thanks!"

Dead silence. I realize that I have absolutely no idea what to say next. But the moment is slipping. Both Will Wright and his girlfriend are now exchanging curious looks with one another, as if wondering what the best way to extricate themselves from a sudden confrontation with a doofus actually is. I can't let him get away: this is my scoop. GC06: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH WILL WRIGHT!

"Ummmm..." I stupidly prattle on, "Hey, I saw your Spore presentation today. It looks like it's coming along great!"

Even kindly Will Wright seems to be losing interest in this lame conversation. "Yeah, we've got a good team..." he mumbles, looking around desperately for an escape.

And then escape comes, engineered by his girlfriend. She points over my shoulder.

"Oh, look, Will," she announces with cold, transparent calculation. "There's some drinks we ought to have!"

And with the cool, breezy dismissal that can only be successfully employed by a beautiful woman, she brushes by me, dragging a relieved looking Will Wright behind her by the hand.

And that — oh my brothers — is the precise moment I realized I would never be a games journalist. Florian Eckhardt