This past weekend I attended XOXO. XOXO was an experimental independent arts festival, or maybe a technology conference, or perhaps the fever dream of a terminally online collective, and this year’s—after a five-year delay due to the pandemic—was the last. The two organizers, Andy Baio and Andy McMillan, had ended each of the previous years by saying they weren’t sure if there would be another one, but 2020 was supposed to be the last hurrah, so it has been a long road to this final goodbye.
I’ve written about XOXO a few times before: some thoughts about attending in 2015 as well as some of the games I played that year, and then a Stack Overflow about some books from the 2018 festival, but I’ve actually been present at most of them. First launched via Kickstarter in 2012, XOXO started off small, with only 400 badges sold, and although I didn’t have an official badge, I stopped by to check out some portions that were open to the public, like a little market area. In 2013, I’d run a Kickstarter campaign for my weird board game Emperor’s New Clothes and wrangled a spot in the Tabletop lineup to show it off, which was a lot of fun. Eventually, starting in 2018, I volunteered to provide the tabletop games library for XOXO, curating a list of games that included many from people who were part of the community.
The list of guests at XOXO is pretty incredible—any given year there were several names of people whose work I had enjoyed, and also a lot of people that I didn’t know beforehand but were amazed by their work. Most of them are people who did some form of “making stuff on the internet” but that stuff ranged from websites to games to tools to toys. But unlike what you might expect from a tech-heavy conference, many of these didn’t have the feel of a TED Talk; instead, speakers were vulnerable and talked about what it’s like to burn out, about dealing with imposter syndrome, about being bombarded with harassment. Not that everything was negative, though: there were also people sharing dreams and getting excited about possibilities.
One of the best moves that the Andys (as the organizers are often referred to) made came in 2015 when they started a Slack for the event. They opened it up to attendees about three months before the actual festival, so that people could introduce themselves and start organizing into different channels based on geographical locations or interests. By the time people arrived in Portland in September, they had online friends they were looking forward to meeting in person. And when XOXO ended, the conversations continued in Slack. Each year after that, new attendees were added to the Slack, and the community grew.
And what a community! Another thing the Andys did was to require you to fill out a little questionnaire before you could buy a pass—it wasn’t terribly difficult, but it was meant to weed out people who primarily wanted to attend so they could sell something because that wasn’t the point of XOXO. They had a strict Code of Conduct and enforced it—if you misbehaved, you could get kicked out, and that went for the Slack too, which has a team of volunteer moderators. It made for a community that put a high value on respect and care for each other. It’s notable that this year’s XOXO had mask requirements for the indoor portions, but also had plenty of things set outdoors for COVID safety—precautions that are more and more rare these days, particularly at large events. In the past five years as I’ve felt like many of my online spaces (Facebook, Twitter) have become less and less tolerable, the XOXO Slack has been an example of what the internet can be like when the conversation isn’t driven by megalomaniacal billionaires.
I realize I haven’t even talked about the actual content of the festival, but it almost seems peripheral to the community (not to discount the amazing guests!). Some of this year’s speakers included Molly White, who has been tracking crypto and NFT scams on Web3 Is Going Great; Samantha Cole and Jason Koebler, co-founders of 404 Media which has been posting great long-form journalism in its first year; Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the pandemic at The Atlantic; Charlie Jane Anders, a founder of io9 and author who talked about finding joy and the importance of forgetting. Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic (which makes the Playdate and some cool videogames), told a story about a random discovery at a McDonald’s that culminated in probably the biggest collective gasp for the whole weekend. All of the conference talks will eventually be on XOXO’s YouTube channel and are definitely worth watching.
Aside from the talks, there were folks showing off new and upcoming video games, a gathering of tabletop designers with prototypes to play, and people sharing cool stories about things they made with code. BackerKit sponsored a tabletop game jam, where teams got together and built games, hacking some classic games and rolling dice to choose mechanics and themes. I worked with Jennifer Abele and Amelia Browning to create a haunted house game that, uh, ended up being like a mini Betrayal at House on the Hill. You probably won’t see it in stores anytime soon, but we had fun coming up with ideas and playtesting it a few times. There was a sideshow of internet-based projects, a books and zines store, and karaoke.
Every time I’ve attended, I’ve come away feeling charged up with renewed excitement, and the challenge is hanging onto that feeling long enough to put it to use. I’ve been writing for GeekDad for fifteen years now, and sometimes it seems like this format has been left behind. We never pivoted to video. We still rely on advertising, which requires more and more ads to make less and less money, which also tends to drive our content to be more toward reviews and away from other types of articles. One of the things the 404 Media folks said this weekend was that they really wanted to write for people instead of for machines, and it made me think about the way that we worked so hard to figure out how to make our posts more SEO-friendly, only to have that all fall apart when Google decided to start giving AI-based search results.
We used to have a better connection to our readers—we had comments sections where we could interact, but eventually had to close them because they were always full of spam. We met families at Maker Faire, at our panels at PAX, at our Gaming with GeekDad events at Gen Con. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to do any of those things. I don’t know exactly whether it’s possible to make our site more interesting and engaging to readers and still keep the lights on, but I’d love to try.
It’s hard to say goodbye to XOXO. The Slack is filled with mostly joking suggestions about what to do next: an OXOX festival in Portland, Maine, for instance. One local attendee and I have agreed that if nothing else, we’ll get together next year and spend a weekend assembling the LEGO Imperial Star Destroyer he has boxed up in his garage, and call that our mini XOXO. Now that there won’t be another big organized event, I think a lot of people are motivated to come up with other ways to stay connected—not just online, but to see each other in person, to share the things we’re making, and to keep nurturing this community that has sustained us through some pretty tough times so far.
For now, I have to return to the real world for a bit. There’s laundry to do, meals to plan, kids to drive to their activities. School started this week and we’re getting back into our fall routines. But I wanted to get some of these thoughts down for now, before I forget. I’m grateful to have experienced this strange, hard-to-define conference, and I hope some of it spills over into the rest of what I do.
