The exhibitors at TGS 2009 spend many thousands of dollars constructing lavish high-wattage booths with enormous TV screens in a gigantic effort to dazzle the eye. Then they hire armies of people to yell at you if you try to take a picture. "NO PHOTO!" they say with their arms/fingers crossed in a big "X."
Jones and I found this baffling, and after I got frantically shooed away from a few booths for my snapshot-snapping ways, we decided to get some footage of me getting yelled at for trying to take pictures. The idea was that I would provoke a bunch of the no-photo people to come out to yell at me, and we'd stitch together a montage of me getting in trouble, maybe set it to some krazy chiptunes. In other words, we would be jerks on tape. I used to do this for a living.
Of course, right after we got this idea, it became impossible for me to be scolded, even at the same booths that had shooed me off earlier that day. Once the cameras started rolling, I only got "yelled at" once, by a guy at the Square Enix booth. And he could not have been nicer about it, which made me feel like crap. I wanted to give him a big hug.
Everybody else just looked at me funny without taking action. Jones' solution every goddamn time, as you hear in this clip, was to urge me to "get closer."
I took Jones' advice to the logical extreme at the Xbox booth, mere inches away from a display festooned with "NO PHOTO!" stickers. No dice. The gestapo atmosphere of the morning had given way to a weary minimum-security vibe by the afternoon.
So they killed me with kindness. I went all the way to TGS and all I got was these lousy outtakes. Tokyo Game Show "No Photo" Guys 1, Teti 0.