SEATTLE, Washington -- What is a "gamer?" Ask ten different Penny Arcade Expo attendees and you'll get ten different answers. Around 50,000 videogame fans have descended on downtown Seattle for this weekend's Penny Arcade Expo, all looking for a different experience.

Some are here to show off their hand-crafted costumes of videogame characters. Some are here to compete in tournaments for thousands of dollars in cash prizes. Some are here to perform videogame music and some are looking to hook up with game publishers and score the job of their dreams. All are here to meet up with like-minded peers from all over the world.

Click through the gallery to see the zaniness of PAX so far. Also check out Wired.com's entire PAX 2008 coverage.

Left: Victor Carino poses for a photograph as Captain Falcon from the game F-Zero on the first day of the Penny Arcade Exposition at the Washington State Visitor and Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, Friday, Aug. 29, 2008.

Jack Waterman, left, and Paul Owens perform "chip tunes," using their Nintendo Game Boy systems as electronic instruments on the first day of the Penny Arcade Expo. Owens directed "Reformat the Planet," a documentary about chip tune artists who create original music using ancient videogame hardware, which is being screened at PAX.

You don't see as much cosplay on the PAX show floor as you do at events like Comic-Con, but there are still plenty of gamers in disguise. Kristopher Benson, left, of Seattle dressed up as Pit, aka Kid Icarus, from the game Super Smash Brothers Brawl. His friend, Hilary Kotzke of Seattle, is dressed as Yuffie -- she's a character from the Final Fantasy series of games, but this particular costume is how she appeared in the Disney/Final Fantasy crossover Kingdom Hearts. Cosplayers are a very specific sort.

The "Omegathon" is one of the most brutal videogame tournaments ever devised. A pool of twenty competitors is slowly whittled down to just two finalists, over six grueling rounds spanning the three days of the show. "Omeganaut" Jo Urbanksy of Litchfield, Ohio, awaits his fate while playing Boom Blox on the Nintendo Wii (during the final match of round two of the Omegathon competition). Urbansky's aim was true, and he moved on to the next round.

Dana White, left, of Seattle says she dressed up as a ninja because she is a ninja. Conversely, Megan Cummings, of Seattle, dressed up as a pirate because she wanted to fight the ninja. (Are they thinking about this game?)

Dungeon Master Sage Kurtz of Portland, Oregon, presides over a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Some gamers come to PAX just to game for three days, whether sprawled on a beanbag chair playing Nintendo DS and trading Pokemon with new friends, or holed up in the tabletop gaming rooms waging pen-and-paper campaigns.

The first two nights of PAX play host to the nerdiest concerts ever. The OneUps, a videogame music cover band, kicked off Friday night's show, which was headlined by Jonathan Coulton, a singer/songwriter who penned "Still Alive," the theme song to last year's cult hit game Portal. Pictured: OneUps guitarist Tim Yarbrough, left, and violinist Greg Kennedy.

Warmachine player Matt Birdsall of Arlington, Washington, rolls the dice while playing Hordes at the Privateer Press exhibit.

Tim Riggs of Spokane, Washington, competes in a Starcraft tournament. PAX's PC gaming room is the stuff of legend: It's sponsored by Intel, and Penny Arcade says it's one of the largest LANs in America. There are 330 computers that attendees can play on, and 300 spots where attendees can set up their own custom rigs. All of those spots had sold out before PAX even began.

As so many years of E3 proved, gamers will do almost anything for swag. To win a the newest version of Brothers in Arms, Kenny Repine of Tumwater, Washington, shaved his head and allowed "HELL" to be painted on his scalp.

There's no Dark Knight videogame that we know of, but that didn't stop Stephanie Lindner and Scott Falkner of Renton, Washington, from dressing up as Harley Quinn and the Joker.

Daniel Smolentsev, right, of Portland, Oregon, and teammate Robert Bosch of Gresham, Oregon, celebrate winning a match in a Team Fortress 2 tournament.

Freezepop vocalist Liz Enthusiasm performs. Freezepop isn't a videogame band per se, but member Kasson Crooker is a senior producer at Harmonix, the creators of Rock Band, and Freezepop's songs have appeared in many of the company's games.

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- From mind-bending art cars to crazy, tricked-out bicycles, there's more than one way to get around at Burning Man. And sometimes the journey's all in your head.

Left: Adrian Selkowitz rides shotgun as Anela Bence drives Boss Hog across the playa. They're just two of the five creators of the huge hog. There's a fine line between a good acid trip and a bad one, and Boss Hog snorts that line up for breakfast.

Bikes of all shapes and sizes grace the avenues at Burning Man. The amount of energy people waste trying to figure out why someone would build these bikes actually makes them less fuel-efficient than a Hummer.

Maya Peer peers through a kaleidoscope created by "Ivan Idea" while Micha Biterman takes a snapshot of her multiple images. The sign is both instructive and a cry for help.

A forklift is brought in to move The Beast from Camp Apocalypse after the monstrous machine's hydraulics failed, causing a mammoth roadblock in the streets of Black Rock City.

In accordance with Burning Man's archaically inhumane robot policy, The Beast will be put to sleep and thrown in a Dumpster out back, and its creators will be told that it was for the best.

A burner turns heads as she cruises through the streets of Black Rock City on a motorized skateboard. Not pictured are the thousands of angry 13-year-olds from whose fantasies she just escaped.

After a blazing day on the playa, burners Adam Al-Harbi (left) from California and Loren Geenberg (center) from New York come out to play in the Zorb, a hamster-wheel-type contraption powered by Logan Jackson and "Dr. Dave" from camp And Then There Is Only Love.

Shortly after this photo, the Zorb became what one onlooker described as a "vomit washing-machine."

It's love at fur sight: A playa moment between "friends."

Lighting the night on fire, Katrina McFerrin, a fire dancer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, shows off her talent for the Crazy Horse Camp. McFerrin later suffered minor burns when she remembered she hadn't set up her out-of-office auto-reply and lost concentration. (Just kidding.)

A spectacular, pedal-powered, fire-spouting vehicle operated by burners from Camp Department of Spontaneous Combustion blazes a trail up the esplanade. And they say cars are dangerous.

Burners dance to sounds spun by Doug LePre, aka Big Daddy Doug, at Big Puffy Yellow Camp beneath the "air star" by Jim McGuire. Four 50-watt bulbs and helium create the full-moon effect, but there can be no explanation for the mumu.

What it is: Envirosight SuperVision 250

What it's used for: Revealing damage deep inside city pipes

You go, you flush: out of sight, out of mind. Not for city maintenance crews. With 850 billion gallons of sewer and storm water leaking into watersheds around the country every year, the Environmental Protection Agency is cracking down on cracked pipes. And the SuperVision 250 is riding that great, stinky wave of demand. Placed in pipes 10 to 72 inches in diameter, this little guy will track down splits, debris, corrosion, and breaks. Operators can watch the video feed from the 10X optical-zoom autofocus camera and use a joystick to pan and tilt. A ring of high-intensity, shadowless LEDs illuminates the scene; dual lasers help size up defects. A sapphire window shields the camera lens, while hardened stainless steel parts protect the crawler from the harsh sewer environment. And thanks to an ultrathin, Kevlar-reinforced tether (sorry, no wireless), the bot can crawl up to 1,640 feet through even heavily obstructed pipes. Just make sure to hose it off when it comes back.

Last year's TV buzz was 1080p. This year's is all about 120 Hz. That refers to the number of images a set displays each second to make your picture move; 120 is twice the norm, netting the smoothest pans since Teflon.

Samsung LN52A750 $3,700, samsung.com This 52-inch Samsung chewed up stuttering 60-Hz video and spit out glass-smooth motion, leaving few visual artifacts. It sailed through most of our processing challenges, proving especially effective at recombining interlaced video. The set also delivered vibrant color — if a bit more saturated, and thus less natural, than the Sony's — after only minor calibration tweaks, which Samsung's simple menus made painless. The subtle, red-hued "touch of color" bezel imparts a reserved style — think Armani, not Elton John. Wired: InfoLink system displays news, weather, and RSS feeds via Ethernet connection. Side-mounted HDMI/USB ports make for easy gaming and photo viewing. Eight HD and three standard-def inputs. Tired: Room lighting + glossy screen = disco reflections. Only one color option, and it might not work for everyone.

Sony Bravia KDL-46W4100 $2,400, sonystyle.com We loved the color right out of this 46-incher's box, and the video processors aced our tests, removing jaggies and scrubbing noise — even from standard-def sources — with little loss of detail. Plus, the motion enhancer smoothed out movement while introducing fewer visual artifacts than any other TV in this batch. (Purists can turn it off for a true filmlike experience.) One gripe: With great features come overstuffed menus. Time to RTFM. Wired: Elegant silver and black bezel. Tons of video inputs — seven HD and five standard-def — plus distinct color profiles for each. Add-on lets you watch select clips via the Net. Tired: Internet add-on is $300! Attention Sony: YouTube is free; you can't charge three bills for an inferior version. PS3-style menus will appeal to gamers but may confuse others.

Sharp Aquos LC-65SE94U $8,500, sharpusa.com This 65-inch monster "five-ups" the previous standard for a large LCD set, but you'll pay for bragging rights. Thankfully, that price buys more than just 5 extra inches of screen. The set produced very dark blacks and a picture bright enough to see even in strong sunlight. But it's time to join the 21st century with your interface, Sharp; we're running out of Atari jokes. Wired: Trumps your neighbor's 60-incher and cranks out enough lumens to let you watch football in the backyard ... just to rub it in. Great-looking narrow-bezel case — important when your TV takes up half a wall. Excellent default picture quality means you can have green Astroturf without taking a course in color calibration. Tired: No bonus features like USB pictures and music. The array of tiny, identical buttons on the remote probably spells "annoying" in braille.

LG Scarlet 47LG60 $2,500, lge.com The bulky, shiny case and visible-from-space power button mark a bold departure from most manufacturers' minimalist styling. And while LG's TruMotion removes stutter, we saw more artifacts than on other LCDs we tested. Default settings produced harsh, oversaturated color — correctable using the bevy of adjustment options but disappointing for a TV of this price. Wired: Straightforward menus simplify navigation and configuration. Separate color adjustment for each input. This 47-inch set boasts one of the few alternatives to picture-frame bezels that isn't designed for a 14-year-old Japanese girl (cough cough, Hannspree, cough). Tired: You'll need expert help — or a lot of time — to dial in good color. No S-video jacks and only one composite input, so forget most of your non-HD sources.

BLACK ROCK CITY, Nevada -- It's hot in the desert, but not too hot to set something on fire.

Amid other activities, Burning Man attendees spit flames and gaze at fiery art installations as the annual festival's iconic Man awaits his inevitable fate.

Left: In the biggest harshed mellow at Burning Man so far this year, the sun decides to come up again. Early risers and those who have not slept wallow confusedly in the solar judgment.

The streets of Black Rock City hustle and bustle with activity as a swarthy unknown by the name of Swearengen arrives seeking wealth and power by any means necessary.

The Cheshire Cat makes its way across the desert and sheds a tear for the old, more wholesome, wonderland.

Burners walk far out on the playa to experience a light and music show created by a team of 20 with weather balloons, off-the-shelf Christmas tree hardware and software, and various insulation and irrigation pipes. This year's decorations are sooo going to one-up the more perfect and WASP-y anarchist festival across the street, Flaming Dude.

A huge ship sails burners across the night desert until the 8-year-old who drew it thinks it looks crappy and throws it away.

Mutopia -- a tech piece of interactive, flame-throwing art depicting a mutant alien life form going through its stages of development -- delights burners. The piece was created by a San Francisco Bay Area group known as the Flaming Lotus Girls.

A costumed burner stops to watch Mutopia.

Natalie Spence works the controls of Mutopia.

Flames shoot from the mouth of a literal burner who just shotgunned a can of lamp oil. This has to be the coolest thing someone can be able to do and still be poor somehow.

Also on Portfolio

When Bloggers Rule the World

Use of Corporate Jets on the Decline

Fat Cat Republican? Here's Where to Eat

Bob Rice has had many careers. He was an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, a partner at law firm Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, C.E.O. of a tech startup, and now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

In his spare time, Rice managed to write Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, one of the more interesting business reads to come down the pike this year, in which he uses the tried-and-true strategies of chess for insight into running a business.

Today, he's squeezing in some blogging. One day. One place: Portfolio.com.

Ah, those Sand Hill Road visionaries, the venture capital guys who finance the future and dictate the trends. It must be fun out there, getting the first glimpses of tomorrow. But suddenly there's a wonderful irony at work: That very future is destroying their industry.

Newspapers are rife with stories about the decline of big V.C. investments, pointing to the trend as a sign of a more conservative investment environment. But I don't think that's really the issue.

Instead, something much more profound is going on: The basic V.C. model is broken. And new technology is driving a much more efficient system for capital allocation to startups.

In fact, technology is largely at fault both for what's wrong with the V.C. world and for what's replacing it. The problem with the industry is this--it's just too cheap to start new companies these days.

Virtual offices allow talent to gather from around the country to work on a new idea without having to quit full-time jobs too early. Servers, computers, and bandwidth are essentially free, and a robust telecommunications platform can be rented for a few tens of dollars a month. Software development can be outsourced without taking on big fixed costs. There are countless programs to manage customer relations, mine contacts, handle the books, and plan and monitor projects. And of course, the internet has reduced the costs of finding customers and testing new concepts to nearly nothing.

Okay, so what? Well, the classic V.C.'s simply have too much money under management, and too expensive a talent pool, to waste time looking at investing anything less than $10 million in a project. Meantime, no entrepreneur wants to give up equity by taking in more money than he absolutely needs. So, when it only costs a few million to get a serious new company off the ground, how can the V.C.'s really play? They have to find places to make gigantic gambles, usually overpaying because the other big V.C.'s are also trying to invest in the few really big-dollar opportunities out there. It has become a system doomed to failure.

The flip side of the story is the rise of angel investor groups. These investment consortiums have always been ideally positioned to provide $500,000 to $5 million equity injections; but until recently, that wasn't enough to get a serious effort off the ground. More fundamentally, however, they have historically not been terribly investor-friendly, largely because the individual members have other occupations.

The individual members didn't work in the same place or even at the same times, so angels were terribly inefficient at evaluating transactions, sharing information, and negotiating and documenting deals.

Those days are over, thanks to software developed by David Rose, founder of the New York Angels (yes, I belong). Angelsoft is a wonderful collaboration platform that manages deal flow, helps match talent and expertise to projects, provides easy-to-use data rooms for potential investors, and generally drives the investment process. It combines project management and social networking in a way that, for the first time, makes the angel process efficient for both the company seeking capital and the potential investors.

The big news now is that, in a period of just a couple of years, over 400 angel groups around the globe have standardized on the platform. That means, of course, that they will also be able to share deals between themselves, vastly expanding the capital and expertise available for any given project.

And entrepreneurs can now create one submission to get access, literally, to a world of sophisticated, organized investors. It sounds like a revolution to me. Check it out at the group's website.

And so, once again, technology is driving a paradigm shift. But this time, it's France in 1789: The progenitors of change are becoming the victims.

OK, we'll admit it. Some of us are drawn to dangerous gear like bears to a picnic basket. There's just something devilishly appealing about mixing a few of our favorite things (tech toys) with one of our least (a ride in the back of a squad car).

Although we'd never condone breaking the law with these five gadgets, we can't deny our morbid fascination with them. Just remember: If misused, these gizmos could get you slapped with a set of handcuffs along with a criminal record.

1. The WASP Knife

A vicious double-whammy of sharpened steel and freezing gas menaces watermelons everywhere.

Designed to quickly dispatch marauding undersea predators, this 5.25-inch hunting/tactical blade conceals a catastrophic one-two punch. After you shank say, a Great White Shark, a flick of a button injects the beast with an 800-psi blast of compressed air. This basketball-sized sphere of freezing gas decimates the interior of whatever it's injected into; whatever's left simply floats to the surface. It works great on watermelons, too.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Stabbing random objects on dry land (and then making them explode) is the fast track to a vandalism charge. Turning the WASP Knife on an innocent creature for non-defense purposes, though? Depending on the state, you're looking at aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, animal cruelty or even the rarely used "mayhem" charge.

2. Sonar II Burner

The Sonar II can burn through garbage bags and retinas with equal aplomb.

Look, everyone wants a lightsaber. But we can't have them because: A) midi-chlorians don't exist and, B) law enforcement agencies are already less-than-enthused over high-power handheld lasers. Consider for a moment, Wicked Lasers' Sonar II Burner. Essentially a more powerful version of the lasers found in Blu-ray players, this six-inch tool doesn't have to compensate for anything; it can light matches, burn holes through paper and melt plastic.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Where to begin? At 60mW, the Sonar II is totally capable of starting fires (arson), burning retinas (assault) and disorienting airline pilots (Gitmo).

3. EMT Paintball Sentry Turret

Fires 30 rounds per second. Fully automated. Illegal in virtually all forms of competitive paintball.

May the Flying Spaghetti Monster's noodley appendage help the poor schmoe who ends up in the cross hairs of the Sentry Turret. This remote-controlled, tripod-mounted paintball cannon unleashes oil-based vengeance at 30 rounds per second on full-auto. And all you paint-balling pros take note: The EMT is not some glorified sloppy-shot Brass Eagle. Integrated-vibration dampeners plus rotation/tilt mechanisms make rounds fired from this gadget highly accurate.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

With the amount of paint the Sentry is capable of unloading, you'd definitely be facing accusations of assault, disturbing the peace and any other charges your welt-covered victims care to press.

4. Fiber Laser Marking System

It may not look menacing, but this portable laser can sear images into rock, glass and metal.

If you're going to deface public property, you might as well get an assist from technology. Laser Photonic's unintentional contribution to this practice is the "Handheld Fiber Laser Marking System." This portable, high-power laser was originally designed for etching graphics into industrial surfaces like metal, glass and stone. Sure, it lacks the DIY charm of spray paint. But it makes up for this by running off a car battery, and being able to etch almost any graphic you can load on a multimedia card.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Tagging public property with such creativity and zeal is likely to bump up the charge. A number of states reserve the right to boost vandalism charges to the felonious level if the damage exceeds $400, is especially malicious or is performed by a repeat offender.

5. Lil' Buttie LB110

Don’t let the name fool you; this gadget is not your friend … if you get caught illegally tapping a phone line with it.

You don't have to work for the NSA to listen to other people's phone calls. A nifty lineman's handset like the Lil' Buttie LB110 is enough to do the trick. This cheap, easy-to-find gadget is the cornerstone of tapping a phone line. All it really takes is hooking the handset's alligator clamps to a set of exposed telephone wires and syncing up the handset. Once you're on the line, you can snoop on conversations, record them or even dial out at your leisure.

Why It'd Get You Arrested:

Despite what you may think, owning a "butt set" isn't illegal. Don't be fooled though -- unless you're using it for running diagnostics on your own phone line, someone's bound to drop the hammer. Getting caught using (or even installing) an unauthorized line is the express lane to a felonious wiretapping charge, and/or a lifetime of government scrutiny. Trust us on this one.

1965: An astronaut in space holds a conversation with an aquanaut underwater, marking another milestone in human communication.

Astronaut Gordon Cooper, orbiting the Earth with Pete Conrad in Gemini 5, hooked up by radiotelephone with an old pal, astronaut-turned-aquanaut Scott Carpenter, who was living and working 205 feet beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean near La Jolla, California, aboard Sealab II.

The two men had known each other since 1959, when they were among the seven pilots chosen by NASA to be America's first Project Mercury astronauts. Carpenter, a former Navy pilot, had already been in space, the solo astronaut on a mistake-plagued, three-orbit flight aboard Aurora 7 that resulted in his being effectively grounded.

He was on leave from the space agency when he joined the Navy's Sealab II project as training officer. Carpenter eventually resigned from NASA in 1967. He retired from the Navy in 1969.

Cooper and Conrad, meanwhile, were nearing the end of an eight-day orbital mission to test human endurance in space. Eight days was recognized as the time needed to travel to the moon and back. (Five days was the longest Soviet space flight before then, and the American record was four days. By years' end, American astronauts would complete a 14-day mission in space.)

The radio hookup was partly a gimmick, to take advantage of Carpenter's astronaut status to publicize the Sealab II project. But it was also a method of testing the effectiveness of an underwater electronics lab installed aboard the submersible.

Gemini 5 was not the only long-distance call made from Sealab II. The Navy aquanauts also spoke with President Johnson at the White House and with Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf 3 team, French colleagues conducting a similar underwater-habitat test off Cap Ferrat in the Mediterranean Sea.

Following their chat with Carpenter, Cooper and Conrad readied Gemini 5 for its return to Earth and splashed down in the very same Pacific Ocean later that day.

Thirty years later, in 1995, Carpenter recreated his seabed-to-space call, chatting with astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavor while staying at Jules' Undersea Lodge off Key Largo, Florida.

Source: Various