Last night, in an apparent attempt to boost my nerd creds, I went to the Video Games Live concert at Wolf Trap. A bottle of wine, some sweet $10 lawn tickets (the NSO put them on sale for a few days over the winter) and a picnic on an utterly perfect night made all the difference.

This concert is cooler than you might think (and it’s a pretty good concept to begin with). In addition to the symphony, a chorus sang many of the unintelligible dramatic themes used on modern video games, and clips from the games were shown on giant screens. And yes, you do get to hear an entire symphony playing along as ‘Pong’ is shown on the screen.

There was a video game character costume contest, and a victim was brought on stage to play Space Invaders — controlling his paddle by running back and forth — and in perhaps the most enjoyable moment of the night, a kid won a laptop computer for scoring enough points by playing Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” on Guitar Hero — at the expert level. At one point, he hit more than 500 straight notes correctly…something I could never do at the Dumbass Level, and I actually play a little guitar.

And finally, as part of the pre-show entertainment, there was this: