PAX East 2012 – Sunday

By Shamus Posted Sunday Apr 8, 2012

Filed under: Notices 42 comments

splash_pax.jpg

And so I come to the final day of PAX. It is not unlike the experience of visiting an amusement park: It begins with joyful enthusiasm as you try to try to take in everything at once. By the end you’re sort of shell-shocked, footsore, overstimulated, and sick of junk food, but you press on and try to see everything not because you want more, but because you know you won’t get the opportunity again for a long time.

Attending PAX is a surreal experience. It’s a huge crowd of young people who are unaccountably polite, cheerful, and well-behaved. It’s a place where you can pay nine dollars for an unremarkable hamburger and not get a side order or a drink to go with it. It’s a place where you’ll see Team Rocket, Commander Shepard, and the Team Fortress 2 Medic wandering around looking at board games and XBLA titles. It’s a place where men have to stand in line for the bathroom, and women don’t.

Writing about PAX is frustrating. I visited about eight different indie developers on the show floor. Every one of them had interesting things to say about the ideas in their game, their development process, or the hurdles they faced in bringing the game to market. Any one of them could merit a 1,000 word post. But a week from now? I’m sure I’ll lose my grip on the specifics of the conversations, or forget which bright-eyed dreamer went with which title. There just isn’t enough time to put these stories in order before they slip away.

And that’s just the indie devs, which represent about two hours of my three-day adventure. Then there are the lavish presentations for AAA games. There’s the panel I was on. There are other panels, aimed at having discussions about the hobby or the industry that feeds it. Then there are the entertainment events. The social gatherings. The cosplay. The spectacle of the show floor. The celebrities. The swag. The peculiarities of an ephemeral three-day flash culture. The general trials of moving around and feeding yourself in the most incomprehensible transit system* ever built by human beings.

* You’ve never been truly lost until you’ve tried to drive six blocks in Boston.

Tomorrow we’re going to drive home, reunite with family, get some proper food, and take some rest. I’ll spend about two days staring at the computer screen, clicking on the same links over and over again because my short-term memory will have been reduced to twenty seconds. By the time I recover, I’ll have lost my grip on my PAX memories. What did we do Friday? I seem to remember attending a panel where the water cooler was empty. But maybe that was Saturday?

Some highlights, before I forget: I got to spend time with Graham, Kathleen, Matt, and James of Loading Ready Run. I got to see my friends at The Escapist. I got to meet James Portnow of Extra Credits. I got to meet many of you.

 


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42 thoughts on “PAX East 2012 – Sunday

  1. Henson says:

    Boston’s roads are pretty terrible. Everything is one-way.

    1. Zombie Pete says:

      You do not drive in Boston. That’s what the T is for.

    2. LintMan says:

      The generally transit philosophy in Boston is:

      If you don’t already know where you’re going, you don’t belong here.

      Which leads to things like no street name signs for the major roads, only the cross streets (if that).

      One time, my visiting parents and I were trying to get to the Museum of Science (which lies on the Charles River, between Boston and Cambridge), and we took a wrong turn literally within eyeshot of the museum. We then spent the next 45 minutes circling up and down the Cambridge and Boston sides of the Charles River, trying to get back there, thwarted again and again by detours, misleading signs, and surprise exit-only lanes that force you over the bridges across the river. It was the Boston version of European Vacation’s “Look kids -Big Ben! Parliament!” but with MIT and Boston U.

      This is why, as Zombie Pete says, you use the T in Boston.

  2. Caffiene says:

    I… er… you may want to be more specific with your Faye Valentine comment. Im lead to believe you might be talking about Cowboy Bebop cosplay, but anybody putting it into google is more likely to end up finding a high profile XXX performer who has gone by the same name.

    1. Shamus says:

      Heh. I had no idea. Thanks for the heads up.

  3. Josh says:

    Hey, where am I on these highlights? That time I pick-pocketed your pants out of your inventory was awesome!

    1. Christopher M. says:

      Shamus’ pants are in his inventory? Huh. Must not be playing monkey island, then – ‘twould be the other way round.

    2. IFS says:

      But if you stole his pants what did you put the grenade into?

      1. JPH says:

        And the incinerator.

  4. Ringwraith says:

    “It's a place where men have to stand in line for the bathroom, and women don't.”
    THE END IS NIGH.

    That must be weird, as that never happens.
    Kind of sadly makes sense when you think about it though.

  5. Dasick says:

    What helps is bringing a notebook (or some sort of sound recorder, if you’re ok with constantly asking people for permission to record their voice). Just very brief point-form notes on what you thought was interesting can help you trigger the memories.

    It’s kind of like procedural compression – you record the event, phrase, idea, whatever that started your thought process, and when you need it all you have to do is put the seed in your head and follow the thought process.

    1. A photo of the game with logo + notes on the business card was our solution.

  6. Malkara says:

    Seeing your panel was a highlight, even if you broke my heart by running out of boooooks. :P

  7. Aanok says:

    Curse you, Atlantic Ocean! Why do you stand in the way between me and nerd awesomeness?

    1. Menegil says:

      Hear hear. Come visit Portugal some day, Shamus!

      1. Jarenth says:

        You misspelled ‘The Netherlands’ in your comment, but otherwise I fully agree.

  8. Gamer says:

    Completely off topic, but Happy Easter to Shamus, the SW crew, and all the guys on this blog.

    1. JPH says:

      Where are the eggs? I can’t find the eggs!

      1. Irridium says:

        Sound’s like you’re feeling a bit… scrambled.

        1. Aldowyn says:

          I’m sure Shamus is a bit fried from his experience at PAX…

          1. Audacity says:

            I feel I should denounce this punning as childish, but I know all to well that doing so would just be egging you punsters on.

            1. Gamer says:

              Oh, boy. All this punning just got hare-y

              1. ZzzzSleep says:

                These yolks are terrible! At least I can poach the best ones though…

                1. JPH says:

                  Damn it, I knew this would happen. I swear, all these puns are making me rabid.

                  1. Kavonde says:

                    Who started this mass punning trend anyway? We need to find out. Maybe we can hire a hard-boiled investigator.

                    1. Irridium says:

                      Hopefully the investigator can untangle this harebrained scheme.

  9. RTBones says:

    Funny thing about Boston – given the city’s age, it is typically regarded as our (American) city that is closest to one in Europe. Its streets are not laid out in a grid pattern, but are all higgldy-piggldy – much as many in Europe are. It is, for the most part, a walkable city. People in Boston take transit every day (as they do in many cities in Europe, and for that matter, here in America). Yet still, as someone who has traveled a lot and ridden many transit systems around the world, I find we tend to get it horribly wrong at times – even in great cities like New York, Chicago, and yes, Boston. We can put men on the Moon, but have difficulty moving people around a city. That just seems odd to me.

    Also, Happy Easter to you and your family, Shamus.

    1. Dragomok says:

      Our methods for “putting people on Moon” are gradually creating an impenetrable space-junk sphere of death that will eventually leave us planet-locked.

      What I wanted to say, this isn’t that much better than city transit, if it is of any consolation.

    2. Aldowyn says:

      Eh. Public transport… I live in the 46th biggest city in the U.S, with almost a million in the metropolitan area, and we have NOTHING more than an insufficient bus system. I think I may see school buses more than city buses even on weekends… >.>

      1. krellen says:

        Up here at 30 it’s pretty much the same, with the added snarl that half the state’s population lives in our metro area.

  10. Jakale says:

    Well, if you want to make future blog posts about the stuff you could probably try taking a small voice recorder or something to unload your thoughts into when the day is done, or the next morning after you’ve finished passing out from exhaustion.

    1. MintSkittle says:

      Or a video camera, so he can be lazy and just load the video file directly to youtube. Then he only needs to write a couple of lines to go with it.

  11. Peter H. Coffin says:

    As with any other con, there’s ways to cope and help. Most of them are a challenge because it’s really easy for them to get washed aside by friends and shiny activities. Some of the things suggested by people that do a LOT of events (on the road upwards of 40 weekends per year some of them) are as follows.

    1. Prep at home — adjust your bedtime to match what you’ll be wanting to do at the con. If you’re normally up at the crack of noon and you’ve got a need to be at panels that begin at 9, shift your routine to get up at 8 starting 3-4 days prior to arriving. Don’t let heading to the west coast “jet lag” fool you into thinking “Oh, I’ll just shift when I get there”; daylight cycles are a bigger influence even in meeting rooms without windows, and your hotel room will have daylight.

    2. Keep part of your routine — If you normally shower right before bed instead of morning, continue to do so even if you screw up and stay up too late. If you need breakfast to feel human, allow time to find and eat it normally. If you normally take a run every other day in the evening, keep it up. And try REALLY HARD to maintain a semblance of your normal amount of sleep, in light of the adjustment in 1 above.

    3. Get away — Especially for cons that run nearly 24 hours a day, set aside some time to get off the site daily, either alone or in the company of very few others. Personally, I try to eat dinner away from the event every day. Others might combine this step with the routine one and find an interesting place to run. If you’re in a cool city, there may be other tourist things to do, museums of other subject matters, zoos, or botanical gardens worth seeing.

    These aren’t perfect cures, and there’s a reasonable “But that’s wasting valuable con time!” reaction, but they really do go a long way toward making the event less exhausting and leaving one feeling very much less frazzled at the end of the weekend.

  12. Eärlindor says:

    You know how to make one jealous. :P

    Happy Easter, Shamus (or, as we like to say at the Middle-earth Network, “Eucatastrophe Day”). :)

  13. ccesarano says:

    It was good meeting you and Heather again, as well as meeting Josh. In fact, I think I exchanged more words with Josh than you, Shamus!

    It was definitely a highlight, though. You guys, MovieBob, James Portnow, Yahtzee, I have major respect for each of you and have different reasons to look up to you all, but I want nothing more most of the time than to sit and just talk with you. I really wish there had been more time.

    I know how you feel, though, about the memory issues. When I went to GameX and VGXPO in Philly, they were smaller events and I was able to write down my thoughts without fear of losing any time. At PAX East, every second is precious. One of these days I’ll have a camera wielding Primeape to record the action on screen and my voice reacting and bitching. Oddly enough, though, this is more important for when I find myself playing a game I love. After having so much fun you step away and think…what WAS that experience? It’s harder to critique something that gets you lost in the moment.

  14. Mailbox says:

    PAX East was great this year. So many panels. I must have taken almost 300 pictures.

    Shamus, great meeting you again. Josh, awesome meeting you for the first time. You destroyed all my preconceived notions of what you actually look like. I wish I could have spent more time talking with you both.
    I look forward to my plane ride home tomorrow and reading my new book.

    Highlights: Penny Arcade: Q&A, Escapist Panel, waiting in lines for 2 hours, Gearbox Software Panel.

    1. Darkness says:

      Pictures of Josh!!! Now!

  15. nmichaels says:

    Boston’s roads are the craziest thing ever. However, driving in Boston is largely unnecessary. I lived in Somerville for 3 years without owning a car. I now live 30 miles West of Boston and didn’t touch a car within 15 miles of PAX this year. The convention center is an inconvenient .7 mile walk from South Station, but from there you can get anywhere easily and safely.

  16. Cognimancer says:

    Glad you got to meet James Portnow; I’ve run him a few times now and he seems like a great guy.

    And for what it’s worth, my vote for the use of your remaining memory goes to Xcom: Enemy Unknown. That panel made me uncomfortably excited.

    1. Josh says:

      Oh, we’re going to have lots to say about XCOM. We spent more time on it than any other game at the convention.

  17. Drew says:

    I was glad I was able to successfully stalk you in the hallway before the LRR panel Saturday and secure autographs from you an Mrs Young. It made the trip that much more worthwhile.

    That, and playing Touch of Evil in tabletop for a while. That’s a great time. Cooperative board gaming is brilliant stuff.

  18. swenson says:

    “You've never been truly lost until you've tried to drive six blocks in Boston.”

    Could not agree more. I’ve got relatives in Boston, and even just making our way out of the airport to get on the highway is nigh impossible!

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