T w e n t y S i d e d

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.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This weekend, Josh and I are going to meet for the first time at PAX East. I’m going to be appearing on a Q&A panel hosted by the Escapist, along with MovieBob and some of the Loading Ready Run crew.

Here is how PAX works:

The main attraction is the show floor. In the middle of the convention center is a massive (airplane hanger sized) area where different companies have booths for showing off their goods, games, demos, previews, and otherwise vying for attention from the press and gaming public. Some of these “Booths” stretch the definition of the term, and are more like self-contained marketing theme parks. In particular, Xbox has enough territory to declare themselves a sovereign nation and field an army to defend it. People are saying they might even have enough space for two people to play with the Kinect. The mind reels.

Around the edges of this mayhem are tiny booths owned by starry-eyed indie developers and middle-aged guys selling overpriced T-shirts, buttons, posters, and other gaming culture accoutrements.

Elsewhere in the convention center are other ongoing attractions: An arcade, a beanbag lounge, a PC lounge, etc. These are quiet places to get off your feet and recharge yourself, your Nintendo DS, or both.

In the outer rooms are “panels”. These events can encompass a lot of different things. Movie screenings. Presentations. Interactive question & answer events. Some are aimed at the press, or developers, or the public, or certain gaming demographics. Read the schedule before you go and see if you’re interested in any of them.

Last year I didn’t have a game plan, and this resulted in a lot of spine-destroying hiking around. This year, I have a careful plan.

For the curious, here is my schedule for Friday. If an event isn’t here, it doesn’t mean I don’t care about it. It probably just conflicts with whatever else I’ve got going on.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “PAX East: Friday Schedule”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.