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.
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