{"id":1231,"date":"2011-03-15T07:11:44","date_gmt":"2011-03-15T11:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=1231"},"modified":"2019-10-27T07:17:02","modified_gmt":"2019-10-27T11:17:02","slug":"pax-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2011\/03\/15\/pax-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"PAX 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This weekend, I attended PAX East<\/a> (AKA \u201cbitch PAX\u201d, in contrast to PAX Prime, which occurs in Seattle and is marginally older). PAX is short for the Penny Arcade<\/a> Expo. It was created by the authors of Penny Arcade<\/a>, a consistently funny and incisive comic strip about (mostly) video games. PAX is kinda sort of an industry event. There\u2019s an exhibit floor, and even some booth babes and schwag, but that\u2019s truly not the point. There are also talks \u2013 but they\u2019re also not the point. There are people in homemade costumes, and impromptu fun all over the city \u2013 and that\u2019s totally the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s the oddest sort of conference I\u2019ve ever attended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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PAX is, as mentioned by multiplexer,<\/a> some odd sort of anti-conference. When I go to Supercomputing<\/a> or similar shows, I try to \u201cwin\u201d the conference. I pre-schedule which talks to attend, I pre-stage and plan with colleagues and shudder<\/em> business contacts. I skulk my way into parties. I stealth and scheme into supposedly closed meetings. I pretend that I know what I\u2019m doing, and I play my pied piper song. I bust ass to get every ounce of energy out of that conference. I did that with PAX last year, and I had a terrible time. Because, well, there\u2019s no \u201cthere\u201d there. The talks at PAX are highly, highly specific. There\u2019s really no such thing as a \u2018general interest\u2019 talk at PAX. Most of the talks are more like old-home weeks for a room or two of friends. They\u2019ve been doing this thing for decades, and this is just the latest of many homes for their running party. Even given that, most of the talks are pretty interesting, if you relax your mind a bit and accept that you don\u2019t know anything. There\u2019s a depth of community there that even I found hard to punch into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The scene is the thing. PAX, properly approached, is a great, ultimate house filled with a positive vibe. In the house are tens of thousands of interesting and creative people. Most of them are not the sort that I hang out with day-to-day. Most of them do not do the things that I do, exactly, for fun. All of them are simply given enough space to do their thing. There was table upon table \u2013 an aircraft hanger\u2019s space \u2013 given over to tabletop games. In that room there were dice players, card players, painted figurine players, and players who wouldn\u2019t be caught dead with any of those loser dicers, dealers, or model clowns. There were two huge rooms dedicated to XBox, Wii, and PS3. There were mid sized rooms dedicated to classic consoles and even classic stand up arcade games. I played Asteroids, Zaxxon, and even Moon Patrol. I played a crazy-ass desktop vector graphics ancestor of Asteroids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I played a lot<\/strong> of first person shooters (FPS) on the XBox. If I have a gamer niche, it\u2019s the FPS. Bulletstorm is rad once it gets going. Halo 3 and Halo Reach are lame and \u2013 for lack of a better word \u2013 overdone. Bulletstorm is violent and ass-clenching in a way that I haven\u2019t seen since Gears of War came out. I felt a vague tinge of guilt when there were 12 year olds watching me try to throw an alien to its death on a cactus for some kind of \u201cskillshot.\u201d Oh well. Their parents should have known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I played the Kinect version of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). That may find its way into my living room at some point \u2013 at the same time as some really solid curtains. There were Rock Band and DDR stages<\/strong>. People sat peacefully, watching people they didn\u2019t know play air guitar and dance onstage. Some people were freakishly good \u2013 not the sort of \u2018good dancing\u2019 that you can develop at home alone. These were real dancers. Some were pretty lame. Everyone got applause \u2013 some with the vigorous \u201cawwright, let someone who knows the system up there!\u201d that got them off the stage with smiles \u2013 but OFF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I played a \u201clearn to play\u201d session of Dungeons and Dragons (fourth edition). I\u2019ve never in my life played any sort of role playing game before \u2013 and I didn\u2019t really go into it expecting to have much fun. I went with it \u2013 and in pretty short order I was helping to create a story with a bunch of people I barely knew. By the end of two hours, we had created a funny little social dynamic that had nothing to do with me as some kind of consultant geek and nothing to do with \u2013 well \u2013 whatever the rest of them do for a living. Two hours flew by, and I was sort of sad that it ended. My rogue was badass, but also sort of a moron. I liked him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m the very least of the gamers \u2013 just like I\u2019m the least of the martial artists and the least of the technogeeks \u2013 but I feel fortunate to be accepted in their tribe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This weekend, I attended PAX East (AKA \u201cbitch PAX\u201d, in contrast to PAX Prime, which occurs in Seattle and is marginally older). PAX is short for the Penny Arcade Expo. It was created by the authors of Penny Arcade, a consistently funny and incisive comic…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speaking","category-real-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1238,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1231\/revisions\/1238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}