PAX East 2011

This weekend I headed out to PAX East, the Penny Arcade-inspired video game convention out in Boston. I went last year and was put off, but decided to give it another go. Overall it was, well, just okay.

Thursday night we headed to the PokeCrawl, a Pokemon-themed bar crawl intended to help you meet some of the people at the convention. I had a reasonably good time given that a) I don’t know anything about Pokemon b) I’m not a fan of bars and c) social situations are mildly terror-inducing. But everyone was really nice and approachable and the bar games were fun and fostered light interaction. The drinks were weak, which seems to be a Boston thing?

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PAX East 2010

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend PAX East 2010, the first east coast installment of Penny Arcade Expo. It was, in a word, insane. It was the most catastrophically organized convention I’ve ever been to because the 62,000 attendees were just way too many for the Hynes Convention Center.

Friday

After the long NYC->Boston bus ride, the usual issues with hotel check-in, and lunch, we got into the queue line on Friday to enter the convention. The queue line stretched through two gymnasium-sized rooms, and though we arrived an hour early, there were thousands of folks in front of us. By the time we made it up to the Main Theater for Wil Wheaton’s keynote address, the doors slammed shut in our face. The fire marshal had declared the space full, and we were left out. I asked an Enforcer (what they call the volunteers who help keep things running smoothly) if it was going to be broadcast in any other rooms since there were thousands more people in line behind me, and he told me I could “probably catch it later on YouTube.” Great.

Turns out Wheaton spoiled the end of Dragon Age: Origins, so maybe I was better off anyway. Read more »