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PAX East was this past weekend. Apparently, I have successfully avoided con crud, so go me! I also Did Not trigger my tendencies towards misanthropism due to large crowds of people and went all three days. (Seriously, after a point with dealing with more than 10 people at a time, I just cannot handle being around other humans. I don't know why.)
Friday
5 of us piled into the Orange Box (Jimbo's burnt metallic orange car) and got to the BCEC by 8:300AM, enough time to stand in line for the 10:30AM keynote by Jane McGonigal. While in line, I think at least 3 of us out of the 5 in our group WhisperNet'ed her book Reality is Broken. (Unfortunately, our inside contact in Amazon is unable to confirm or deny any sort of strange spike in purchases for said book during this time.) It's a really good book so far, about how games can make us better people, and bring us closer together. And ways of using things we learn in games (set a goal, define methods of getting that goal, and doing it) in the real world. And I'm glad we got there in time to hear the keynote, because McGonigal is a fantastic speaker and brilliant. I'm only sad I didn't get to have her sign my Kindle.
After various hilarious instances of splitting the party, Yarmond and I wandered around the Expo floor for a good 2-4 hours. Saw some demos for some games I'll keep an eye on from the big studios (Children of Eden by Ubisoft looks to be doing something interesting with the Kinecet), got to try out some of the new hardware coming out of nVidia (when I actually need 3D graphics, I guess), and actually got to try out the Nintendo 3DS. Never thought it'd actually work, but goddamn, it actually does. Color me impressed.
We also hit up the classic arcade games they had set up in a conference room. I suck at the original R-Type. I did better than Yarmond on Tempest. And we both did about the same on Gauntlet. The Roadrunner game, we both agree, can go die in a fire. That game is total harshflakes.
Friday night concerts were the Protomen, MC Frontalot, and Metroid Metal. I liked Protomen a lot more this time around, since I'd listened to their albums prior. Unfortunately, my knee was being a bastard by this point, and I was in too much pain to fully enjoy Frontalot and Metroid Metal. Not even 800mg of ibuprofin killed it. I possibly was whining a lot at this point.
Saturday
Saturday, we piled into the car again, this time at 9:30am, to hit up another set of 10:30am panels. However, due to traffic, this involved Link, Yarmond, and I diving out of the car in front of the BCEC while Jimbo went off to find parking. (At least this time, I remembered to take the vitamin supplement for my knees) We went to the "Just Because You Have an Idea, Doesn't Mean You're A Game Designer" panel, which was pretty much talking about how to become an game designer and how to get notice and practices of becoming a good one. Cool talk, but I'll need to pick up actual programming skills beyond what I have (MATLAB and Verilog, and the latter is hardware. Although I can program a mean game of Pong on an FPGA) if I want to do something other than tabletop, LARP, or card game design. Which isn't exactly something I didn't know.
Later, Link and I ended up at a panel I think is Relevant to Peoples' Interest around here: "Females on Female Characters". (Yes, I'm pretty sure the name was deliberate) It was about an hour of the 5 panelists (from the Escapist, GamePro, and other such sources) ranting and raving about female characters they hated and loved. It was actually pretty great, because it was intelligent discussion on our favorite question "what makes a good female character?" With a healthy helping of "sexy != slutty", "sex appeal != sexism", "strong female character != asskicking and taking names" and "I don't hate her because she's attractive, I hate her because she's a bad character. Give her a dick and I'd still think she was a bad character." (There was a good bit of "just write better characters all around", because the men mostly suck to, but we're societally conditioned to accept "strong, handsome, manly eye-candy with personality of cardboard = good character". Yes, they went there. And it was awesome.) Good bit of sex positive thinking too (Bayonetta got props for that, for all it's other questionable aspects, it was mostly held up positively). And some bemoaning of the fact that the recent Metroid gave Samus, Queen of Video Game Asskicking Leads, daddy issues. Which, honestly, makes no fucking sense at all if you've played Metroid. Which is possibly why it pissed them off.
More wandering around the Expo hall got me the chance to play Okamiden on the DS, and it nearly killed me from the cute.
Saturday night concerts had us lining up by 6:30pm for 8pm. There was round 3 of the Omegathon, which was amazing. Why? Because it had 3700+ people breathless with anticipation while watching people play Jenga. Yes, Jenga. For 45 minutes. And then there were the concerts themselves. The VGO was back, and even more awesome than last year. They're apparently playing at the Boston Symphony Hall on 4/1, and I've got my ticket already. I wouldn't miss that for anything. Also playing on Saturday night were Paul and Storm (hilarious as always) and Jonathan Colton. JoCo's cool and all, but the VGO is what draws me to this, hands down. And we were sitting this time, so it was even better because I wasn't in pain!
And then DST came and smacked us in the face and we got home at 3:30am.
Sunday
I, unlike the rest of my house, decided to eat the crazy cookies and hauled my ass out of bed after 4 hours of sleep to make a 10:30am panel on game theory and mechanism design. Yes, I entered into severe sleep-dep for a panel on mathematical theory as it applies to game design. Because I am me, and therefore, really am not always good at judgment calls when it comes to my own health. But it was interesting! (Although it wasn't a chalk talk, but probably because the math is a little complicated for the layperson) I now have a couple of papers on the subject on my Kindle for further reading. Which is funny, because game theory is usually applied to economics, and the only time I took an econ class, I hated it because the math was too fuzzy. *eyeroll* Only me.
Afterward I braved the Expo floor by myself one last time, this time with the aim of hitting up the indie booths I'd not gotten a chance to loiter at when I was with people.
Played a round of Slam Bolt Scrappers (now out on PSN!), which was very fun.
DYAD is a neat little rail shooter that feels like someone took Rez, took out the rhythm aspect, and put in more weird. I don't even know.
Chivalry is only in video stage, but I talked to one of the developers for a bit, and I have to say it looks promising. Especially since it's a skill-based first person combat game; you get better by actually getting better, not by numbers going up.
I also talked to SRRN games, who put out a little RPG called Ash for the iPhone that got some good reviews over at RPGamer. They told me that their next game's going to be on Android as well, so I'm all excited.
And then there was a little company called Gamebook Adventures, who are also currently on iWhatever but are coming out with Android, PC, and Kindle versions in like 6 months, who are doing pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure meets tabletop gaming. The app they were showing me on the iPad looks awesome, so I highly recommend checking them out if you have an iOS device.
I then wandered over to the indie tabletop people. I had the intention of buying something new, and if I couldn't figure out what, I'd probably have defaulted to buying the Burning Wheel core book. Except that didn't happen, because as I was paging through one of the books, the creator happened to be behind the table and I got into a decently long conversation with her about the game system she wrote about spies (Blowback). And then with the guy next to her about his game about the time travel temp agency (Time & Temp), and the amusement I had about the concept because I've been playing around with a time police RPG for about the last 6 months. And after talking shop with these fine people for so long, and I did find their work intriguing, well, I never did buy Burning Wheel, but I do have 2 new tabletop systems to try out.
After that, I was pretty much done with PAX, having done most of what I wanted and wanting to escape without further damage to my wallet.
Then I zoomed off to campus in time for Ides, the semi-annual Assassins' Guild seminar on mechanics and game writing. Which is not part of PAX, but is included here anyway because my life is circular.
Friday
5 of us piled into the Orange Box (Jimbo's burnt metallic orange car) and got to the BCEC by 8:300AM, enough time to stand in line for the 10:30AM keynote by Jane McGonigal. While in line, I think at least 3 of us out of the 5 in our group WhisperNet'ed her book Reality is Broken. (Unfortunately, our inside contact in Amazon is unable to confirm or deny any sort of strange spike in purchases for said book during this time.) It's a really good book so far, about how games can make us better people, and bring us closer together. And ways of using things we learn in games (set a goal, define methods of getting that goal, and doing it) in the real world. And I'm glad we got there in time to hear the keynote, because McGonigal is a fantastic speaker and brilliant. I'm only sad I didn't get to have her sign my Kindle.
After various hilarious instances of splitting the party, Yarmond and I wandered around the Expo floor for a good 2-4 hours. Saw some demos for some games I'll keep an eye on from the big studios (Children of Eden by Ubisoft looks to be doing something interesting with the Kinecet), got to try out some of the new hardware coming out of nVidia (when I actually need 3D graphics, I guess), and actually got to try out the Nintendo 3DS. Never thought it'd actually work, but goddamn, it actually does. Color me impressed.
We also hit up the classic arcade games they had set up in a conference room. I suck at the original R-Type. I did better than Yarmond on Tempest. And we both did about the same on Gauntlet. The Roadrunner game, we both agree, can go die in a fire. That game is total harshflakes.
Friday night concerts were the Protomen, MC Frontalot, and Metroid Metal. I liked Protomen a lot more this time around, since I'd listened to their albums prior. Unfortunately, my knee was being a bastard by this point, and I was in too much pain to fully enjoy Frontalot and Metroid Metal. Not even 800mg of ibuprofin killed it. I possibly was whining a lot at this point.
Saturday
Saturday, we piled into the car again, this time at 9:30am, to hit up another set of 10:30am panels. However, due to traffic, this involved Link, Yarmond, and I diving out of the car in front of the BCEC while Jimbo went off to find parking. (At least this time, I remembered to take the vitamin supplement for my knees) We went to the "Just Because You Have an Idea, Doesn't Mean You're A Game Designer" panel, which was pretty much talking about how to become an game designer and how to get notice and practices of becoming a good one. Cool talk, but I'll need to pick up actual programming skills beyond what I have (MATLAB and Verilog, and the latter is hardware. Although I can program a mean game of Pong on an FPGA) if I want to do something other than tabletop, LARP, or card game design. Which isn't exactly something I didn't know.
Later, Link and I ended up at a panel I think is Relevant to Peoples' Interest around here: "Females on Female Characters". (Yes, I'm pretty sure the name was deliberate) It was about an hour of the 5 panelists (from the Escapist, GamePro, and other such sources) ranting and raving about female characters they hated and loved. It was actually pretty great, because it was intelligent discussion on our favorite question "what makes a good female character?" With a healthy helping of "sexy != slutty", "sex appeal != sexism", "strong female character != asskicking and taking names" and "I don't hate her because she's attractive, I hate her because she's a bad character. Give her a dick and I'd still think she was a bad character." (There was a good bit of "just write better characters all around", because the men mostly suck to, but we're societally conditioned to accept "strong, handsome, manly eye-candy with personality of cardboard = good character". Yes, they went there. And it was awesome.) Good bit of sex positive thinking too (Bayonetta got props for that, for all it's other questionable aspects, it was mostly held up positively). And some bemoaning of the fact that the recent Metroid gave Samus, Queen of Video Game Asskicking Leads, daddy issues. Which, honestly, makes no fucking sense at all if you've played Metroid. Which is possibly why it pissed them off.
More wandering around the Expo hall got me the chance to play Okamiden on the DS, and it nearly killed me from the cute.
Saturday night concerts had us lining up by 6:30pm for 8pm. There was round 3 of the Omegathon, which was amazing. Why? Because it had 3700+ people breathless with anticipation while watching people play Jenga. Yes, Jenga. For 45 minutes. And then there were the concerts themselves. The VGO was back, and even more awesome than last year. They're apparently playing at the Boston Symphony Hall on 4/1, and I've got my ticket already. I wouldn't miss that for anything. Also playing on Saturday night were Paul and Storm (hilarious as always) and Jonathan Colton. JoCo's cool and all, but the VGO is what draws me to this, hands down. And we were sitting this time, so it was even better because I wasn't in pain!
And then DST came and smacked us in the face and we got home at 3:30am.
Sunday
I, unlike the rest of my house, decided to eat the crazy cookies and hauled my ass out of bed after 4 hours of sleep to make a 10:30am panel on game theory and mechanism design. Yes, I entered into severe sleep-dep for a panel on mathematical theory as it applies to game design. Because I am me, and therefore, really am not always good at judgment calls when it comes to my own health. But it was interesting! (Although it wasn't a chalk talk, but probably because the math is a little complicated for the layperson) I now have a couple of papers on the subject on my Kindle for further reading. Which is funny, because game theory is usually applied to economics, and the only time I took an econ class, I hated it because the math was too fuzzy. *eyeroll* Only me.
Afterward I braved the Expo floor by myself one last time, this time with the aim of hitting up the indie booths I'd not gotten a chance to loiter at when I was with people.
Played a round of Slam Bolt Scrappers (now out on PSN!), which was very fun.
DYAD is a neat little rail shooter that feels like someone took Rez, took out the rhythm aspect, and put in more weird. I don't even know.
Chivalry is only in video stage, but I talked to one of the developers for a bit, and I have to say it looks promising. Especially since it's a skill-based first person combat game; you get better by actually getting better, not by numbers going up.
I also talked to SRRN games, who put out a little RPG called Ash for the iPhone that got some good reviews over at RPGamer. They told me that their next game's going to be on Android as well, so I'm all excited.
And then there was a little company called Gamebook Adventures, who are also currently on iWhatever but are coming out with Android, PC, and Kindle versions in like 6 months, who are doing pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure meets tabletop gaming. The app they were showing me on the iPad looks awesome, so I highly recommend checking them out if you have an iOS device.
I then wandered over to the indie tabletop people. I had the intention of buying something new, and if I couldn't figure out what, I'd probably have defaulted to buying the Burning Wheel core book. Except that didn't happen, because as I was paging through one of the books, the creator happened to be behind the table and I got into a decently long conversation with her about the game system she wrote about spies (Blowback). And then with the guy next to her about his game about the time travel temp agency (Time & Temp), and the amusement I had about the concept because I've been playing around with a time police RPG for about the last 6 months. And after talking shop with these fine people for so long, and I did find their work intriguing, well, I never did buy Burning Wheel, but I do have 2 new tabletop systems to try out.
After that, I was pretty much done with PAX, having done most of what I wanted and wanting to escape without further damage to my wallet.
Then I zoomed off to campus in time for Ides, the semi-annual Assassins' Guild seminar on mechanics and game writing. Which is not part of PAX, but is included here anyway because my life is circular.
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