PAX West 2018

So my initial plan failed on me so I will be doing nothing in Seattle on Thursday, anyone have a good spot or two for a first timer to go?

Pre-pax tabletop.

Or that charity dinner in the tower if they’re still doing it!

I have one full set of PAX West badges I will sell at face value. All or nothing: I’m not going to split the set.

I’ll post this on twitter later today, but I wanted to give the forum first dibs.

In the airport, the new adventure begins…

Having immediately read Random Images Megathread - #356 by Josh before reading this, my brain queued up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwBjCKWaO_0

So how was it? Some reddit threads reminded me it just happened:

I played a bunch of new/favorite tabletop games, while the convention ambiently occurred around me. All my expo hall stuff was done on Friday, and I spent Sunday in Tabletop First Look, which was always full - but not so crowded you couldn’t sit down and play.

That first Reddit thread is a lot of people ageing out of stuff I avoided in the first place. They all lost a PAX I never had.

Yeah, I can see where those comments and feelings are coming from, but it also a natural evolution both by those of us attending for many years and what PAX is doing to keep up with the interests of today’s gamers. Mike & Jerry et al started as rock throwers at the industry who were given no attention now have a brand and show that the industry loves having a piece of. Of course every aspect of PAX is not perfect but I don’t think it is objectively/significantly worse than years past, it is just the current version. Other than buying a set of quality brass dice, nothing on the Expo floor interested me at all, but it has been increasingly irrelevant to me for years. But PAX is still worth attending because PAX is so much more than Expo.

Expo hall itself was never my thing at any convention. A few panels and a bunch of games always seemed ideal.

Personally I go to conventions for the panels. PAX for me is like the best parts of college classes.

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I can usually find one or two notable booths in Expo, not necessarily games I play but at least seeing something noteworthy that I will actually stop and observe for a while. Thinking of things like the Switch at PAX South 2017 or when VR started showing up in force a couple of years ago.

The panels, tabletop, and mingling with like minded people are the big draws for me.

The thing I love most about the panels at cons is at the good ones (MAG is king here, fight me) you can actually discover impressive people who’s work you didn’t even realize you admired.

Example. 2018 MAGFest, Rym is on a panel with Dr.Hazard about some bullshit I didn’t really care about. Dr. Hazard steals the show by being brilliant, I manage to catch him briefly after the show and ask if he’s giving any other lectures and he is. None of them I’d considered interesting enough to go to based on title alone.

One of them is called Creating Groupness. It’s in the forum and it’s sparely populated so it’s more of a 20 or so person moderated discussion with the 4 or 5 panelists. Said panelists were the moderators and two aspiring board game designers making a game where you can only act in tandem with another player trying to force groupness (I was invited to playtest it, it was lovely), Dr. Hazard, A PhD. Psychologist studying group dynamics who’s name I wish I remember and who’s card I wish I’d gotten but when I asked this was her only panel, and one Fred Wan of L5R fame who also happens to be an attorney.

He was later on a panel with Luke Petershmit of… well a lotta things fame, and on and on it goes. I just loved listening to their lectures.

One downside to a lot of panels at something like PAX/Gencon is they kinda have to be aimed at a pretty broad audience to fit the medium… so if you’re like an superfan/expert at something you’re not going to get a ton out of it. Lots of disappointing D&D panels that just end up turning into 30 minutes of Q&A where people ask all those questions you’ve seen ten thousand times on the internet. A lot of the presenters are very interesting to talk to in a more extended sense, but what can you really do when four panelists are all going to need 15 minutes.

Or they just don’t get how a panel as a medium is different from college lectures or their web series (James Portnow).

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Oh, how was the keynote?

Average. Not a great speaker. Didn’t say anything really incredible. But it was nice that he talked about the history of his professional life and not the history of his nerd life or personal lief. Nobody else I remember has done that.

Every keynote except Mikey Neumann has been a brief synopsis of the speaker’s professional career, followed by a 20 minute PR-approved pitch for a product that’s coming out in a few months.

Neumann basically got up and said “fuck Gamergate” though so that was cool.

The latest keynote as not a brief synopsis. It was 100% covering all details in his professional career. How he became a lawyer. How he became a WoW raid leader (when not lawyering). How he got out of lawyering to work at Blizzard. Each promotion he got at Blizzard. Each WoW release at Blizzard he was a part of. And so on.

He spent almost no time hyping products, not even the one that just came out. Thankfully he also spent relatively little time on the woo game of calling out the nerdy things he grew up with.