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).
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.
The majority are still pure talks without the advertisement. There was a run of several that had the included ads, but the tide seems to have turned back.
There are ~6 keynotes that were garbage, ~3 that were OK, and the rest were fascinating.
Geoff Keighley: some bullshit about “compromise” regarding GG, and jokes about doritogate.
Cliff B: that game that released next to Overwatch and the time he told them to put the chainsaws on the guns in Gears of War
Chris Perkins: the top-down shooter Anthony LPed as a clumsy anecdote for inclusivity in games writing (Perkins: “we changed the character to a woman, and realized we didn’t have to change any of the dialogue” Anthony: “OH. That’s why that character was written so stereotypically masculine!!”), and some D&D plugs
Molyneux: Godus (lol)
I’ve had bad luck with keynotes, assuming the others have been fascinating. I love listening to stories - retrospectives on projects, things that went wrong, lessons learned. But no one delivering a keynote can actually talk about that stuff. Every keynote speaker I have seen has been unable and unwilling to tell those stories, because the game industry is so heavily hype-, money-, and PR-driven, and these are talks crafted and delivered primarily to an audience of consumers.
I actually DID like the Omegathon finale they did the second year at South, when they did 1v1 Goldeneye + License to Kill + Bunker. It was a perfect combination of skill and blind luck.
This year’s Omegathon finale at South, though… woof. Some VR strategy game that was not fun to watch.
The fact that they brought back the Omegaclaw shows I think they are running out of Oemgathon finale ideas. Also, as dramatic and entertaining as the claw can be, it is random. Cranes are just slot machines that look different.
Some Omegathons have been lame due to poor game selection, like Ikaruga. But I’ll give PAX credit that others have been lame due to poor omeganauts. It’s not PAX’s fault that those people couldn’t play Mario.
I still wish there was a PROmegathon in addition to the regular one.
The crowd was going nuts for the Omegaclaw at least. It was entertaining to people who don’t know.
But, I don’t read it as not having ideas left. I read it as a reaction to the failed Dropmix Omegathon.
The common discourse after Dropmix was “game companies can buy the Omegathon finale.” That is not a message PAX wants to have out there. It’s damaging to the PAX brand as a whole, reduces interest in the Omegathon, etc…
I see this as wanting an Omegathon that is 100% not in any way meaningfully associated with any game company. It was a PR move.