Pictures from PAX

Here are a few select shots from our trip this weekend. I've uploaded all of my pictures in my smugmug gallery. Note that the last shot is MC Frontalot, in the flesh!

PAX: Endgame

The third day of PAX was pretty chill. We slept in, grabbed lunch at a Mexican place, and then headed into the convention.

At Dan's urging, we won another set of passes to the upcoming D&D Online beta. To do so, we had to play through a 10 minute adventure and kill a boss at the end. For anyone else playing this demo adventure, note that when facing the boss clerics need only push "7" for the win. Without that little tip, the guy's actually pretty hard to beat.

After that, we caught the tail end of a "Marketing Games" panel. Dan and Hawk then went off to the team Magic tournament, where they made it as far as the semifinals. Bill and I stuck around and watched the second Penny Arcade panel, where we got to hear the sound of 2,000 people simultaneously cracking their knuckles (don't ask) (it was awesome, by the way).

Finally, we saw the finals of the Omegathon, which was a super-old-school Atari tank game. The winner walked away with an original NES and every single NES game and peripheral ever released in the U.S. He and the runner-up also each got an Alienware PC.

After that, it was dinner at a tasty Thai restaurant and then a speedy limp through the rain back to the hotel. We're holed up with the Simpsons now, drying off, and getting ready for a nice, early flight tomorrow.

If the past is any indication, I probably won't be blogging again until I take another trip. So thanks for reading!

PAX Day Two

Hawk finished third in a field of 64 in yesterday's Magic tournament. What a man!

We started this morning bright and early, but unfortunately not early enough to get wristbands for tonight's MC Frontalot show. After a quick snack, we went straight to the team Halo 2 tournament. We waited for an hour before we finally had our chance to play. And in five minutes, we got our asses handed to us by guys 10 years our junior, as expected.

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon and early evening:

• In console freeplay (some fighter called Guilty Gear X).
• In PC freeplay (Hawk and I got in half an hour of Unreal Tournament 2004).
• Waiting in lines <=== [this is where we spent most of our time].

That last point deserves some elaboration. PAX is basically a cheap, populist version of E3. Its appeal is in its all-embracing vibe: if you're a 15-year-old fan who lives an hour away, then you can afford to come to PAX. But because of this limited budget (and, to be frank, because of some lousy organization), we're definitely getting what we paid for. In other words, this is an unbeatable place for a giant, nerdy group hug, but it's ultimately a frustrating place if you want to actually do things like play games.

We had an excellent dinner at the Rock Bottom Brewery. Then we found an empty table and played my first game of Chrononauts (Dan owned, but Bill and I were about to win on the same turn, so the game seems pretty random).

Finally, it was off to the main event: musical guests Conney Lin, MC Frontalot, MC Chris, and the Minibosses. We had managed to get wristbands early in the afternoon by waiting in a line, and at 9pm we happily filed into the show.

The warmup was the quarterfinal round of PAX's Omegathon, a test of videogame skill and endurance. This was a truly epic battle of Karaoke Karaoke Revolution. After that it was pianist Conney Lin playing arrangements of a bunch of Final Fantasy songs.

And then ... Mr. Frontalot. He was really energetic on stage, and the band had clearly spent a lot of time rehearsing together. Overall, the translation of his beloved studio work into a live format was much better than I'd dared to hope. Especially notable was the performance of that most scatalogical of all Star Wars-influenced raps: Yellow Lasers. Great job, MC Frontalot!

After that was MC Chris and the Minibosses, but Bill, Dan and I were out of gas and called it a night. I look forward to getting the full report from Hawk tomorrow morning.

One random note on the "group hug" comment from above. Here at PAX, you can see firsthand how the internet has transformed (what tech evangelists would call) "sparse communities." I'd put it this way: 15 years ago, these would have been 8,000 people getting their asses kicked by a geek-hating world in 2,000 separate towns. Now, they self-identify as members of an active, growing subculture with market power and even -- yes -- some sort of cultural cachet. It seems that the internet often has this effect: concentrating and magnifying fringe communities.

I think that's exciting in general. But before we get too excited about the dawning tech-driven utopia of universal joy and acceptance, it's important to remember that the internet is just an amoral catalyst for these interactions. It has transformed the hardcore video gaming community in the same exact way that it transformed the nascent terrorist community. It's cliched but true: the internet does little to change human nature. It just magnifies whatever's already there.

Greetings from PAX

I'm spending the weekend in Seattle at the Penny Arcade Expo (as in this Penny Arcade) with Bill, Hawk, and Dan. If this doesn't mean anything to you, then perhaps you've heard me referring to an upcoming "nerd convention" in the past week.

Well, we are the nerds. And this is that convention.

After catching an early morning flight, we wandered downtown Bellevue for a couple of hours, then hopped into the rapidly-growing line outside the convention center.

Let me digress for a bit to explain that lines were apparently a huge problem at last year's PAX. So this year, they mailed walk-right-in passes to early registrants like us, and they even let us in an hour early. The theory was that no one in their right mind would wait two hours in line to enter a convention 5 minutes earlier.

They obviously misjudged their audience.

As Hawk astutely pointed out, this place is a sea of obsessive gaming geeks. These are people actively looking for ways to be even more hardcore than all their fellow travellers. One way to do this is to stand in a line for longer than everyone else. However, just to add a dash of sanity to today's line, only the first 400 or so folks got tickets to see tonight's musical acts.

So anyway, the line wasn't too bad. We stood next to the guy who runs TalkXbox, and he was very friendly.

Once we got inside, we took a quick tour of the place. Hawk, Dan, and Bill quickly settled into a tabletop game that involved hand-painted models and very complicated rules. ("Confrontation," I think it was called). Not something I'd tried before, but it seemed pretty neat.

After that, we caught a talk on the present and future of online gaming with folks from Sun, Microsoft, (ex-)Sony, and somewhere else. The one thing that really struck me was the Sun guy's repeated mention of cell phones as a portal to some modified version of a persistent online world. This makes a lot of sense. Take Dan for example, whose addiction to World of Warcraft is well-known. Now, Dan can't play WoW on his cell phone, and even if cell phones were capable of running WoW, I doubt he'd want to play it on such a tiny screen. But if you let Dan use his cell phone to trade WoW items, chat with his clan-mates, etc..... I'm pretty sure he'd do this all the time. He'd probably lose his job, but that's a separate issue.

Toward the end of the online gaming discussion, I heard from Bill that MC Frontalot had entered the building and was selling schwag and signing autographs. The Front was actually my main reason for coming to Penny Arcade, so I jumped at the chance to shake his hand, take a picture, buy an autographed album, and -- yes -- geek out just a little bit. Don't worry, I wasn't the only one doing so.

After meeting the Front, it was back to the theater to catch a funny presentation by Penny Arcade's Gabe and Tycho. They were my other main reason for coming, and didn't disappoint. Funny, animated, and very much like their online personas in tone (although they look nothing like their cartoons in real life).

Last but not least, I saw a panel and preview with the Red vs. Blue guys, which was great. Then I wussed out and headed back to the hotel. Bill was about to start playing in the Smash Brothers tournament (I bet $1 that he lost in the first round). Dan's ass got pwn3d in a Magic tournament. And Hawk was doing well in that same Magic tournament, proving once again that he is truly the Alpha Nerd.

I have only four regrets for the day:

1. I don't own a PSP or a DS. I'm apparently the only one here who doesn't.
2. I didn't bring my laptop with me, so I had to blog all of this at the end of the day.
3. I didn't actually play any games today! No tabletop, no console freeplay, nothin'. Bill and I kept saying we'd get around to this, but with all the panel discussions and such, there wasn't any time.
   
4. I forgot the cable that connects my camera to my laptop, so I won't be able to post pictures until I get home on Monday. But I'm taking some good ones!