PAX

I'm doing two blogs today, to make up for yesterday. I was really tired after the convention.

If you haven't read my previous posts, PAX is a gaming convention held at the Convention Center in Seattle. They have everything from tabletop to console to PC to Wil Wheaton (who I sadly couldn't go see, since he was there on a different day).

Not only was this my first gaming convention, it was my first convention, period.

When dad and I neared the Convention Center in our car, there were swarms of people crossing streets--and they were all gamers. I couldn't keep from smiling for probably half an hour as we entered the building and found our way up to the expo floor. There had to be thousands of people there. To imagine the impact, think of all the multitudes of people who like to game. Mostly guys (the womens' restrooms were nearly deserted), but all ages and all personalities. Think of everyone, for example, who plays World of Warcraft. Take a random chunk of those people and place them in a large space where they can see each other in reality. And there you go. It was pretty amazing to me.

Most of the games you could play had extremely long lines, so we didn't play too many. But we did try a few games, one called Power Gig, a band game where instead of buttons on the guitar, there are real strings, and the controller is actually a working electric guitar. On what I'm guessing was the easy setting, you can press any string on a particular fret and it would count for that color. Among a couple others, I checked out Captain Comic, a console game where when you move or beat people up, there are exclamations like BANG! and WHIZZ! and there are frames, like in a comic book.

I even saw the Back to the Future delorean, in honor of a game coming out based on the movie. I was going to see Bill Amend of the Foxtrot comic strip (who is an avid gamer himself) do a presentation, but there was too much else to see.

As for "swag," or free stuff, I got about four t-shirts, three of which are huge on me (that's what we get for being there at the end of the convention), for example, one has "/godmode" on the front and funny modding code on the back, and one I got for playing Power Gig; twenty little buttons with various things on them like guitars, gold coins, and little cartoon characters; an inflatable sword for Dragon Age 2; a computer screen cleaner; and a few more items. Needless to say, my near-empty backpack was stuffed full by the end.

If you are a gamer at all, I highly recommend going to PAX sometime in the future. It'll blow your mind.

~

Photo (top): A Lord of the Rings statue in honor of the game Lord of the Rings Online, with people lined up behind it, waiting to play something.

Photo (bottom): A few people who work at a nearby booth and a guy dressed in Halo armor play Just Dance 2. The song was, fittingly, techno (a song called Satisfaction, by Benni Benassi). Throughout the day, people who were brave enough could step up and dance.