PAX: The Final Countdown

As fellow party-member Lemming has discussed (while I have been strangely silent), we attended Pax (Penny Arcade Expo) this weekend. You can find Lemming's show highlights here. Also, here are his brief notes for portions of days one, two, and three.

Before I get into some of my highlights (and occasional shenanigans), it's worth pointing out one different in perspective from Lemming. I view Lemming as a hard-core video gamer, whereas I most definitely am not one. I am hard-core with certain other games (at least to some extent when it comes to RPGs) and I enjoy games a lot, but I frequently go several weeks at a time (and sometimes several months at a time) without even playing video games. My being deeply in the middle of a game means I am playing something like 7-15 hours a week. It has been many years when I have had anything beyond very thin spikes of more than that. I don't actually read Penny Arcade and I basically haven't seen the humor in nearly any of the example strips of thirs that I have read.

OK, so why did I go to this convention? Well, for one thing, I do have a reasonable connection to geek culture even if my primary focus of is a different aspect than the main themes of this convention. There are tons of correlations involved, and my adventures into the Realms of Ironic T-Shirts tend to be very enjoyable ones. If attending a Con on my own, an RPG-heavy one like Dragon*Con would be my preference. However, attending a Con like this with a fellow party member is a rare and invaluable opportunity, so once I realized (granted, very late in the game) that I would actually have time to go, I went with it and had a lot of fun in the process. I hadn't attended a Con in three years, and I tend to like the big ones a lot. I read my work e-mails this weekend while attending PAX (and I definitely read baseball box scores when I went back to the hotel room!), but I actually left nearly all of my nontrivial work untouched until my return. This, perhaps more than anything else, truly reveals how much I enjoyed this weekend. I actually had a real vacation and I almost always am spending a good amount of time doing work even during what amount to my version of real vacations. This time, I was so engrossed with having fun that I was able to let most of my work wait for me. Well met, PAX! (The one nontrivial thing I did some work on was a fairly urgent request involving a collaborator and because they had helped quickly when my student and I had a comparable request in the past, it was my responsibility to do likewise even while on vacation.)

Alright, let's get to the various highlights and misadventures from the show:


Friday:

Minor shenanigans at the Oakland airport: Lemming mentioned that I showed my excellence here. Basically, we ended up in different groups for the second leg of our trip but I assumed we were in the same one (and never actually checked). The guy collecting tickets made me take a walk of shame from group B to the end of the line of group C, which made me basically the last person on the plane to pick a seat. Thankfully, the people behind me in line B told Lemming what happened, so he knew why I had suddenly disappeared. Of course, this incident got completely dwarfed by Saturday's booth babe shenanigans, but I'll get to that below.

Random conversations: Here is one place where Lemming and I differ. I did not find it easy to start random conversations with people. I didn't feel comfortable enough to pass my inertial barriers. Most of my interactions with people were fine, though I got annoyed a couple of times (though less often than I am annoyed in day-to-day stuff, especially when you consider the number of people around and the close quarters). In one case, people behind me were disparaging my shirt and talking behind my back even while I was within earshot. (What they said wasn't horribly nasty, but it was enough to bother me.) Unfortunately, this was near the beginning of the Con and didn't help me with respect to my usual timidity in meeting new people (basically, it hurt my comfort level). In one other, somebody asked a perfectly reasonable question in a Question & Answer session and a couple of dozen or so jackasses verbally abused him. It was a very small minority, but this was completely out of line and such behavior just pisses me off in general. There were a couple of smaller things.

Long lines: There were some long lines at PAX, but none of them were even close to as long as this one. Also, the long lines moved really fast, so while the first one I saw was intimidating, it was never actually an issue.

Wil Wheaton: As Lemming mentioned, Wil Wheaton gave a fantastic keynote. I should note, however, that he was preaching to the choir. So, while the talk was excellent, I can't say I learned much from it even though I can say I was greatly entertained by it. That's more than enough for me, but I figure that it's worth pointing out the distinction. Also, I didn't agree 100% with his perspective. For example, he called gaming an "inherently social" activity. In my mind, that's not quite true. It can be extremely social, but that depends to a large extent on the context and (especially) the people involved. I have also seen the opposite, so really it's a matter of what people do with gaming that can be social or not (just like with numerous other things).

Q & A Session with Gabe and Tycho: I also enjoyed this quite a bit. They were very funny and charismatic and their interactions with (and extreme accomodation of!) the questioners was absolutely awesome. I gained a lot of respect for them after seeing this session. (See Lemming's blog for a great specific example.)

Uwe Boll: OK, so this is not technically a highlight. I was curious to see how the Q & A would go --- apparently, it devolved into the expected nastiness --- but he rambled for 20 minutes before Lemming and I gave up and left. It just wasn't worth it. I do want to mention, however, that apparently Sarah Silverman (!) refused to be in his new film because she felt it was too offensive. Holy shit! That's really hard to do!

One of the best t-shirts ever: You can find that here. This was being sold at the Paizo booth. I had never seen it before. Awesome! Now, who can I give this to as a gift without getting killed? (The best guess I have right now is my opera singer friend who is a nerd groupie.)

Simultaneous dismissal: On Friday, when Lemming and I were taking our first pass through the exhibitor's hall, we saw the World of Warcraft booth, said there was nothing of interest there, and moved on. I just have no desire to spend time with that at all.

Mmmm... steaks: Given that Lemming and I were spending a lot of money on the hotel and flight, we decided that we should have at least one really good dinner while we were in Seattle. Accordingly, we went to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and had large, excellent pieces of meat.

D & D Dungeon Delve: I skipped out on the first couple of concerts on Friday because I wanted to play at least some D & D, and the only event I wanted to play was on Friday. (I did see some private D & D games and board games going on, but I felt too shy to even try to join in. I also never bothered trying to play multi-player DS or convincing people to play Apples to Apples, even though both of those were theoretically part of my original plan.) Dungeon Delve was a twenty minute romp with pregenerated 4th level characters. The idea was to see how far in a dungeon the party could get in that time. I chose to play a barbarian because I would take less time making decisions. There were only three of us in the party (others couldn't be found), but we had a barbarian, a cleric, and a sorceror, so I think this actually helped given the time limitation. One guy was a bit slow (he kept rolling dice with the wrong number of sides), but we got lucky with the random dungeon generation and became the only party up to that point to make it all the way through (again, our dungeon was much easier than the norm). We each got five Wizards tokens for our trouble. I redeemed them for a miniature; I could have gotten a set of dice, but it's a good thing I didn't choose that because I was later given a set of those for free at the Wizards booth. Incidentally, all the other D & D events were either RPGA events or miniatures. I used to play in the RPGA events years ago (and even DMed several games for a particular set of online Cons!), but I saw a lot of really annoying behavior that resulted from how those are set up --- they have a certificate method that ends up providing motivation for people to act in really retarded manners --- so I have refused to play in these for 5-6 years now and will never play in them again. Sadly, those are the most popular D & D events at Cons, so for Cons like PAX in which RPGs have limited representation, that basically means there aren't that many of them in which I want to play. In this case, that meant that I only did the Dungeon Delve.

Freezepop: I missed the other concerts because I did a combination of zoning out, walking around a bit, and D & D. I also missed at least part of the first song, which may actually have been song N > 1. From my discussions with Lemming, I eventually figured out that they were the Indie band that performed the new wavey song that I really liked in Guitar Hero II. Given my musical leanings, I really enjoyed the background music (i.e., the parts without singing) in this concert. The group is really a direct hit with my paradigm! However, the quality of the singing was sloppy and the lyrics were often rather weak. I have since downloaded a bunch of songs from the group --- including covers of "Neverending Story" and Depeche Mode's "Photographic" (the first ever DM single) --- and I liked the ones I listed to, so I think it's currently an issue of I like them better when they can have multiple takes. As Lemming points out, their rendition of Europe's "Final Countdown" was fantastic. That was definitely a show highlight. I've had that song in my head on and off ever since, and I don't regret it.



Saturday:

Game demos and actual games: First, let me start with Friday. I tried the same Geometry Wars game that Lemming did. I basically did the Wii version of button mashing. I'll have to try the game again later. I think that's the only game I tried on Friday, so let me jump to Saturday. I did the same button mashing with an incomplete version of a Wii Godzilla fighting game. I actually managed to beat the PR guy I played, but I didn't feel like I knew what I was doing. I loved it when he mentioned something like "Don't pick that monster; it's not finished yet." I tried the Wii version of the ping pong game that Zifnab has. I was hoping that I could use my ping pong stroke with the game given that it used the Wii-mote. Sadly, if one flicks one's wrist at even close to the speed that one needs in the real game, then one fails miserably at the console version. Lame. I'll actually screw up my stroke if I play this game, so I'm definitely not getting it. The most important demo I tried was the one for Zelda: Fantom Hourglass, which seems to be a direct sequel to my GBA Zelda game. I had trouble controlling certain things with the stylus, but I imagine I'll get used to it. Obviously, I am buying this game...

D & D panel session: I went to a D & D panel session that was primarily about their new online social network Gleemax. I think that most of what it offers is ho-hum, but I like the fact that it might help me find people to game with in a new city. Then it occurred to me that this could be the source of time snapshot network data that I craved --- the best way to do this is with a brand new social network, of course! --- so I put on my scientific hat a bit and hoped that I could have a chance to talk to the guy presenting the stuff and maybe even acquire time-series data so that I could have some real data to study growth mechanisms for social networks. This session also included a lot of information about 4th edition D & D, so I was very happy I went to it. There was also a really awesome promo video making fun of the most messed up stuff from earlier editions. (For first edition, I don't remember the specific target, but the fake afro on the guy who shaves his head to look younger was priceless. The target for second edition was THAC0 and that for third edition was grappling. "How do I compute THAC0 again?" I heard that question so many times back in the day...)

Free stuff: Well, there was lots of this. I have a free beach ball, a t-shirt, a set of dice, a burr, some Magic cards and other cards, some bags, etc. I didn't get any of the free Ramen, but I wouldn't have had room for it anyway.

Did I mention that Wil Wheaton is awesome?: The line for Wheaton's autograph on Saturday was reasonably short at some point, so I stood in line and got my program signed. (I then accidently smeared his signature a bit with my thumb when I got it back, but there are memories from the line that are far more important than that.) The person right before me had Wheaton sign his Guitar Hero guitar, which is already awesome... but there's more: In signing it, Wheaton started out by writing "FREEBIRD!!!" in large block letters. He then put his signature below that. I tried to take a picture of that, but my non-digital camera didn't react in time so I couldn't get that picture. (But that wasn't my "best" camera failure of the day...)

For a good time, call Jenny: One of the prevalent things at PAX were the people prominently displaying their numbers for an NVIDIA contest in which they were supposed to find their love match (i.e., the person who had the same number) at the Con. That wasn't so bad, although I found it extremely annoying when people used a Q & A question to do this (which I saw twice). That's retarded! While in line to get Wheaton's autograph, however, I saw something that more than made up for that. There was a person with the fake contest number 8675309 and somebody next to him with the fake number 8675308. Dude! I took a couple pictures of this, although that's in the roll that's still in my camera, so it will be a while before I can show anybody. (I need to get a digital camera, as both this and the last blurb indicate.)

The booth babe incident: OK, here's the real camera incident, though in my case, the problem was technically my timing rather than the camera's. One of the games had a both babe with an interesting gunslinger costume that I (and lots of others, obviously) thought would make a good picture. Most people were taking pictures with her, but I figured that taking a picture of her would be fine. So when there isn't anyone else there, I start doing this. Then she starts posing for the shot, which for some reason I didn't register that she was going to do. I finished taking the picture before she could finish posing, and she ended up with this really horrified look on her face that I think I got on camera. (This is the last picture from the other roll, so I'll show you this picture soon enough. We'll see what it actually looks like.) I'm sure I had a sheepish grin on my face and I know that I shrugged apologetically. Lemming was browsing the PAX forums later where there was a discussion of the small number of booth babes (two separate ones in the exhibitors hall, and a few more for one particular game --- I know I saw more than the 2 that Lemming mentions), and this particular booth babe, who had basically two complaints about the Con: the lesser of the two was that her boots were uncomfortable and the greater of the two were the people who didn't know how to operate their cameras. Um, oops. (For what it's worth, I think that this happened a lot --- probably not with the same flair as with my incident, but she wouldn't have complained about it so prominently if things weren't happening repeatedly.)

Fun with Microsoft: Lemming describes this very well: Joking with Microsoft PR: Mason made a point to bring his "Windows for Solitaire" shirt, and then made a point to get a picture taken at the Microsoft booth. We got a nice picture of him posing with Microsoft's PR rep for the event, and "Manager of Online Communities" (whatever position that is), who took it with a great sense of humor and was a great sport. Then I went over and took a picture with Mr. Bubbles (a statue of a "Big Daddy" from BioShock, a game that just came out). I have a couple of things to add: (1) the picture I took of Lemming with Mr. Bubbles came out really well. (2) The Microsoft guy requested a copy of the picture of him and me. (3) I hope that Lemming will post these two pictures on his blog. I'll add a link if/when he does.

The World's Smallest Dungeon: The people were very accomodating. They found out that I get migraines (they actually ask about motion sickness because of the strobe lights they use) and they decided I shouldn't have to deal with the strobe lights. I probably could have gotten away with only some small amount of dizziness if the strobe lights were still there, but they wanted to err on the side of caution. I was the only person up to that point who actually had a problem with strobe lights, though apparently several people had joked around about it before then. Also, I took a picture of Lemming next to the "satyr" (a guy in costume) who helping run the booth. Well, Lemming was not posing next to him but was rather playing House of the Dead III next to him. Also, Lemming bought a shot glass from this booth; the glass had a caption about about rolling the dice to see if he's getting drunk. :)

Omegathon: Round 4: Well, the people playing Rock Band here got the closest experience to being in a rock band than they'll probably get ever again in their lives. It was an amusing spectacle, even though the song they played sucked (IMO, obviously). I was hoping the song would be "Don't Fear the Reaper".

Jonathan Coulton: I loved his folk-music cover of "Baby Got Back". He was ok for me. The shenanigans with the camera guy were really amusing. I liked the song about the Mandelbrot set even though Coulton royally messed up some of the math. (I can't help being anal about that. It's part of my field and connecting it to the butterfly effect, which is directly in my field, is highly misleading)

MC Frontalot: I couldn't understand his lyrics at all because the acoustics were awful. I don't like rap, so I think I would have gotten a lot more out of his performance if I could actually figure out what he was saying. I love MC Hawking and it's really the lyrics that do it for me rather than the rap, and I want to hear the words to see if they amuse me. The song topics are certainly good.



Sunday:

Life imitates Spaceballs (and some notes on other costumes): Lemming and I decided to go to IHOP on Sunday, so we got to the Con a little later than the previous day. On the way back, we saw a guy dressed as Princess Peach (we also saw one of them earlier, so in total, I saw two male Princess Peaches and one or two female ones). When we noticed that he was smoking, I knew that we had captured Peach's stunt double. (As awesome as this was, it would have been even more spectacular would be if Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, and Toad were also in the scene. There were certainly plenty of Marios and Luigis to go around.) Other costumes included at least 4 links (3 female, 1 male), Phoenix Wright (sp?) stuff, and more. Costumes weren't as close to as prevalent as at Dragon*Con (which is one reason I like Dragon*Con so much), but they were reasonably common and it definitely made people-watching better.

Come hither: This interaction ended up working out a little better than the booth babe one, though this time the person involved had a vested interest. Basically, Lemming and I were in the middle of an alleyway discussing where to go next and the girl at a booth beckoned me with her pinky to come over to the Astro booth that she was manning. I eventually walked over despite my shyness (i.e, the summon spell worked) and filled out a form to possibly get a free laptop. (I guess it will be pretty ironic if I win it.) She was very friendly, but I was pretty tired at that point and wasn't confusing it with friendship, so I didn't try to stray from business. (Mostly, I was amused by the girl's tactics. That's why I'm mentioning it here.) I probably should have at least asked for a name, but I didn't.

N+: This game reminded me of Loadrunner and the few levels I played were really fun. I started swearing are the game when I exploded at a particularly inopprtune time. In this case, it was a sign that I was getting really into the game. I found out later that this is coming out for the DS, so I'll be buying it. (According to Amazon, it comes out on January 8th, 2008.)

Castle Crashers: I tried this demo with Lemming and two other people --- well, we tried most of it, but the exhibition hall was having power troubles at the time, so it ended up crashing before we could finish. (We previously saw a different group play the part we missed, and the twist we couldn't played was really cool.) The game --- reminiscent of the old TMNT action games and with a spectacular animation style --- was pretty fun, but I had a lot of trouble keeping track of my character. (Lemming had no such troubles, so this could easily just be a facet of my own lack of skill with most games.) I was mostly button-mashing, but I found some very cool special moves by accident, so it seems like one could develop a decent amount of strategy with this game.

Omegathon: Final Round: Lemming describes this on his on his blog. I completely differ with him on this one. I definitely understand how others can enjoy this (on a broad level, it comes down to the same reasons I really enjoy watching things like baseball), but I found watching a game I don't care about in a genre I don't care about being played by people I don't care about to be utterly boring (except when one person accidently immolated himself, which I found hilarious). I was underwhelmed. I know most of the people at the Con care about Halo 3, but hopefully I'll instead be able to see a future Final Round which instead uses Combat for the Atari 2600.

Dinner with Kin Chan: A couple of hours later, Lemming and I had dinner with Kin Chan, one of my fellow Usual Bastards. The place I went actually had 100% cream, which is rare. (Most places have half & half, and that's what they give you when you ask for cream.) I approve!


OK, so this post is long, but I decided to try to get things out of the way at once. Hopefully, Lemming will post some of his pictures and I can link to them. I'll let you know about the picture of the horrified booth babe once I have it.

Update: Here is a picture of Wil Wheaton posing with the autographed guitar and the couple for whom he autographed. By the way, I'm the one who took that photo. (The standard procedure, naturally, is to ask the next person in line to help out.)