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How will Boston handle an invasion of 60,000 nerds, geeks and gamers? And how will the T-shirt-and-RedBull crowd handle the home of Puritanism and witch trials? The answers will come on March 26 when the Penny Arcade Expo makes its first expansion from the West Coast to its East Coast home in Boston.
The answers to the above questions depend in part on whom you ask. For Pat Moscaritolo, president and CEO of the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau, PAX East means a huge win for the city and region.
“It packs a huge wallop,” he said.
How huge? With a sold-out crowd expected to flood the Hynes Convention Center, PAX East will become the area’s third-largest recurring event in the first quarter, right out of the gate, behind the Yankee Dental conference and the International Seafood Show, as far as economic impact goes.
And yes, that did say “recurring.” PAX East has signed a three-year deal that will bring the largest collection of gamers and game industry people in North America back to Boston in March of 2011 and 2012.
For the local gaming industry, the convention means a chance to connect with the gamers who have to make choices on where to spend their money. For companies like Westwood’s Turbine Inc., PAX East is a chance to connect with players of its massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as “Lord of the Rings Online” and “Dungeons & Dragons Online,” according to director of communications Adam Mersky.
“This is the only time when we can get to get in front of lots of players,” Mersky said. And, as much as having a big presence at PAX is about branding, it’s also to “just get to know who our players are,” he said.
Turbine will have a 1,000-square-foot pavilion on the show floor and nearly 300 of the company’s 320 Westwood employees will be at the booth at some point over the three-day show. Mersky said that Turbine wants to make sure that it pulls out all the stops at a convention of gamers in its own backyard.
“This is really the center, the core of gaming culture, and these people are very influential,” Mersky said.
For most people, PAX attendees are assumed to be like the Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons,” but who those influential people really are might be surprising. They run the gamut from teenagers to octogenarians with an average age of 27, and 25 percent of attendees are women. One thing all of the attendees share is a love for games, from tabletop board games to the latest offerings on computers or consoles.
“Gaming isn’t simply a hobby or something they come home from work and play — gaming for them is a lifestyle choice,” said Robert Khoo, president of Penny Arcade Inc. and show director.
According to Moscaritolo, PAX East is expected to bring in between $16 million and $19 million to the local economy, which compares with $19 million to $22 million each year from the seafood show and the $20 million to $25 million from the dental conference.
To put attendance numbers in context, when PAX opened up the hotel block associated with the show, it had three hotels on the list. When the show sold out in early February, it was up to 10 hotels in the official block.
Khoo is the man behind the show curtain for PAX, and he said a plan to come east was in the works almost since the first show in 2004.
“Trust me, we were thinking about it since 2005,” Khoo said. “But it was such a logistical challenge to try to bring it there. It’s hard enough to do it in your own back yard.”
That back yard is Seattle, home to a conference that was born from the minds of the creators of a Web comic about games and gamers. Spokane, Wash., residents Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik created a comic strip that has become, Khoo said, “a political cartoon for the gamer industry.”
Jason Schupbach, creative economy industry director for the state of Massachusetts, has been helping Khoo and the PAX staff since he first starting working for the state in early 2009. While his department has helped Khoo once they made the decision to come to Boston, the credit for that decision lays in the hands of the local gaming community itself, he said.
“They made the decision based on going to a lot of community events,” Schupbach said. “They were just blown away by the communications and the community here.”
Khoo agreed, saying that in addition to the colleges, the fact that it is a travel hub and the overall “Seattle” vibe of the city, PAX also was drawn to the area based on “the expansion in the amount of game development in the Boston area.”
While he is proud of the anticipated attendance number, Khoo is equally proud of the fact that he really has no way to measure how financially successful the upcoming show will be, because, frankly, it doesn’t interest him.
“Our ‘corporate philosophy’ — it isn’t really about money,” Khoo said. “I mean, we don’t actually care about ‘maximizing profitability,’ as most companies do.”
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