Monday, March 14, 2011

Reporter's Notebook

Pax East sets records, secures gaming hotbed role

By Rodney H. Brown

While the Advil takes the edge off my painful feet and knees, below are some random observations about PAX East 2011, the gaming convention that ran through the weekend at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

New England’s getting global notice for gaming
In its first year last March, PAX East did not have great representation from major game studios and publishers. According to PAX executive director Robert Khoo – by the way, the best-dressed man in the gaming industry, period – most large companies felt that Boston was an untried market and didn’t want to commit the funds for a big trade show splash until it saw what kind of turn out happened. Great thinking that – it isn’t like there are any colleges or anything in and around Boston.

Well, we all now know that last year’s attendance of 52,000 nearly burst the Hynes Convention Center at its seams, and this year set a record attendance for all PAX events in its seven-year history, with 69,500 attendees. Right along with the greater number of attendees was the much greater number of game studios and publishers. They more than filled the 75,000 square feet of floor space made available to them. Largest of them all – Warner Brothers, the new corporate parent of Turbine Inc.

Those attendees, by the way, came from all over the globe – I personally encountered people from Atlanta; Portland, Ore.; Toronto; England and Germany.

The BCEC is really, really big
Despite tripling its exhibit hall floor space for game companies and other vendors, that part of PAX East only filled up one third of the entire showroom floor at the BCEC. That bodes well for future growth of the convention. With this year’s figures projected to be between 62,000 and 70,000 attendees, the BCEC can handle a few more tens of thousands with relative comfort. So, what did the PAX organizers do with the rest of the floor space? One third was split between a queue area for major events and a tabletop gaming space where any attendee could play any tabletop game that was at the show for free. The major benefit of that decision was olfactory – shutting seated gamers in a closed-off room, no matter how large, as was done at the Hynes last year, leads to a room no one wants to enter by midway through the second day.

The final third of the floor was devoted to a second food court, to help offset the loss of easy access to the hundreds of food options that comes with having an event at the Hynes. While the food choices weren’t exactly PF Chang’s, they sufficed and were actually pretty appropriate for the carnival-like atmosphere that is PAX.

Nerds are much cooler about celebrity than most
One might be able to justify the fact that nerd-specific celebrities like Larry Hryb (AKA Major Nelson), the director of programming for XBox Live for Microsoft Corp., or Jessic Chobot, host of The Daily Fix for IGN, or Adam Sessler, founder of G4TV’s show XPlay wouldn’t get pestered at a show like PAX because they aren’t celebrities in the sense most people think of them. But general celebrities such as former Red Sox ace Curt Schilling was seen wandering the showroom floor with his sons in tow on multiple occasions without being hassled and molested – and without any handler or security evident. Schilling is, of course, also a nerd celebrity as the founder of 38 Studios, whose upcoming game Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning was a major hit according to the crowd at its world premier of an actual gameplay demo Friday at PAX East.

Massachusetts is the indie game hotbed of the country
The executive director of the International Game Developer’s Association, Gordon Bellamy, said it on Thursday at the MIT Business in Gaming Conference in advance of PAX East – their Boston chapter is the most active one in the world. At PAX East, while the lines to see the new Star Wars: The Old Republic game or Darkness II were dozens of people deep with hours-long waits, smaller independent games like Slam Bolt Scrappers from Fire Hose Games of Cambridge or Smuggle Truck from Watertown-based Owlchemy Labs always had crowds so thick checking out the games they pushed into the corridors blocking foot traffic.

Now the one question remains – how can politicians not see how enormous the sector already is here, and the vast potential it has for growth?