Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Blog

PAX East: They like us, they really like us!

By Rodney Brown

This week’s big news that the gaming convention PAX East has committed to staying in Boston through 2023 showcases two things - one, the folks at Penny Arcade Expo love Boston and its college-age, super-nerdy crowd, and two, Boston is one Hell of an emotionally needy city.

Weeks ago I had heard that there was some big news coming down the road about PAX East and the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which runs the Hynes Convention Center and the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Try as I might, however, I couldn’t get any of the participants to spill the beans early. Kudos to them for all staying tight-lipped. But one source on the West Coast finally said something to the effect of the news being not that big a thing. This person couldn’t understand why all the fuss.

I’ll tell you why - Massachusetts in general and the greater Boston area in particular has an enormous chip on its shoulder. It has a culturally endemic condition often referred to as “Short Man’s Syndrome.” Compliments are veiled insults to the sufferers of this condition, nothing is as good as the next person has, and they desperately seek outside validation, while instantly dismissing it as disingenuous when such validation is offered.

Don’t believe me? Talk to any Red Sox fan for a few minutes. The Yankees are a better team, but of course they suck. Same for the Patriots. The New York Giants played a better game, but they still are chumps and Eli is a joke.

This attitude extends to the tech community as well. Silicon Valley has a more active venture capital community, with more tech investments than Greater Boston per year, and that fact sticks in the craw of the Bay State homers that can’t celebrate the region for what it is, and let the Valley have what it has. New York City has a more active digital media tech community, and that just can’t be allowed, in the minds of these SMS sufferers.

Wake up, people. All you homers and whiners run the real risk of damaging the areas in which the region really does have dominance by not being willing to accept them for what they are without also trying to grab onto what some other region has. Greater Boston has the best education systems, overall, of any area in the country. Don’t believe it? Ask anyone who has taken a child of high school age out of a public school system in Massachusetts to a similar system in another state. All AP classes and boredom. In higher education in particular, nobody can touch the concentration of colleges and universities in this area - in either quantity or quality.

That all leads to one of the most active startup communities anywhere. There is a reason why MassChallenge is becoming an international model for fostering innovation. And a reason why TechStars is here, to say nothing of corporate investment arms from companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Google, Motorola, Intel and others.

Then there is the gaming industry. Sure, California has more large-scale studios and game publishers. But we have two of the best colleges for training game developers in the entire country in Becker College and Worcester Polytechnic Institute - both in the same city, even. PAX East recognized that fact with its commitment of $325,000 over ten years to the nascent Massachusetts Digital Gaming Institute, which is using Becker as its home base to build the videogame industry in Massachusetts.

Let’s accept the admiration of the largest consumer gaming empire, and its recognition of what the Bay State can bring to the industry - well-trained brains. And let’s not whine that some game giant like Electronic Arts hasn’t established a publishing office here. We don’t need to be the best at everything. But we can no longer put at risk what we are the best at by always thinking that there’s someone out to get us, that what some other region has is better than what we have.