PAX:Day 1

Well, the first four hours were really adventures in lines. We made the best of it though with various hand-helds, pictochat involving phallic drawings and conversations with far more geek cred than me. We even fit in a full game of Warcraft 3 which was quite thrilling! My opponents were very kind players and it was great to be able to do that in the middle of the doldrum of the waiting.

After finally being able to set up our computers we floated around the exhibit hall which was excellent. I would imagine in an exhibit hall like E3 it is likely more shill and shwag, but here you really felt like they were there to let you play. Things like demoing a TCC and letting you keep a whole deck of the cards. It was neat! I also got a beta key from a developer for Pirates of the Burning Seas which I have wanted to beta forever. Quite excited about that!

After that, we saw the keynote speech by Wil Wheaton. This was one of the most amazing speeches I have ever heard. He wove a story of his experience of his childhood with games into all of the troubles and concerns in the modern day concerning video games. Concerns like anti-social behavior and violence which contradict the experiences we have all had with games. He also had some choice words about people who play online games and act like dicks. Throughout the entire speech he made hundreds of well placed references to gaming experiences and our geek culture at large and tied it all together in such a way that it made me feel proud to be a gamer. That guy is fucking GOOD!

There was a Q&A with Jerry and Mike that was really funny. Some good questions and some silly ones. There was a really odd moment when this guy, who must have been really stoned, was accusing them of something and then remembered that he had not asked them a question. Bewildering. Then they had a surprise speaker, Uwe Boll. Lots of boos and everything. It was really embarrassing for me to see half the auditorium get up and leave, half of those left ridiculing him. I really thought it took brass balls to fly from Germany to stand in front of that. Very few people had genuine questions about how he planned to do better movies in the future and he did well to answer them. Also, the clips of his newest movie "Postal" didn't look terrible. Maybe a little editing but I thought some of the jokes were good.

Right now I am hanging with my computer, might play a lil StarCraft and then head down for some dinner before the concert. Till next post!

-Aaron