by Adam Harshberger
PAX East, I’m realizing, is that awkward place where Us and Them come together.
There are some people – you, most likely, if you’re reading Medium Difficulty – who have taken up the work of analyzing, criticizing, and thinking about videogames. Doing it seriously, with intentions from academic to idealistic, and doing it in many cases for no compensation at all. These people, myself included, care deeply about games.
Other people really love games, too. For them, games are their identity, their social group – not their muse. Like someone wearing a band t-shirt, they wear a Lord of the Rings Online hoodie or dress up as Final Fantasy characters. They don’t care any less than us. Just in different ways.
These two groups aren’t quite the same, but they aren’t so different either. Largely, they get along without a hitch, often overlapping – but I’ve heard my colleagues say things like, “Fucking nerds,” while here. It’s said ironically, and sometimes even warmly, sure, but the implication of superiority is still there. On the other hand, the fucking nerds seem to not really care about our presence here. Yellow media badges aren’t the draw that cosplay is.
I’ll admit something: I’ve had an itchy trigger finger since I got here. I’ve been frothing at the mouth to call PAX East a ‘festival of Mammon.’ I’ve been dying to call it a fucked up display of everything wrong with the way games are marketed and thought about, or maybe even made. I’ve been toying with the idea of calling the fan-attendees blind, baa-ing consumers. I’ve been playing with the idea of painting every PR person as a shiny-shoes, spiky-haired husk. There’s a temptation to paint the critics and press as either elitist pricks or pen-wielding saviors.
But all of those, I’m afraid, are the easy stories. When you cut down to the heart of PAX, and idealistically, videogames as a whole, I’d like to think you find joy. Maybe that’s an easy story, too. But amongst all parties involved, the one constant is the kind of smiles that sore feet and aching shoulders bring. Every group here has their flaws, but they aren’t at war with each other and don’t have to be.
The odd thing is that I think the fans like games a lot more than I do. And while I certainly can’t speak for my peers with media badges, I don’t really believe that any of them stood in public lines for hours to catch the briefest glimpse of a game. I know I didn’t – any chance I got to play games on the show floor was just me being opportunistic. Otherwise, it was all press appointments. I found out that most of the time, they let the press play in closed off, quieter areas. But the fucking nerds, man, they’ll do the waiting. They’re totally genuine, enthusiastic, and stoked. That’s more than I can say for myself most of the time.
And it’s a mistake to think of them as shallow. I tire easily, and obviously, I need to stop and write sometimes. The press room is really awkward here, so usually, I go and sit in an off-the-beaten-path hallway. In those kind of places, you can hear other people talking. Some would have us think that the ‘fans,’ or the imagined millions and millions of Kotaku commenters, are mindless. It is easier that way; scapegoats make the problems with games easier to bear. We can blame the problems on them. They want boobs, they want blood, they want Bigger, Better, and More Badass.
That isn’t what I’ve heard them talk about.
I’ve heard them instantly recognize who people work for, just from a name. I’ve heard them talk about aesthetics and about how it really feels to play a game. I watched and listened as they fearlessly stood in front of hundreds of people to ask the likes of Cliff Blezsinksi or Casey Hudson intelligent, thoughtful questions about their games. I heard one guy’s very extended and well-argued opinion about why the new Bit.Trip Runner’s graphics just don’t work as well as the old one. These are not drones, and these aren’t stupid people — not that I took a complete and thorough survey of their intelligence, of course, but I have spent enough time in the midst off it all to know that most of them are no fools.
They’re people who really, really fucking like videogames. Like Us. Like me. I write thousands of words about games every month and make no money, and I love it. They spend hundreds of hours doing the same thing on forums. And on cosplay. And on 100% completions. It’s two sides of the same coin.
Ahem. Anyways. What the hell did I do at PAX on Saturday?
I went to a lot of preview events. I played a beta build of TERA, an upcoming MMORPG from En Masse Entertainment, alongside two journalists from major publications. Which left me feeling a little out of my depth. I spent an hour chatting with Scott Youngblood, lead designer on Red 5 Studios’ Firefall. He was a good guy, and demonstrated an impressive amount of enthusiasm for not only his game’s innovative design, but for the fiction that surrounds it (which is considerably less innovative than the design.)
I spent twenty minutes watching a live demo of the Firaxis X-COM remake, which was interesting, but it was overwhelmingly obvious that they had performed this demo hundreds of times, and were bored. But again, when the demo ended and the Q+A started, the questions were stellar. They came from fans, not journalists — myself and the other media person there sat silent, if you’re wondering. They didn’t want to know how siq ( sic -Ed ) the guns are; they wanted to know if they could expect the same feelings of sadness, isolation, and of being overwhelmed as they had when they played the original X-COM. They asked questions about mechanics because they were interested in the decisions the developers made. These questions revealed that Firaxis lowered the squad size to six from 20-or-so to make it harder for players to overwhelm their enemies, creating a stronger sense of importance on each move you make, for instance.
I went to panels again, too. Here’s a pro-tip if you ever make it to PAX East: go listen to the developers. Try to avoid panels that have a lot of speakers – any panel I went with 4 or 5 people sitting at a table and taking turns talking was borderline nauseating. Don’t go to panels for people you follow on Twitter, especially if their Twitter feed is dedicated to the same topic as their panel. You won’t hear anything new.
Pro-tip 2: if Cliff Blezsinski is around and someone seems likely to give him a microphone, drop everything and listen. The man is infectious, passionate, and funny. I’m nursing an idea that Cliffy B might be the Steven Spielberg of videogames: just with heavenly frictions instead of booming John Williams scores at the climax. When you look at Gears of War and E.T. and then compare the Ferrari-playboy Blesinski to the older-uncle Spielberg, I think you can see an analogue, too: they both adopted personas that their target audiences could relate to, and both brought those audiences pop art of the highest quality. Cliff and Mike Capps, the president of Epic Games, spent an hour laughing and connecting candidly with their fans, touching on everything from nixed Unreal racing mini-games to daddy issues. It was the best panel so far.
I spent the evening drinking with some friends and relative strangers, and ended the night well into the next morning by screaming my lungs out, half-drunk, about the merits and failings of Final Fantasy games (someone had the audacity to tell me Final Fantasy Tactics sucked). We stayed up far too late, and then I had to take an economically-devastating cab-ride back to my hotel. That’s okay, though – that is just the kind of thing you do at PAX.
Further Reading: Postcards from PAX East (Medium Difficulty)
This entry was posted in Features and tagged Adam Harshberger , Casey Hudson , Cliff Bleszinski , CliffyB , En Masse Entertainment , Epic Games , Final Fantasy , Final Fantasy Tactics , Firaxis , PAX East , PAX East 2012 , Red 5 Studios , TERA , Unreal , X-COM . Bookmark the permalink .
