Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The PAX Journals!

I was lucky enough to visit PAX East last week, and I'm just now starting to recover from the experience.  And what an experience it was!  PAX is rightly preserved in nerd-culture as a sort of Shangri-la, a remarkable collection of sub-cultural fetishes that occurs four times a year in varied locale, a swirl of positive energy that overrides any ambient cynicism native to its host city (no mean feat in the case of the "fucking Sully" filled rage-bastion that is Boston).  But what amazed me wasn't the positivity, or the raw number of people attending the get-together, or any particular video-game that I saw there.  What amazed me was the sheer density of the event.

Part of that may have been highlighted by the way I arrived at PAX East.  Since I teach on Fridays, and live in New York, attending PAX meant driving through Connecticut in the middle of rush hour after teaching two classes.  I ended up arriving in Boston at around midnight, missing Friday's events completely, and barely getting in with any time to decompress and sleep if I wanted to actually be able to see the main-event panel on Saturday, and not because the panel was particularly early.  See, while the number of people at PAX isn't the most remarkable part, it is undeniably impressive.  Driving from the suburbs, where I grew up and was staying, in to South Boston, where the convention center is located, normally takes about 20 minutes.  That means, to get to a 10:30 panel a little early and have plenty of time to settle in and find nice seats, you might need to leave maybe forty-five minutes beforehand, or an hour, if you're nervous.  The friend I was attending PAX with picked me up from where I was staying two hours before the event to take a twenty minute drive, and we didn't even depart the overflow parking lot we ended up in, two miles away from the venue, until 30 minutes after the event had already started.  That's the traffic footprint that PAX leaves: an hour of backed up traffic centered around the convention center, so composed that a single traffic light funnels scores of vehicles from a major highway into a two-lane street wholly unequipped to deal with the mass of humanity spilling into Boston's remarkably well-appointed convention center.  The presence of a single entrance also complicated matters: while we were driving in we saw a line roughly half a mile long, doubled over on itself, and this was 30 minutes into the event opening its doors.  Once we were inside, there was a virtual sea of people on the expo hall floor, shuffling from line to line, trying to get a look at a particular tournament or game or impressively nerdy piece of kitsch or clothing.  That sea of traffic, both automotive and human, kept us from making it to the Make-A-Strip panel until half-an-hour after it had started, and that was with the well-thought-out measures that the convention center staff, the MBTA, PAX's planners, and the laudable Enforcers of PAX put into place.  Twenty minutes stretched to three hours, and by the end I was just happy to get in the door and have a chance to sit in a nearly full hall, listening to two nerds joke while they drew pictures.  The number of people was staggering, but the way they were so artfully packed into these spaces was nothing short of amazing.  PAX East stuffed people into every nook and cranny, and managed to simultaneously fill an expo hall, and partially fill a major theater, and there were still events going on all over the theater that we could've attended if the main panel we were attending had been locked up.

That brings me to the second kind of density present at PAX: the density of activity.  PAX East's human population is one thing, to be expected at a sold-out event that stuffs a major convention center to its bursting point.  What sets PAX aside from, say, a sold out concert or a sporting event is that once you're inside the convention center there are a minimum of three limited time events starting at any given moment, and odds are at least two of them are pretty interesting.  Attending the Make-A-Strip panel meant missing out on panels about narrative in Indie games and un-typifying gender in play structures, and some other bullshit panels I couldn't care less about.  There were also multiple game tournaments going on at the same time, a tournament for whatever medium you fetishize.  Stand-up arcade, console games, PC games, board games, and CCGs were all repped on the schedule, and all overlapped with things you wanted to do.  The PAX I attended probably wasn't the PAX that other people attended.  In fact, a group of my Boston-based friends spent their entire PAX on the expo floor, where I was barely present, playing demos of upcoming games (or, perhaps more accurate, waiting in line to play demos of upcoming games - PAX East's showroom floor is a latticework of people waiting in line to try their hand at upcoming titles, with lines spilling out of already overwrought booths and across the expo floor).  When I told him about the event I'd bought a Sunday ticket just to see, he was perplexed.  He had no idea what Acquisitions Incorporated was, and, moreover, hadn't even bothered to see any Penny-Arcade events.  He just didn't care about them - they weren't why he was attending the convention.

And that brings me to the next kind of density PAX presents: subcultural density.  It's hardly news that nerds compartmentalize avidly, breaking into sub-groups more vociferously than nearly anyone else, but PAX takes it to an extreme.  While I was attending that Make-a-Strip panel that I arrived late to, one of the founders of the event told a story about watching an overcrowded autograph desk inhabited by a Youtube-star (an odd turn of phrase for my aging hands to type) and asking Is that guy a big deal or something?  A tween waiting to meet this You-tuber turned to him and scolded him: Yeah.  Six million subscribers.  That's a pretty big deal.

That's the diversity of nerds attending PAX: there are people who spent a minimum of $45 to get in to the event who don't know the people who founded it, people who not only can't recognize these creators, but are so avidly devoted to their own subculture to project that wanton disregard for the other cultural spheres of the convention out into the cultural id.  Penny-Arcade is a subsection of PAX East, and a pretty small one at that.  While the Acquisitions Incorporated panel was packed to bursting, the Make-a-Strip panel had plenty of seats open, and the general population of PAX had its attention largely focused elsewhere, away from the very activity that formed the kernel of this convention.  That kind of condensed cultural sprawl is weird, and weirdly infectious: PAX is first and foremost a place where people who care deeply about things that other people are either unaware of or annoyed with or ashamed by come to indulge in their passions.

What's amazing about that is how the nerds populating PAX, with the exception of a few people like the aforementioned tween, are so welcoming and generous with their passion.  There were a few assholes (and at moments, I may have been one of them) who jealously championed their own passions with the kind of contempt you'd expect from a stereotypical nerd, but for the most part people were generous: they'd share what they loved with you, hurl it your way with aplomb.  I've been to anime conventions where gaggles of Cosplayers hop from show-event to show-event while pasty nerds in sweat-stained t-shirts consciously avoid looking at their cleavage, but at PAX people in elaborately constructed suits of armor wait next to people in standard issue nerd-gear who wait next to men in suits who wait next to scantily clad comic-book-villainesses come to life, and they're all just trying to play Overwatch.  If you want a picture with the girl in that dope ass suit of armor, or, more likely, the fifth Poison Ivy you've seen this weekend, you can ask, and they'll probably say yes, chat you up about the game, and get back in to the line in the spot they left, which will have been dutifully held by a combination of natural community good-will and administratively projected good will, courtesy of PAX's Enforcers, volunteer assistants and general social tone-setters for the event who walk the floor in red shirts, making sure people are generally okay, and that no one acts like too much of a fuckwit.  The sharing, the intellectual generosity of PAX-ites, is infectious.  A week past the event, I still feel a glow inside myself for other people's passions, and the love they can bring to them.

That magnanimity actually shaped where I spent most of my time at the show.  Usually I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer.  I sit around and fuck around in front of a keyboard for fun whenever I'm not doing it professionally, but at PAX I had zero interest in waiting in line to play new games in front of what was essentially a stadium full of people.  Instead I spent most of my time in the board game area, sitting down for pick-up games of titles I'd never heard of, let alone played before.  I found some pretty cool stuff that way, too.  From the mystifyingly titled but surprisingly engrossing Billionaire Banshee (whose creator I may have unintentionally insulted - sorry guy, you made a really fun party game) to the generic-as-fuck titled but marvelously original Castle Dice, there wasn't a single game that didn't have both an enthusiastic and high-energy staff pimping it and a crowd of interested people waiting to get a seat at a table and learn to play.  Some of these people were tweens or tween-a-likes who were actively or passively rude, but mostly they were just psyched, game to try games.  At one point a young man, unaffiliated with a game creator, flagged me and my friends over to a table to get us to play a game.  I sat down with people I'd never met to try games I'd never seen before, and got to know both the game systems, and more than I'd like to about the relationship status of my table mates as I played.  Don't get me wrong, there were certainly douchebags and dicks on the floor.  The swag-bag line was filled with shitheels ducking under tills to collect as many bags as they could in short order.  But for every douchebag there were ten genuinely nice people looking to enjoy themselves, to indulge in their subcultural passion of choice.  From moms dragged there by Enforcers gamely trying their hand at weird, avant-garde games, to cartoonists just trying to sit down and get a hand of Magic in at a table, PAX was rich with the kind of forthright intellectual generosity nerds are capable of when they're at their best, and the kind of monomaniacal focus that makes that generosity so revelatory when it emerges, four times a year, splayed across two continents.