PAX Prime Thanks

Serious YomiThanks to Gabe and Tycho for holding PAX. It's so big and complex of a thing that it's hard to imagine what must go into planning and executing it all. If you guys are reading, great job, though I have one complaint you probably can't possibly do anything about. At PAX East, the layout is one enormous "room" the size of an airplane hangar or something with the video game area in the front and the tabletop games area in the back. The booths where tabletop game companies do demos are right next to the place where tournaments for those games are run, which are right next to the free play area. Because of this, at PAX East it was very easy for people who wanted to find me to find me, and it was generally easy for anyone to find anyone and to meet up and play things.

At PAX Prime though the company booths, tournament area for tabletop games, and freeplay area for tabletop games were so segmented that it was logistically very hard to deal with. The tournament area was in a different building 3 blocks away from the rest (rather than 10 feet away), so it makes it much more inconvenient to enter tournaments. When people at the tournament area asked where is the main place to buy games, giving them directions to a place 3 blocks away isn't a great thing to have to do. And trying to meet up with people in the freeplay tabletop game area is generally very difficult because there were like 6 different rooms (rather than one big space) and it's not possible to predict which rooms will have empty seats, so you can't really say "let's meet at room 210" or whatever.

Anyway, it seems like you've outgrown the entire city of Seattle! It looks like you need a new convention center that's way, way bigger than what's there. You've managed to have to have the problem of being "too popular," ha.

Thanks to everyone to attended and helped run the Sirlin Games tournaments, and to those who played my customizable card game, too. It was interesting seeing how new people reacted to it and you guys gave me generally very high quality feedback for people who were so new to the game.

I never did end up meeting the elusive Day9 but super thanks to Thom From Canada, the diamond league Terran player who had me sign his "gg" button, and then waited in line for an hour to have Day9 sign right next to it so he could tell Day9 that I would really like to talk to him, lol. Thom From Canada was also a star playtester of my customizable card game at PAX. I liked how he made a list of a few properties of the game ("things I know to be true," he said) in order to derive a few second-order statements about what must be good strategy tips. He was excited to hear that I had reasons his strategy tips might not be totally right (because it meant new information for him). And it was hilarious to see him play more and go against all his own tips. I also see why he's such a high ranking player in Starcraft. He made constant strategy mistakes while playing the card game the first couple times, creating a comedy of errors. Maybe embarrassing and funny, but I think this allowed him to very quickly learn a whole bunch of things not to do again. I wonder if there's something to that. Try all you can when you're new and accept that you'll make play mistakes. That results in lots of bad choices, but also teaches you faster than if you try to play in a very restrictive, "correct" way when you are new to a game (maybe?). In any case, big thanks to TFC. (And to the rest who played, like Claytus and Stephen Keller from the comments section of my Diablo3 post, lol.)

Oh and by the way, I won the Street Fighter HD Remix tournament again. And I met Cammy.

Comments

[Claytus]

Doesn't splitting not matter, though? The "+8" card is just being totalled at the end to determine if the good guys get victory anyway? I do agree it's probably more fun/flavorful, though. Whatever, I'm out of actual ideas to contribute at this point, I think you had the answer before this conversation started.

One potential idea for the 4th idea is that you make the days more similar (expo hall is already identical every day, anyway), and then sell more individual passes. So it's more about getting more total people at the show, than it is about allowing more stuff for people to do. But I say that only as speculation, and there's like 20 obvious problems with that statement, so who knows what will actually happen next year.