PAX East: Day 2
Today, I missed the bus. The shuttle to and from the convention center doesn’t exactly have a schedule per se, just that it arrives every 25-30 minutes at the stops. When I walked outside my hotel this morning, the shuttle had just left. So I was presented with 2 options: wait 25-30 minutes for the next one, or take the 20ish minute walk. I went with the latter. At first it was really cold outside and I had to keep swapping which hand was holding my phone for directions and which was cowering from the temperature in my pocket, but once I got around Boston Harbor, where the sun was out, It wasn’t all that bad to be honest. The worst part is that my legs were terribly worn out from all the walking around I did yesterday.
So upon arriving at the convention center, I made my way to the queue area for the expo floor once again. This time, I ended up in the area near PAX Arena, where they had distributed some inflatables to keep people entertained for the time they were standing there waiting. In this moment, I was awe-stricken by the ability for a bunch of people to gameify bouncing inflatables around with a bunch of strangers. One of the inflatables handed out was an innertube decorated like a doughnut. Very quickly people started to hold up the doughnut while others attempted to get the beach balls through it. Whenever someone was successful, a wave of cheers would erupt from the crowd and the doughnut would be passed off to a different person to hold. Things like this really reinforced for me that I was among a bunch of nerds like me.
The only panels I planned to see today were the two “Careers in the Games Industry” panels, which didn’t start until 4:30, so I spent most of today wandering the expo hall again. I played some cool games, talked to some devs, handed out cards to those devs (hi guys!), and added some new games to my steam wishlist. I also spent a lot of time window-shopping the board game section of the expo floor. My wallet (and my shelf at home) are dreading the prospect of me buying another board game, but I find that it’s probably inevitable that I’ll come home with at least one.
Eventually, I made my way up to the Arachnid theater for the Careers in the Games Industry panels. This panel really reinforced for me that a lot of the recent decisions I’ve been making have been good ones, such as building my LinkedIn presence or simply coming to PAX in the first place, and gave me some tips on other things I should be doing as well, such as adjusting my resume for every job I apply to, and potentially adding some new things to my portfolio. In particular, after the panel, I had the opportunity to talk to Amanda Grow, a producer at Standing Stone Games. One of my major goals in my career is to eventually to work on the World of Warcraft team, and more specifically, on instanced content such as dungeons and raids. Because of this, I figured she would have some good advice for me about how to show off my love of this kind of content and understanding of it without being able to show that in a project sense. She told me that in cover letters and even on my portfolio itself, I should have a section where I talk about how much I’ve played the game and basically use my words to express my knowledge of the game and what makes it fun. Due to this, I’m starting to consider an additional page to my website where I can write more thoughtful and in depth write-ups about various types of games and their mechanics, so I can demonstrate this.
Finally, during the day today, I decided that next year, I want to exhibit at PAX. Of course, that means I’ll need to have something to actually show off next year. I think this is a really good external pressure to make something, not necessarily fast, but with a definite deadline. I’ve proposed the idea to a handful of my friends and they seem interested in joining me in this spur of the moment idea. We’ve already got a couple ideas floating around based on my perception of what seems to attract attention at the expo booths. I’m sure in the coming days I’ll have some more to talk about on that front, probably as I work on the design document on my train ride home on Monday.
Tomorrow is the day that Brian David Gilbert, as well as some other Dropout and Dropout-adjacent people will be at PAX running a live show of “Um, Actually” so I hope to be able to catch that show!
