10 Ways to Supersize PAX

Giant Realm's Gus Mastrapa shows how to grow gaming's best convention.

If you were at PAX, you know that the three-day convention organized by Penny Arcade and their ever-growing empire was something really special. Nearly 60,000 gamers converged on Seattle to play games, make **** jokes and be cool to each other. The show was Woodstock for nerds, and by the time next fall rolls around thousands more will want to hop on a bus and crash the show. Giant Realm has some tips that ought to help Gabe, Tycho and company expand PAX without cocking the whole thing up.

1. More Playtests: At GenCon this year I played a bunch of tabletop prototypes. For game publishers these kinds of demos are a win-win situation. They learn new ways to tweak the games they're developing and we get pumped for forthcoming releases. I'd love to see videogame publishers set up honest-to-God playtests at PAX. Demos of games like World of WarCraft: Wrath of the Lich King and Warhammer Online are fine, but the experiences you get at a booth just aren't beefy enough to help us form opinions or pinpoint flaws. Why not make serious testing at PAX part of the game design process?
2. More Women: Gals weren't totally scarce, but the ratio of boys to girls was more lopsided than your average anime or even comic book convention. Surely, the overabundance of Y chromosomes is pretty representative of the gamer demographic, but still, you can't tell me that the Cookie Brigade and the handful of wives and girlfriends I saw were the only women that would be interested in a show as awesome as PAX. There's got to be a way to reach out to and welcome more girl gamers.
3. More Music: Two evenings of concerts rocked the PAX crowd. Geek acts like Jonathan Coulton and The Minibosses melted faces, but both evenings' line-ups leaned fairly heavily toward rock. Outside the convention center a scruffy crew of chip-tune artists threw an off-the-cuff street concert that thrilled a much smaller crowd with bleeps, screeches and bloops. PAX could use a second stage, where smaller, more experimental acts and DJs play - or maybe they should just host a West Coast installment the Blip Festival. Either way PAX should expand their musical offerings to include a more diverse sampling of video game inspired music.
4. More Competition: The Omegathon is awesome and infinitely more accessible than your average eSports competition, but I got the distinct feeling after watching the round-six finale of the Omegathon that the crowd was hungry to see more. I'd love to see PAX's take on competitive StarCraft or WarCraft III. Those games are already a blast to watch live. A tournament thrown with Penny Arcade's patented low-key attitude sounds more than a little promising.
5. More Art: The Penny Arcade Expo wouldn't exist if it weren't for comics. Publisher Oni Press (behind the awesome Scott Pilgrim publishers) were on hand to sell comics and press the flesh, but otherwise the con felt fairly bereft of hand-drawn fun. Comic conventions staples, like fan art galleries, portfolio reviews and art-centric Q&A panels would help stoke fans' creativity . If not, next year let's just get those I Am 8-Bit guys to take their show to Seattle for all of us who couldn't make it to Los Angeles.
6. More Panels and Workshops: I was lucky enough to be invited to talk on a game journalism panel at this year's convention. Even though we were booked opposite Harmonix and a panel hosted by Gabe and Tycho themselves we still had over 500 attendees at our talk. There's a hunger for intelligent talk about gaming, journalism and design at PAX. The show could soon be a great alternative to the expensive Game Developer's Conference. Let's see more events that allow professionals get together and share ideas with those who aspire to get into games.
7. More Debate: People got along nicely at PAX. A little too nicely. Considering the amount of argument that goes down on message boards and in comments threads, PAX could be a great outlet for folks to spew their opinions, make arguments and take a side. GDC frequently hosts ***** sessions. Sure, PAX is a big love-in, but maybe a little controlled *****ing could be cathartic.
8. More Fans: PAX is already expanding to Boston for an East Coast get-together in 2010, and it's fair to assume that the show in Seattle will continue growing. My sincere hope is that PAX finds a way to accommodate everyone who wants to attend. This year's Blizzcon ticket fiasco proved that fan shows need to grow to fit their audiences. Blizzard is making a huge mistake in limiting attendance to their show. PAX should avoid this pitfall at all costs.
9. More Recruiting: CCP, the makers of the MMOG EVE Online, were publicly recruiting for programmers and other employees their booth.  More game designers should reach out to the community like this. It shows that you're not a bunch of elitist assholes and it proves that you're keeping your game staffed with people who actually care about games. Besides, I'd be willing to wager that the met at least a couple young designers that had what it takes.
10. More Deodorant: I know it's a cliché to point out that nerds have hygiene problems, but it's still the truth. There's nothing more annoying than getting stuck in line next to Pig Pen. Daily showers and a healthy underarm application of antiperspirant ought to be part of every gamer's morning load out. But should a nerd fail to do the right thing, his peers (that's you and me) should take the smelly dork aside and set him straight. And if that doesn't work, hot, cosplay chicks dressed as Cammy from Street Fighter ought to hand out sample sized sticks of Old Spice. The Cookie Brigade is cool, but a Glade Brigade would go a long way to making everyone's PAX experience that much better.

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