Thursday, September 10, 2009

Act I: My son grew up in our household never knowing a time without a computer in the house. He played games on our old Radio Shack TRS-80. He played console games like Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda. He played computer games on our Macs and PCs. In college, he studied computer animation and after graduation worked for game companies like Surreal (where he worked on The Suffering) and ArenaNet (where he worked on Guild Wars). After a detour through grad school to get his MBA, he now works for NCSoft, one of the worlds biggest game companies (which is about to launch their new game, Aion).

Click any image to enlarge it ...

Brian at the TRS-80

Intermission: This past weekend, he invited me to PAX09 – the largest game conference in the world – which is held here in Seattle. And he provided a “Speaker Badge” so I could get into the show. He and I met for coffee in advance and headed to the show before opening Sunday morning. “What happens if someone asks me what my speech was about,” I asked him. “Don’t worry, they won’t.”

Game art for Brian’s (er, NCSoft’s) newest game.

Act II: In my working life I have attended many big conferences and I always thought it would be fun to crash a conference. Pick up an unclaimed badge at the last minute. Talk my way into the show. Eat the rubber chicken and hit the hospitality suites. But to this day, I have never tried it on purpose. I accidentally crashed a conference once in Spain because I was confused about which conference room my conference was in. It took be about 3 hours to figure out I was in the wrong place … the conference being in Spanish and my command of the language primitive at best. But I digress. Here’s what happened at PAX09.

There’s more ... Click here: www.DigitalQuixote.com for big high res photos. And click below to hear the rest of the story.

Act III: My son and I approached the Exhibitors’ door to the conference early. The guard looked at his Exhibitor badge and let him pass. He looked at my Speaker badge and tried to stop me. I was carrying my big pro-looking Nikon D3 camera. I told the guard I was “His Publicist,” never stopping, never making eye contact, and never looking back. The guard let me pass.

We got to the door to the show floor itself and another guard let my son pass, but stopped me. “I’m his publicist,” I said to the guard holding up my Nikon, which guard was profoundly unimpressed and refused me entry. “We were informed that a Speaker badge had the same access as an Exhibitor badge.” Well, the guard would have to verify that. A few minutes passed while he was in dialog with someone at the other end of the radio. No conclusive answers were forth coming, but he let me pass. So now I’ve fulfilled my dream to intentionally crash a conference … even though I was invited.

Once in, it was a hoot. 80,000 people attended the conference. It occupied the entire venue of the Trade Center. There were tons of booths set up by game companies. There were Booth Babes! There was a ton of schwag.  There were lots and lots and lots of eclectic attendees. All in all, it was an incredible and incredibly enjoyable show. Thanks B for the invitation.
Oh, and remember the Speaker badge? As I was chatting with folks, about a dozen asked me what I spoke about. I told them my topic had to do, “with intellectual property considerations of buying a start-up game company.” I could actually have given a talk on this subject, but no one asked follow-up questions.

I took about 500 pictures on the trade show floor. Most folks were happy to have their picture taken or to have pictures taken of their booths. I ran into trouble in one booth. A guy told me, “The Company wants to know who’s taking pictures of their booth.” I introduced myself with my real name and said I was “an independent.” I then started interviewing him about the show, traffic through their booth, what he thought of competitors and he forgot to ask me anything else. Ah, the gift of gab!

Anyway, here are a few of the pictures. There are Booths, Booth Babes, Game Art, Game Paraphernalia, and presumably paying conference attendees. What a hoot!

Posted by Digital Quixote in • Out and About
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