PAX East – Is This Newb Doing it Right?

So rather than finishing the piles of work I’ve got lined up for school, I decided to head out with my friends to PAX East.

I’ve never been to PAX before, and everyone I was going with had. In all honesty, I’ve never done a Con before, so I wasn’t sure to expect.  I’m not super hardcore into the pro gaming scene, and just game casually. I’m a total tech dork though, so being able to go to an expo with a ton of console and PC gaming stuff and hardware vendors seemed like a cool idea.

The 5.5 hour drive wasn’t too bad (even the typical Boston traffic wasn’t as terrible as usual) and we hung out at our hotel last night, after hitting up Made in MA at Microsoft in Cambridge. 

Morning came, and everyone separated (side effect of going with a bunch of Enforcers: everybody’s got crazy different schedules) so I headed out to the Expo Hall.

Wow.

There are a ton of vendors and companies here and demos. Everybody from NVIDIA to ThinkGeek to Riot to Pandora (an indie company selling a portable linux-based system that runs emulators.)  It’s honestly a bit overwhelming when you walk in. I was looking around, asking myself “Where do I start?” I started looking around at vendors and began collecting swag.

There are a ton of panels going on, but the lines looked a little long for all of them (guess I shouldn’t have gotten up at 10am :P) and I figured I’d have more fun looking around the floor. 

So the first question I’ll ask:

Is it worth going to panels?

I haven’t seen a ton of stuff that I’m necessarily interested in for the panels (that or I missed them) so what’s your idea about hitting up random panels at PAX?

The second question I’ll ask:

What’s the best part of PAX East in your opinion?

I’ve got a whole weekend here, and I want to break out and see as much cool stuff as I can.

There are a ton of people passionate about the gaming industry, not only in the PC, and console world, but in the tabletop world (a world which I need to break into at some point.) If you haven’t been able to make it out to PAX, it’s really worth it, just to see the sheer amount of people and companies hanging out here (including GameSkinny).