The Stack

PAX is full of games, but it’s even more full of people. The show was simply oversold. I haven’t even really tried to get into any panels or events other than the IF-related ones, but even those, contrary to expectation, have had queues too long to fit in the room. Are there really that many IF fans at PAX? Not really. At one of the panels, someone asked the audience to raise their hands if they had played a text game in the last year, and only about half of them raised their hands. Even that was more than I was expecting after hearing people talking in line. Some of them had no idea what they were in line for, and just wanted to get into anything. This was a good half hour before the doors were opened.

After one such experience, I made sure to bring some entertainment on subsequent queues. This isn’t at all unusual, of course. A lot of people in the queues were playing on various handheld devices (mostly various forms of Nintendo DS). But I’m still trying to get get through Heimdall, which means using a relatively bulky laptop. If I can sit down while playing, I can of course put it on my lap, where it belongs. But the people in charge liked to keep shifting the queue around while we were waiting, to use space more efficiently. Standing up and holding the laptop in one hand, one has only one hand free for gameplay. But you know something? For a primarily mouse-based game like Heimdall, that’s enough. If I weren’t playing Heimdall, I probably would have been trying to play IF, that being more appropriate to my immediate context, and to play that standing up, you’d really want a harness of the sort seen in The Typing of the Dead.