While all of PAX East is a social experience there are specific events tailored to just have pure fun without sitting at a panel or wandering the show floor. These extra spaces as well as community rooms for LGBTQ spaces and lounges for handheld gaming round out a fantastic experience for everyone who attends PAX East. Spaces like a Jackbox Games stage, Speedrun stations and charity spaces like the infamous Cookie Brigade and Child’s Play also offer games, entertainment and opportunities to donate. A great example is Pinny trading has become a big deal with folks trading the collectible pins with each other and these spaces are scattered everywhere.
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Many of the scheduled sessions are also centered around gaming tournaments, outreach and how to play certain experiences.Īcross the sprawling BCEC there are also many stages, breakout spaces and hangout spaces that give plenty of opportunities to try new things. These panels run concurrently in multiple theatres so there is always plenty of options to choose from when looking to hear about whatever aspect of the industry catches your interest.
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These range from major industry showcases like the Gearbox Main Theatre Show to smaller focused talks like Ready Player Queer: Growth of Queerness in Gaming or The Evolution of PC Modding. The Panels and ActivatesĪnother major key focus is well over a hundred panels that run over the course of the conference. PAX also introduced new security scanners to speed up gate checks so the vibe was one of general glee and wonder. People were exuberant, the weather in Boston was fantastic so folks were coming in and out and happy to do so. The reduced footprint and lack of major players like Sony and Microsoft made the event feel somehow infinite with dozens of Independent games giving us great new experiences to discover.įrankly it was a pleasure wandering the show floor for the whole event. The result is an immense showcase of games, apparel, dice, tabletop games and opportunities for ad-hoc gaming sessions. There is also scattered vendors, hardware manufacturers, food/drink vendors and educational entities to fill out the remaining areas. In the past the videogame showcases dominated the majority of the expo space, but as interest in tabletop experiences has grown so has their presence at PAX East. The show floor is roughly divided into two parts with Videogames near the front entrance and Tabletop Games at the rear of the area. PAX East is a showcase for all things gaming, the major draw at this conference is the Expo Hall that was open all four days of the show. People were calm, people were respectful, helpful and frankly just damn happy to be at the conference whose tagline is welcome home.
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This, plus the smaller footprint, lower attendance caps and lack of major Triple A studio presence made PAX East radically different than previous years.
They held firm on this despite Massachusetts dropping many restrictions. The nice thing about PAX East, and frankly why I went was that the organizers had a strict health and safety policy that everyone had to be vaccinated and mask usage in the conference centre grounds was mandated. Months into this new variant and restrictions are relaxing and travel is starting again. This is the Third PAX being held in person with PAX West and Unplugged happening just before Omicron added new wrinkles to how we deal with COVID-19. My last in person experience with this iconic gaming conference was in March 2020 just before the Pandemic was declared and the world stopped in it’s tracks. It is a surreal thing wandering into a trade show like PAX East as we are newly into the third year of the Pandemic.
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