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Penny Arcade Expo '09: The Friday Panels
This post is by Sam Machkovech.
PAX is a geeky, protected asylum. That's obvious for the attendees, surrounded by games and fellow gamers. If anybody pulls a Nintendo DS out of their pockets, they don't get ridiculed; they get assaulted with requests to play some Tetris or Mario.
Keynote speaker Ron Gilbert reveled in his place in the bubble, too. Gilbert, a decades-long vet of the industry, made his name with LucasArts and their adventure games of the '80s and early '90s, particularly Maniac Mansion and Tales of Monkey Island. As such, he was able to toss up countless, obscure nerd references, each received with a cheer by the thousands-strong keynote crowd: the first powerful TI programming calculator; the Horizon computer he had as a kid ("possibly the first personal computer ever sold in Oregon," he insisted); the old computers and game consoles he taught himself to program with.
Previous PAX keynotes have served as a call to arms for gamers, to embrace their hobby and be proud of being a nerd, geek, and/or dweeb. Gilbert's was soundly fixed in the post-cheerleading era. "Games are important" was his refrain, and he directed his call to arms not at gamers, but at the industry. He called video games "the most important art form to emerge in the past 100 years," and contended that small teams of 10 or less are the ones making the best games these days. That's the way the business was when Gilbert first started, he pointed out—full of forward-thinking, story-driven games without corporate meddling.
"Games have one special ability," he concluded, slamming a "games are not art" argument made by Roger Ebert a few years ago. "They take us beyond viewing. We interact, explore, and make it personal with games. Live it. Don't view it."
Friday's panels were only the tip of the iceberg. One dealt with games journalism in a market of shrinking ad sales; another looked at the development world from the perspective of four people in the LGBT community. Each of those drew big crowds; game-specific previews of unreleased stuff were even more packed. But most successful—and certainly most in line with Gilbert's speech—was that of the Penny Arcade creators themselves, who addressed a capacity crowd in the Washington State Convention Center's's largest room. The co-creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, talked about a scheduling snafu in which PAX attendees were about to be booted from the Hyatt to make room for visiting Oakland Raiders players. The Hyatt rep allegedly mentioned the Raiders as if by name alone, they should win out. PAX's people told 'em to fuck off.
"Come on," Holkins laughed. "That's the ultimate ascent of geek over jock!"
PAX is a geeky, protected asylum. That's obvious for the attendees, surrounded by games and fellow gamers. If anybody pulls a Nintendo DS out of their pockets, they don't get ridiculed; they get assaulted with requests to play some Tetris or Mario.
Keynote speaker Ron Gilbert reveled in his place in the bubble, too. Gilbert, a decades-long vet of the industry, made his name with LucasArts and their adventure games of the '80s and early '90s, particularly Maniac Mansion and Tales of Monkey Island. As such, he was able to toss up countless, obscure nerd references, each received with a cheer by the thousands-strong keynote crowd: the first powerful TI programming calculator; the Horizon computer he had as a kid ("possibly the first personal computer ever sold in Oregon," he insisted); the old computers and game consoles he taught himself to program with.
Previous PAX keynotes have served as a call to arms for gamers, to embrace their hobby and be proud of being a nerd, geek, and/or dweeb. Gilbert's was soundly fixed in the post-cheerleading era. "Games are important" was his refrain, and he directed his call to arms not at gamers, but at the industry. He called video games "the most important art form to emerge in the past 100 years," and contended that small teams of 10 or less are the ones making the best games these days. That's the way the business was when Gilbert first started, he pointed out—full of forward-thinking, story-driven games without corporate meddling.
"Games have one special ability," he concluded, slamming a "games are not art" argument made by Roger Ebert a few years ago. "They take us beyond viewing. We interact, explore, and make it personal with games. Live it. Don't view it."
Friday's panels were only the tip of the iceberg. One dealt with games journalism in a market of shrinking ad sales; another looked at the development world from the perspective of four people in the LGBT community. Each of those drew big crowds; game-specific previews of unreleased stuff were even more packed. But most successful—and certainly most in line with Gilbert's speech—was that of the Penny Arcade creators themselves, who addressed a capacity crowd in the Washington State Convention Center's's largest room. The co-creators, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, talked about a scheduling snafu in which PAX attendees were about to be booted from the Hyatt to make room for visiting Oakland Raiders players. The Hyatt rep allegedly mentioned the Raiders as if by name alone, they should win out. PAX's people told 'em to fuck off.
"Come on," Holkins laughed. "That's the ultimate ascent of geek over jock!"
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