I think there was a danger of over-expectation on my part based on friends who absolutely loved PAX East in previous years; after all, they were instrumental in finally getting me on board with checking it out. But it was quickly apparent that I had actually underestimated the convention, leaving me surprised and overwhelmed, all in good ways, once I entered the event.
All the rumors are true, PAX East is a frickin’ blast.
Say what you will about Penny Arcade in general but the PAX conventions are fairly well-regarded as being some of the best run conventions you will ever go to. Some of our friends have been trying to convince us to go for a while now with PAX East being in Boston. We are not huge gamers but both of us at least casually play enough games, and absorb enough geeky news in general, that we had an interest in going. (Also for some reason I casually consume a lot of information about game design.) Much like SDCC you have to decide fairly early on that you want to go to PAX East. You can’t just decide a week before the convention that you should go and then get a 3-day pass and a hotel. This is a convention that sold out of weekend passes a few hours after they went one sale. The only way to get a ticket past that point was to pay marked up ticket scalper prices. So we barely got our tickets but we got them. So the question is was it worth the effort for a convention about a secondary fandom of ours.
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