This year was not my first PAX East or even my first PAX. My first PAX East was in 2013 and I was five months pregnant, hating life, and easily angered. I also had about 4, maybe 5, scheduled appointments for the show, so I could do pretty much whatever I wanted, which ended up being standing in line or running to the bathroom. Don’t attend one of these massive conventions pregnant. Just. Don’t. That’s a lesson I learned three years ago.
My second PAX was PAX South 2015. I didn’t have a lot of appointments then either, because this was the first PAX South, and a lot of developers didn’t come. Even most of the indie devs that showed up brought games already out in the wild.
This PAX East I wasn’t pregnant, and I’ve made a slight bigger name for Action Trip over the last couple of years, so I had no problem booking my time across various developers and publishers at the show. That said, I made this year’s experience way too stressful on myself, and while I had a lot of fun meeting developers and hanging out with my friends, I have learned so much for making future PAX visits even better. And this goes for all PAXes, not just PAX East.
Don’t schedule an appointment right when doors open.
Just don’t. The only day I made an appointment at doors open was on Friday, when they let press in an hour early. After that, I was forced into the cattle corral with an insane number of people and ended up 15 minutes late to my SECOND appointment on Saturday. I had to text apologies to the PR, and then being so late to my second appointment threw me into a constant stasis of being late all damn day.
Don’t schedule appointments back to back.
I scheduled appointments for every 30 minutes from doors open to close. I’m able to do that at E3 with no problems, so I figured this would be no biggie either. SO. VERY. WRONG. They passed out maps of course of the showroom floor, and each booth was nicely numbered on said map. The booths were NOT numbered on the floor. Well, that’s not true, they were numbered, but many companies covered the numbers with their logos and signage. What PAX really needed was banners hanging from the ceiling with number ranges to show exactly where each cluster of numbers were. That’s one thing I can say San Diego Comic Con does right.
As a result, I got lost repeatedly. I kept getting turned around on the floor, and I couldn’t tell which direction I was going in relation to the map. I’ve never had trouble reading a convention map before this one. Sadly, I missed two appointments because I was so lost, I wandered around through my appointment.
Which brings me to my third lesson learned…
Find out who will man the booth and get THEIR contact info.
If I had these particular companies’ contact info, I could have called or texted and asked where they were. Give me a landmark or something.
I never did find where they were.
Take some time for myself.
This is a massive fan convention for video games, which means there are so many vendors ready to sell amazing geeky stuff I may not be able to get online. Set aside at least 30 minutes if not an hour each day just to browse and make plans for purchases. I know I missed out on some things just because I simply didn’t have the time to look.
Boston is expensive, yo.
My biggest regret, even bigger than missing some appointments, was not budgeting this trip well. I forgot how expensive everything is in Boston, especially the food. I ate appetizers for dinner because I couldn’t afford the main dishes, especially if I had a beer or two with friends earlier. It also meant that I wasn’t able to buy a few things that I wanted at the show, but I felt like everything jumped in price since the last time I was there. Base price for practically everything was $20. One plush that wasn’t very big cost $40. It was cute, but dammit, it wasn’t that cute. When SDCC prices seem like a better deal, there’s something rotten with this. Now I’ll have to really monitor the prices at SDCC, not counting the SDCC exclusives, which are always batshit crazy expensive.
Will I go back next year? If I can afford it, I’d love to. My career life is in a bit of a weird sway right now, so I can’t predict what’s going to happen in the next month, much less next year. But I do recommend video game fans make the trek to Boston at least once for PAX East. Just bring your wallet, comfortable shoes, and lots of patience.
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