The One Earring

Preface: What you are about to read is utterly unbelievable. It is dependant on nigh impossible odds at key moments, timing down to a single minute within a whole weekend and my inhibitions about talking to anyone and everyone. But every word of the following story is true.

The Saturday morning of PAX saw JP, Stephen, Claire and myself getting up early and into the convention centre ahead of the worst of the crowds. We wanted to do our own thing for a bit, and split up, heading to our various destinations.

We met up again at noon and were all heading across the brightly lit skybridge that connects the two main halls when Claire stopped suddenly. She bent down and picked up a tiny object. As she held it up, we realized that it was a single earring. It was a tiny glass-blown yellow octopus. The little guy must have fallen off of someones ear, but apart from his wire hook being slightly out of shape, he was otherwise intact.

We had a quick glance around to see if anyone was walking around looking at the ground, but didn't see anyone. Claire commented on how pretty the earring was, and how upset she would be to have lost it, then carefully put the earring in her pocket and we continued on our way.

Skip to 6pm that evening, and the main halls are closing. Hundreds of attendees are flooding out of the various exists and down the stairs on their way to evening panels, food or the gaming rooms. We're back together once again, and leave through the exit by the skybridge, one of the busier traffic areas. Everyone is walking along, chatting to each other. There are dozens of bodies within arms reach, and most are talking over each other. It's almost impossible to hear what any one voice is saying.

As we head for the first escalator down, my ears tune into a single word: earring. A girl about two bodies ahead and one to my right is telling the guy she's walking with how annoyed and upset she is that she lost her earring, and how she'll never be able to replace it. She's looking through her handbag for her remaining earring.

Can you see where this story is going?

I ask if it was a small earring, and she turns and says "No, not really, but it was unusually heavy."

Now, I don't have much experience with earrings, and the glass octopus looked like it would fit a "small" descriptor.

"Ah well", I reply. "Probably not the one we found then."

By now Claire, walking just ahead of me, has heard what we're talking about, and reaches into her pocket. She pulls out a closed fist, and opens it in front of the girl, revealing a tiny glass-blown yellow octopus.

Everyone involved stops dead on the spot, and, not to be too romantic about it here, but the entire place seemed to turn silent for just a moment.

The girl removes her hand from her handbag, holding a tiny glass-blown yellow octopus dangling from a wire.

"No. Fucking. Way."

We all have a good laugh, and chat briefly on the way down. It turns out the guy she was talking to is her husband, and they had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary two weeks previously. They had travelled to Vancouver Island, where they had found a man selling tiny glass-blown jewellery he made himself. The octopus was, literally, a one of a kind, hand-made piece she had gotten from her husband on their first anniversary.

True story.

PAX. It's a magical place.

You Gotta Share The Love

I've been a role-player since starting college in UCC in 1998. Before then, I had vaguely heard of the concept, but wasn't all that familiar with how it worked. I got asked to join a once-off adventure with pregenerated player characters, run by one of the taller members of the Wargaming and Role Playing Society, or WARPS. If I recall correctly, it was a Lovecraftian horror, in which I played the wife of a crackpot inventor who ended up being revealed as a clockwork automaton, much to everyones surprise, including myself! At that point I killed my husband and everyone else and escaped into the wastelands with my son who had been locked away in the attic.

Basically, I was hooked.

It was like reading a book with friends and choosing the outcome. Brilliant! I found out much later that those kinds of books existed as well! Amazing!

I spent the next several years playing and running various games, learning various systems and introducing more people to the world of tabletop RPGs, as well as making new friends through it.

Then that tall man with the twisted and uncanny sense of storytelling, who had gone on to write RPG's professionally, told me about a new game on the market, one focused more on storytelling and description than rolling bigger numbers. Gar laid out all the reasons why I should get excited about Spirit of the Century, then hit me with the homerun. It was a pulp setting, based in the 1920's and 30's, styled after the adventures of the Shadow, Indiana Jones, Doc Savage and, of course, the Rocketeer!

Once he got hold of his own copy of the book, he ran a few games, and I jumped at the chance to be in it. Before we were even finished the character creation section, which was most of a session in itself, I knew that this was going to be my system. The system I used for every game I ran. The system I stole elements from even if I was playing with a different rules set. The system I would love and support from this moment on.

I got the beautiful and low print run hard cover edition, read it cover to cover and ran my first successful campaign, including twelve sessions, guest appearances by other players and many, many happy memories.

So when Evil Hat annouced in late 2012 that they were Kickstarting their new edition of Fate, the rules system used in Spirit of the Century, I was stuck to it like gum on a Cirrus X-3! I watched as the Fate Core stretch goals were destroyed as the amount pledged shot through the roof. My own pledge amount rose as more and more was made availalbe as print add-ons. I became involved in the swiftly growing community around it in ways I have never done for anything before. I loved seeing the love Fate Core was getting, and sharing that love with others online.

Jump to PAX Prime 2013.

I'm wandering the main exhibition floor early on Saturday morning. I've decided to cross to the other side of the hall to check out a particular booth when I stumble across a guy chilling out on one of the complimentary seats one of the big booths has lying about its area. His head is stuck in a copy of the recently released print version of Fate Core. I stop briefly to comment on the book.

It turns out he's not a role-player! He saw the book and thought it looked like an interesting read, and already he's about a third of the way through. We chat briefly about the hobby and the book, and I suggest a few places to start, as well as answering a few quick questions he has. Before I leave, I suggest that he takes a look at Fate Accelerated Edition, a companion pick-up-and-play version of the Fate Core book, then I wish him well in his new adventure and keep on wandering.

Saturday goes by and Sunday rolls about. It's late afternoon, and I'm in the convention hall again, but this time I'm looking for my wife. I check my email and discover that she's on the sixth floor, in the Console Freeplay Area. That means having to go up the back stairs, a route I don't usually cover at PAX, as that side of the sixth floor is mostly for various panels.

I reach the fifth floor and sitting on one of the comfy chairs by himself is the guy from yesterday, still reading Fate Core. He's noticably further along in it. I stop and say hi. He recognises me immediately and we both get a good laugh out of running into each other again in a convention of over 70,000 attendees, especially here, as he picked this place to stop and read expressly because it was so quiet and out of the way. I ask him how he's enjoying the book, and he tells me, with much excitement, that he's thinking of running his first game tonight!! I wish him the best of luck in tonights game and many more beyond before leaving to find my wife.

I sit down with Claire and realize my brain wants to tell me something, so I relax and listen. It tells me this:

You have never been monetarily wealthy. You went to college away from home and had to pay for rent and food. Even with a job, you had to borrow money from your parents at times. You finished college with a degree and got a job doing something you love, but for only four hours a day, and you still had to pay for food and rent, as well as now paying back borrowed money to the bank and your family. Any time you thought you had money, an unexpected expense came up to take it all away. And then, you decided to move to Vancouver, so you had less money than ever to spend freely.

In all that time, from your first day in college to today, tomorrow and beyond, you have had amazing friends. They have shared with you all kinds of things, from cards to make your L5R deck better, to board games and books, from video games to comics, to food and clothing. You have long thought about how you haven't often been able to return that kindness to them.

But karma is a universal thing. Others do good things to you, you do good things to others, others do good things to even others. It does not have to be a closed loop. They do not have to be the same people. And

Every.

Little.

Thing.

Counts.

It's not the value, it's the friendship behind it.

You know what to do.

And suddenly I do. I get up and tell Claire I'll be back soon.

I race down three flights of stairs to where I know it will be and I buy it.

Then, I go back up two flights of stairs and find that guy again, still in the same place, still reading the same book. I interrupt his reading one last time and hand him a fresh copy of Fate Accelerated Edition, because I can do that now for someone. It's nothing, I say. It only cost me five dollars. This is incredible, he replies. I've never had a stranger gift me something before. I really appreciate it.

Enjoy the game, I tell him as I head back to my wife. It's the best hobby in the world.

PAX Prime 2013

This was the third trip to PAX for Claire and myself, first in 2008 on our Epic Holiday[TM], and again in 2011 after arriving in Vancouver and getting settled in. But this year was special, as two friends and my brother joined us in Seattle for the first four-day PAX ever, and it was fantastic

Mike had arrived in Vancouver a few days early, and we all travelled south to Seattle by train on Thursday evening, meeting up with friends I had made on the last visit to PAX at the station in Vancouver. It certainly helped pass the time on the five hour trip to have friends to chat to.

In Seattle we met up with JP and my brother Stephen. They had been in Seattle for a day already, and had gotten a jump on us by attending a Microsoft event and playing the Xbox One! Thursday night was pretty much a crash, as we wanted to be up super early Friday morning to get into the hall for a full day of PAX.

The whole weekend was amazing! I got so much free swag, mostly in the form of t-shirts, and spent a not inconsiderable amount of cash on merchandise, again, mostly in the form of t-shirts. We all had a blast trying out and seeing upcoming games, and managed to spend time doing our own thing without getting separated for too long, or at least being able to meet up later without difficulty. It helped a lot that the convention centre wifi stayed working under the strain of thousands of nerds on mobile devices for the majority of the time. We could email and tweet at each other with plans from where ever we were at.

Once again, I didn't do much by way of panels. Stephen and JP came in early some mornings to get into interesting presentations without having to queue for too long, which was the best way to do it, in my opinion. I don't see much point in queuing for five hours to play a 15 minute demo of a game I'm already sold on buying when it's released a month down the line. We did go to the Gearbox Software panel together in the Paramount Theatre, which was hilarious and awesome, and then we got to meet the team after at their signing! Very cool!

But my big lesson from this year at PAX was that I'm becoming less and less interested in the triple-A titles on display and more and more involved with the indy games. I found myself in the indy games section at least once every day, trying out games I've never heard of, from companies that might not even have existed in 2011. My favourite games at PAX this year were all from the indy's, from the colourful and frantic four-player chaos of Speed Runners to the beautiful and hilarious Monster Loves You, both of which I got after the convention on Steam. The only triple-A title I spent any time queuing for was Nintendo's HD remake of Wind Waker, and only then for the free t-shirt. I've already played the game one my GameCube.

Two companies of particular note that I got to speak to this year are Vancouver's own Klei Entertainment, creators of Mark of the Ninja, Don't Starve and the currently on Early Access release Incognita, and the team behind my game of 2013, Gunpoint. I fanboyed out bigtime meeting Tom, John and Ryan at their PAX 10 booth. They were a pleasure to meet, and I'm delighted to have been supporting them since launch, buying my copy of Gunpoint before I even had my own Steam account, and before it became the massive success it is. I've been following Gunpoint since November 2011, and I'll be following this team onto their next big project too, whatever that may be.

And it wasn't just the indy companies that caught my attention. JP, Mike, Stephen and myself spend an hour in the DigiPen section, an area showcasing the best games from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. The games were creative, clever, beautiful and masterfully crafted with love and care, and we spent longer there as a group than at any of the big name booths.

It was interesting to note that more of the Indy games we saw were supporting couch co-op or couch competition. I have many happy memories of playing Mario Kart or Bomberman on the SNES with my cousins, or GoldenEye on the N64 with the garda recruits that stayed with us, each sharing one TV, and having those immediate and intimate reactions only possible when sharing a couch with your opponents. Even from the Xbox 360 era, two of my favourite memories are playing split-screen with a friend. I'd love to see a resurgence in that social gaming with friends in the coming years, and I think indy games might be at the forefront of that.

I hope that the organizers of PAX 2013 noted the heavy foot traffic in the indy section this year and give them a greater space next year. I realize they can't cough up the same amount as the big studios, but they deserve the support and recognition.

PAX was a fun time with fun friends, and I've enjoyed it every year we've been, but Mike "Gabe" Krahulik's recent comments on transgenders and the whole recurring Dickwolves fiasco has definitely soured our interest in ever going again. At the start of September I said we'd probably never return to PAX, but that's a bit premature. I'm not willing to accept Gabe's apologies, as at this point it's clear he either doesn't really mean it, or he isn't learning from his previous mistakes. But I would like to come back to a safer, more accepting, open PAX with my future children and share with them the joy of being a gamer geek.

So never is a long time. But not next year.

 

Mr Ryan Goes To PAX 2011

Last weekend my wonderful wife and I took a bus south across the border to the city of Seattle for the best gaming convention in he world, Penny Arcade eXpo, or PAX. We headed down on Thursday and met up with some friends, one of whom lives in Seattle now and the other two traveled up from New Mexico for the convention as well! Our charming company was a welcome bonus!

This was our second time at PAX, the first being in 2008 at the end of our Epic Holiday[TM]. I never did get around to a write-up of that stop, but you can safely assume that it was incredible, and we couldn't wait to get back. This year I decided to step things up a bit by going in costume. Thanks to my amazing mum, I was able to get my Rocketeer helmet brought over from Ireland, and I already had the jacket with me. And so, for most of Friday and Saturday at PAX 2011, I could be seen wandering the many areas, slowly sweating to death in a heavy leather jacket, carrying a heavy, metal helmet[1].

A lot of the guests and exhibitors fist bump rather than shaking hands in order to avoid picking up nasty infections. This year I even saw the more extreme version, elbow bump, used by many. It certainly worked for me. I have not come down with any PAX crud as of yet, apart from being utterly exhausted for a few days after!

The whole event was awesome. We met so many incredibly nice people, and I got to talk to people I never expected, about interests I never expected to share with them. I got to meet AJ LoCascio, the voice of Marty McFly in the TellTale Games episodic Back to the Future video game! Not only was he probably the most down-to-earth, nice, honest-to-goodness coolest guy I met at PAX, but he's also a huge Rocketeer fan[2]! He was able to recognize that I was holding a Disney Master Replicas version of the helmet from across the booth, and he recognized the Wested jacket as well! If you can imagine how blown away I was by that much, I almost collapsed when he told me that he made his own Rocketeer helmet from fiberglass. We spent about ten minutes geeking out about the movie, the props and the awesomeness of the Replica Prop Forum.

The weekend was just chock full of amazing stories, though rather like Empire Strikes Back, I feel I opened on the best of them. My costume was a huge success, and I got stopped everywhere I went by other attendees, exhibitors and even a VIP or two as they gushed over the character and took photos. It was heart warming to see so many fans of Dave Stevens creation in attendance. For me, one of the things I enjoyed most was watching peoples eyes widen as I let them hold the helmet and even try it on. Unlike the more accurate fiberglass versions available, the metal Master Replica I have is far from fragile. It was nice to be a part of fullfilling a small number of peoples dreams to hold or wear such an iconic piece from a much loved classic.

Even queuing was a fun experience. Apart from playing games on iPads, Enforcers (the PAX volunteer force that help make everything run smoothly) were handing out bits and pieces to help us pass the time. While queuing for the Saturday night concert, we all got given brightly coloured pipe cleaners and instructions to "Be creative". This resulted in hats, flowers, Portal-themed wrist bracelets, stick figures fighting, a sniper with gun, and even a helicopter with rotating blades! From pipe cleaners, people!

But of course, PAX is ultimately all about the games. And we got to try loads of them!

Welcome to Serra.
Gears of War 3 is due for release on September 20th, and it had a large presence in the Xbox area. I expected longer lines, but compared to others games on display, the Gears line was tiny. I got to try out the updated Horde 2.0 on Friday and the brand new to the franchise Beast Mode on Saturday.

Horde: My biggest worry about Horde 2.0 was that they had gone and messed with a good thing. Horde is still the best of the endless-wave styles of game modes because it is so clean and simple. It threw out customization in favour of accessibility. Horde 2.0 adds to the basics by bringing in a cash-for-kills system for that can be used to buy stuff during a small window between waves, from ammo to laser defenses and beyond. And it works fantastically! It's fast, fun and doesn't stop the games flow. We got to play waves 8 to 10 allowing us a peek at what surprises the tenth waves hold. I'm not going to spoil it, but after the terrifying horror of seeing your first bloodmount in Gears 2, they've really outdone themselves for Gears 3. It's awesome!

Beast: This is a whole other kettle of fish. Trying Horde, I knew the basics. Waves of alien monsters that I need to kill before they kill me. Beast is a set number of COGs per level and you have a very tight time limit. You start with one minute on the clock and get more for every kill. You can play as a variety of Locust, starting as low as tickers or wretches, and going up from there. I'm not going to tell you what I saw or played as, but you can assume it was fun! The gameplay is very different, and I sucked during my quick trial. This is not Reverse Horde, it requires a totally new set of skills.

The Boardgame: Not on display at the Xbox booth, this was instead being demoed on a different floor, but I've included it here for completions sake. This looked very nice. Fantasy Flight Games were running demos all weekend long and the whole thing looked impressive. I didn't play myself, but I heard lots of good things from people that were trying it out. As expected from an FFG game, the production quality was through the roof. Cards, tokens and figure pieces were beautiful. The figure pieces were especially impressive, and looked like they should be a lot of fun to paint up.

But Gears was only a tiny area in a huge, multilevel convention. I got to see and play games that are coming out as soon as this month and as late as next year.

The Gunstringer is the first retail game from Twisted Pixel, the company behind Comic Jumper and 'Splosion Man. It's a Kinect game that makes clevel use of the technology and, more importantly, it's a load of fun to play. I don't own a Kinect. Yet. There was no reason to before I went to PAX. Now I'm tempted. I might even get one for this alone.

I got up on stage with three others and had a four-player dance-off in front of a large crowd playing Dance Central 2, also for Kinect. I found that it had very good motion tracking, more impressive for being able to track four uncoordinated male players gyrating wildly. I came first, despite never playing any of the dance games before, though that probably says more about how bad the others were than how good I was.

From the ridiculous length of the line all weekend long, it was clear that there was a lot of interest in the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, but I could not have cared less. Not that I have anything against it, I'm just not interested in fantasy games. One of our friends stood in line for 3.5 hours to play the 15 minute demo and got a fuzzy hat for her troubles[3]. At one point while I was talking to her in the line, I looked up at a clip of a dragon in the trailer and jokingly said "Oh. Nice graphics. What's this game?" and 40 angry nerd heads swiveled in my direction.

Last, but by no means least, one of the booths that immediately caught my attention was the TellTale Games Jurassic Park area. Not only did they have a nice small-scale replica of the entrance gates into the park, and fencing with little flashing lights on top, but they had a fan-made reproduction of one of the park jeeps! I was a child all over again standing beside it. Instead of just reading my thoughts on this however, take a break from the text and look at a video blog TellTale Games staff did during the convention. Check out the eejit at the 1:25 mark, and again at the 2:30 mark. Yeesh. Fanboys. They were everywhere at PAX.




PAX wouldn't be PAX without free stuff. We came home with tonnes and tonnes of swag. I think I got 8 t-shirts, of which I only paid for one. Baseball hats, avatar items, lanyards, pins, even a very high quality hoodie! The whole weekend paid for itself in free stuff. Claire and our friends even got themselves free OnLive consoles! FREE. CONSOLES!!![4] Insane.

If we're still here next year we'll be going again, so I'll let people know in case anyone is interested in joining us for a crazy weekend of video games, boardgames, demos, t-shirts, freebies, music, costumes, celebrities and more in 2012! I honestly cannot recommend it enough. It's the best, friendliest, most community orientated convention I've ever been to.

Hopefully you can join us and share in the love that is PAX 2012.

[1]- On Saturday morning I woke up complains of an unusual pain in my right arm. I put it down to sleeping badly in the hotel bed, as I had no recollection of having injured it the day before. It wasn't until later that same day that I realised that the weight of the helmet was causing strain on my arm muscles! I didn't feel it while I was enjoying the convention. It was only once I relaxed that it all hit me!
[2]- The earlier part of this sentence should probably be noted as biased based on the latter part. But even then, AJ was very, very cool.
[3]- She did also get to meet and have her photo taken with Todd Howard while in the queue, which she excitedly told me later in the day. She was much distraught when I shrugged and told her I had no idea who that was. Still, that first 3.5 hours at PAX in a queue was pretty much the high point of her convention, I'm led to believe. 
[4]- The catch of course is that OnLive is a subscription based service, so they're happy to give you the console for free to let you try out the service and hopefully sign up.

Seattle: Fraiser Is Leaving The Building

So despite my distinct lack of posts during our visit to this fine city, after a packed ten days of fun and games, including an incredible weekend at PAX, tomorrow morning around noon we're leaving on a jet plane, not knowing when we'll be back again... hey. That's catchy. I should use it as the basis for a song or something....

Seattle has been incredible. We have so much to post about when we get home and have nothing to do in the evening. I'll be writing blog posts about our Epic Holiday for the next year!! Well, hopefully not.

But we did get to eat in the revolving restaurant at the top of the Space Needle. We got to see the Sci-Fi Museum and the Experience Music Center. We shopped in the Pike Place Markets and Pioneer Square. We ate in tonnes of great places, with a world of different styles, from French baguettes, to Thai noodles, to Italian pizza.

And we got countless amounts of free swag at PAX.

However, after six whole weeks in the US, filled to bursting with stunning experiences that just "couldn't get any better", and then did, we are coming home. I'll miss this crazy, messed up, amazing, sunny, warm place.