PAX East 2014 Day 2 Reporter’s Notebook
This is the second in a series of observations about the gaming convention PAX East, happening this weekend in Boston. This type of coverage has a long history in journalism as something called a “reporter’s notebook,” but what it is today is basically a series of tweets I never actually sent. But the objective is the same — to give a more immediate sense of what the convention was like.
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Saturday’s crowds where a bit bigger than Friday’s, but not the usual spike in attendance you usually see between those days at a three-day convention. Which makes me wonder who was staffing all the IT duties in companies throughout New England on Friday. Or, as one sign at the entrance of PAX East said of the con itself “The reason your IT staff is ‘out sick’.”
Between Mass Effect photo shoots and meetups, League of Legends photo shoots and meetups and the costume contest, the number of cosplayers jumped by a higher percentage between Friday and Saturday than overall attendance, it seemed.
PAX has established something that should emulated at cons everywhere — the Diversity Lounge. In one of the biggest panel rooms, PAX East created an area that was both a show floor with booths and a relaxing lounge with large round tables with plenty of seating, and giant bean bags along the walls, all for those tables and booths that felt they would be better served in an area that was quieter than the crazy crowded main show floor. The space between rows of booths was wider than on the main floor to more easily accommodate wheelchairs and powered carts. And the booths had a constant flow of visitors, even fairly early in the day, so it never felt like the vendors and guests had been pushed off into the room and away from the show floor.
The unisex, or gender neutral, bathrooms — one on each side of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center– were a big hit.
The BCEC is roughly 1/4 of a mile long, so two trips front to back means you have walked a mile. Most people will log 3-4 miles over the course of day going from show floor to panel and back again repeatedly. I talked to one cosplayer who at the end of the day had logged 6.5 miles on her FitBit — all in high-heeled boots.
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Stay tuned tomorrow for more observations from PAX East 2014.
