Greetings, beautiful party people of the world wide webbernets. Penny Arcade Expo has come and gone for yet another year few months until PAX Australia, and just like every other year this PAX was filled with good times, bad times, interesting panels, amazing games, and highlighted the very best of what the video game community can accomplish when we come together in the names of acceptance, friendship, and fun.
But some of y’all need to hit yourselves with some soap and water.
As I write this, I have a current temperature of roughly 8,000-degrees Kelvin. I feel like righteous death; sore throat, splitting headache, the desire to eviscerate anyone who mentions food in my presence, and so forth. The fact that these symptoms began to rear their ugly bastard head mere moments before I was to enter an aluminium tube of compressed air with 200 fellow tired and cranky souls, amplified it to eleven. I spent the next three hours on that damned plane. The complimentary orange juice did nothing to smooth the gravel that had lodged in my throat. The air jets did nothing to counter the fission reaction occurring just beneath my unfortunate excuse for a beard. The shrieking harpy, or “child,” three rows behind my seat made me long for a harpoon and diplomatic immunity.
It was miserable. And it happens every damn year.
PAX, more than most other shows, is the perfect breeding ground for this kind of madness. You have 70,000+ people shuffling through confined spaces, pressed against each other as they force their way through the mass of humanity that’s made the walkway between Ubisoft and 2K impassable. It’s four days (four!) days of hugs, handshakes, heavy breathing, sharing controllers, and way too much sweat. Pile all of this together, and sick it (see what I did there? har har) on a crowd of people whose immune systems are already weakened by a comical amount of alcohol consumption, and you have the perfect storm to pass along a new strain of hyper bubonic.
“But James,” I hear the voices in my head shout because I’m pretty sure the centaur nurse is a fever-induced hallucination. “You can’t possibly expect to not get sick at shows!”
No, I can’t. That’d require all of us to dress in space suits and remain 30 yards apart from each other, thus requiring Penny Arcade to rent out a space roughly the size of Delaware to hold their show. But is it too much to ask for some hand sanitizer? The only time I saw those glorious Purell markings was when I had the chance to visit the Deep Silver booth to check out Escape Dead Rising and Dead Rising 2 (spoiler alert: HOLY CRAP YES!!!). It’s a little thing, to be sure, but my god it goes a long way towards keeping people relatively sanitary. The fact that it’s missing from just about every other booth at these shows is mind-boggling to me, though I suppose when you’re worried about booth space and getting two-dozen PCs to work and making sure your event staff knows what’s up and having enough swag to hand out and press appointments to schedule and presentations to plan and demos to practice (they rehearse those for weeks in advance), going “remember to buy twelve tubs of germ murdering hand lotion” can be a pretty easy oversight.
Of course, part of the responsibility falls on the con goers, as well. If you were one of those people who went to try on an Oculus Rift VR headset after it’s been passed around from sweaty forehead to sweaty forehead for three days, though, you’re on your own. I, personally, carried a small bottle with me throughout the weekend, and while it made me popular with the booth workers it obviously didn’t save me from the oncoming sickness.
But it was worth it.
I mentioned just last week how I wasn’t a fan of conventions. With some of the “unpleasant” stuff going on in the sphere of video game culture, I was expecting this year’s PAX to be a complete nightmare. I was pleasantly surprised – people were even more outgoing than usual, taking that extra step to ensure that everybody had the time of their lives. Was it the best show in terms of content, or announcements, or hype, or general layout of the booths? Probably not. But it was the most fun I’ve had at a show in a very, very long time – and it was entirely because of the people I met while I was there. Despite what you may or may not think of Penny Arcade as a company or as a publication, Penny Arcade Expo has once again shown itself to be the ultimate expression of good in video game culture. It was an incredible experience, and I have each and every one of you to thank for that.
Even if one of you swine passed along your disease…