Who knew that San Antonio would, at least for one weekend, become the epicenter of gaming culture for the region?
On Friday, PAX South, the inaugural conference from the company that built an empire on the Penny Arcade web comic strip, launched a three-day jam at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio.
Amid packed parking lots and bad weather, gamers still gathered in an enormous display not only of how mainstream gaming has gotten, but of the need for gamers to continue making video games, tabletop gaming (you know, board games and card games like “Magic: The Gathering”) and the culture around it (cosplay, video streaming, toys) a social act. This was even as the tenor of online conversation about gaming has gotten toxic (more on that in a moment).
PAX has been a fixture in Seattle, where it began, Boston, where it first expanded to and even Australia. But PAX South brought Penny Arcade’s giant vision of safe spaces for gamers to Texas for the first time after years of speculation that a new Penny Arcade Expo might land in Austin.
On the first day, TV gaming personality and game award show empressario Geoff Keighley kicked off the conference with a career restrospective and a call for gamers to celebrate their culture without actually naming “#GamerGate,” the online fiasco that continues to make some gamers question whether they want to be associated with toxicity in places like Twitter.
Things got much more interesting when Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, the founders of Penny Arcade better known as Gabe and Tycho, hosted a hilarious, profane and surprisingly emotional Q&A that included a cowboy hat full of questions. In it, they spoke about their working relationship, how their work and gaming habits have changed since they became fathers. They also revealed that one of the reasons PAX South came to San Antonio instead of, say, Austin, is that PAX goes where there are no existing major game conference.
Holkins said later that there had been talks with the purveyors of perhaps Austin’s biggest game conference, Rooster Teeth’s RTX Expo, about combining forces, but instead PAX choose to go where there’s not already a SXSW Gaming or RTX.
As it was, the Rooster Teeth crew were on their own packed panel Friday in which members of the team wore sombreros and answered questions from audience members about their popular slate of web shows including “Red vs. Blue” and “Achievement Hunter.”
Friday turned into a massive collection of expo space featuring game companies small and large (Nintendo, Dell’s Alienware), areas for classic gaming, open spaces for dance competitions, rooms to unplug and nap, and lots of panels. The night ended with gamer-centric concerts in the main theater and the promise of more panels, gaming announcements (like the world premiere of a “Guild Wars 2″ expanion pack early Saturday) and good vibes on Saturday as the weather improved.
Gamers were in good spirits despite the spectre of GamerGate hanging over the proceedings, even infecting the #PAXSouth hashtag on Twitter. Holkins and Krahulik addressed the last year's mess directly in their Friday Q&A, saying that the growing number of PAX events are not about feuds and controversy. "Every two months, I come to this show and that's not what I see. We're here to do it right," Holkins said.
Here are some of the sights from Friday and early Saturday at PAX South. (And follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more.)
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