Authentalk #1: PAX West

I haven’t gotten a true vacation in years. When you’re a home parent and you take a vacation with your kids, it’s not really a vacation. In a rare instance of taking time for myself, last Friday, August 30th, I attended the PAX West festival in Seattle, Washington.

I took 48 hours away from home; it was a life-changing experience. Last year, I took my son to the Washington State Gaming Expo at the Washington State Fairground. That was cool, but PAX was otherworldly. It seems that in the 20 years it has been put on, the people in charge have solved a lot of issues that plague other similar festivals. For instance, having clean, modern controllers for people to play video games was a problem at the WSGE. Not so at PAX. It was very streamlined. There was an “AFK Room” for people, like me, who got overwhelmed with the onslaught of information, screens, and people. I did word puzzles for 10 minutes. It calmed me down.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion were treated with the utmost importance. Something I very much enjoyed about PAX - which also applied to WSGE - is that it was a collection of people who were being their authentic selves. When I was a kid, I got made fun of for liking stuff like video games and tabletop games. I’m so glad that people like me created a festival to celebrate our shared interests.

I will likely write about specific experiences from my time away, but I just wanted to give a primer to get you ready for those posts.