Heading to PAX

I’m zipping up to Seattle this weekend for a quick visit to PAX on Saturday. The Penny-Arcade Expo has come a long way! I haven’t been there for what… three years? Something like that. So I’m looking forward to seeing how it has grown. I remember last time I went I was still working for Sony, and I was irritated how many people were playing on their Nintendo DS’s instead of their Sony PSP’s. 🙂
While at PAX, I’ll be participating on two panels that are related to what I’m focusing a lot of my attention on these days. If you’re at the show, I hope you can come by the panels!
Saturday at 3pm, Scott Foe from Nokia (creator of “Reset Generation”) is leading a panel on “Democratizing Game Development”. This makes me very happy, since my CoFesta talk from Tokyo Game Show last year had the same name, and my Escapist article had a very similar subject matter. Obviously many of us (or at least Scott and I and our other panelists) are thinking about this lately. How can we make games easier to develop? And what things do people really need to know in order to implement their visions for a game?
At 6pm Saturday, Andre Vrignaud from Xbox is leading a panel called “Is Casual Killing Core Games?” Watch us argue about how hardcore games are getting dumbed down due to all the lame casual games being made these days. Hahahhaha that won’t be my position though – I think that the casual game industry is having a very interesting effect on hardcore titles and that there is a huge market for crossover games (we’ll talk about that!) Frankly I love them both!
Hope to run into you at PAX!