Cruise Elroy

PAX East was such a giant sprawling experience that I probably can’t cover everything I saw and did. I do want to talk about some highlights, though, and I’m starting with perhaps the most unexpected one: waiting in line.

While the Hynes Convention Center itself felt large enough to accommodate everyone, the individual rooms were often far too small. There was therefore a lot of waiting in lines, either in the hallways or in the designated Queue Room, for panels and concerts and the like.

The Queue Room featured a setup by Get in Line Games, a company which apparently specializes in entertaining captive audiences. To accomplish this they set up large screens around the room and displayed simple games that could be played via text message. For example, one asked video game trivia questions and then provided real-time feedback on a bar graph as people sent in their responses.

At first I thought this was just a cute low-key diversion, but the more I watched the more I appreciated how well-designed it was.

The key is what the website calls the terminal host. In between games, a hidden MC typed messages into a terminal window displayed on the large screens. These included everything from instructions on how to play (“Here’s the number to text”) to quelling frustration (“I hear the doors are opening soon!”) to cheap nerd-culture references (Rickrolling, lolcats) to teasing the audience (“I see a lot of neckbeards out there today!”). Having messages that were both live and topical did wonders to engage the crowd. It’s what separated Get in Line from, say, a movie theater trivia reel.

The games themselves were pretty thin, but as with the terminal host’s banter they worked because they were tailored to the audience. There was one storytelling game in which the details were selected by multiple choice; the first question was “Who should the main character be? Text 1 for Mario, 2 for Pac-Man, or 3 for Aeris.” After we chose Aeris and told her to go jump on Goombas or something, Sephiroth suddenly descended from the sky and impaled her to raucous applause. They knew their audience!

The centerpiece of the experience was a clever collaborative platform game. The terminal host asked us all to stand up and lean to the left; cameras pointed at the crowd photographed us in this pose. After doing the same for a right-leaning picture, we had to “play” by leaning left or right in unison to control the character. From where I was standing it looked like well over 90% of the room was involved here — people were waving their arms, shouting instructions, cheering when we did well, etc. If all of their games were this engaging, they would be set.

The main drawback to Get in Line is that there simply wasn’t enough content. I was only exposed to it twice, and the second time was largely identical to the first. It seemed difficult for the terminal host to get people excited when many had already been in line for an hour and a half (and had seen all the games the day before). If there were more Get in Line events with the same content yet again, I can’t imagine they went over very well.