The PAX East Fun Factory

PAX East was a fun factory.

That seems like a kind of jokey thing to say, but I mean it in a very literal way. PAX East was a tremendously enjoyable convention, and most of the reasons for that can be traced to how it's run and the decisions that went into it. From my perspective, those practices and decisions are in line with those that make for maximum efficiency in factory production. Or maybe network engineering.

First, there's a lot of "wasted space" including an entire HUGE room used only in the morning for standing in line. PAX East does not take advantage of all the space available to it.

But what looks like waste at first glance is really excess capacity, and very well managed capacity at that. It's designed to handle the maximum load, not the average load, and that's just good design. It means there's always room for things to happen, and that's important later. In contrast, when you have a con that uses all the space available, things break when something overflows or runs late. Problems cascade into the rest of the system. Excess capacity keeps that from happening.

Second, PAX has a strange schedule. There are only a very small number of events, and demand is such that the queue for one usually begins at least an hour before the event. That creates a lot of friction in getting into events, and seems like a terribe way to run a ship. But again, all is not as it appears.

The small number of events is absolutely a chokepoint, but the instictive solution (add more events) doesn't change that. It just creates more, harder to manage chokepoints. Instead, PAX East elevates the chokepoints, putting them front and center. The queues seem inefficient when compared to a ticketing system, but a little thought about that (including questions like when you would distribute tickets) makes it clear that they work quite well. If you _really_ want to go to a panel, you can do so. It will only cost you time.

Still, if that was all there was to it, I wouldn't consider it too much of a solution, so of course there's a catch. See, by elevating the chokepoint that the events represent, PAX implicitly acknowledges that not everyone can be entertained by the events, and so it is necessary that convention itself be entertaining enough (or provide the opportunities for entertainment) to keep people occupied. To that end, there are numerous resources that range from an old style arcade to a console gaming room to the aforementioned tabletop gaming area. This is where that extra capacity pays off because these places can support people seeking the "passive" fun of the convention (rather than the "active" fun of events).

For people who have gone to Gencon or another highly scheduled gaming convention, consider the comparison. If you don't have a scheduled event, what do you do (besides buy things?) I'm sure there are some answers, but I admit. most of my first answers had nothing to do with the convention.

There's another upshot worth mentioning. By limiting the number of official events, but providing excess capacity and tools for communication (like the PAX forums) it encouraged informal scheduling. It also meant that scheduling was the responsibility of the person or group running the event. From private invitations to the WOTC run events, these were not the convention's responsibility to schedule (though the convention did view itself as responsible for _supporting_ these events - a key distinction). A cynic might view that as a invitation or disaster, but it seems to turn out that empowered geeks self organize pretty well.

Not flawlessly though. That's where the last bit of magic comes in. By training and empowering their volunteers, PAX has effectively created factory foremen with its enforcers. Like foremen, they have the tools and the impetus to keep everything moving, and they do so with a smile (and let me give a brief shout out to Zuki and Meatshield). It's not that every problem they solve is a big one - most aren't - but the reality is that most big problems begin with a small problem that has spun up out of control. Putting enforcers in a position to make the small fixes means the big fixes are less likely to be necessary.

Now, these are just a few observations about how things were run. I'm sure others will occur to me, and there are others I completely failed to notice. But from these alone, I'm really impressed at the depth of capacity managment thinking that has clearly gone into things. There are a stack of things that PAX East seems to does wrong (Wasted space! Bad scheduling!) but actually does very right indeed.