PAX, the Omegathon, and novelty in video games

I love books and documentaries that examine quirky subcultures. The book Word Freak provides a fascinating look inside the world of tournament Scrabble. Murderball was a great film about the players of wheelchair rugby. My favorite quirky documentary though is The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters which dramatizes the competition between two players for the high score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.

I've just found an amazing article online called PAX Primer which is the perfect introduction to the quirky subculture that is the Penny Arcade Expo. It covers the origins of the Expo (in case you ever wanted to know how a web comic can spawn a convention dedicated to video games and board games), the growth of video games, and their transition from fringe to mainstream culture.

Earlier this year, I posted about PAX because Bananagrams was an event in the PAX East Omegathon. It turns out that the Omegathon organizers decided to feature Bananagrams in the west coast PAX Omegathon as well. The article says that in the convention program, Bananagrams is described as "like Scrabble, only not boring and for old people".

It later goes on to discuss a few computer games which I might opine are "like video games, only not boring and for old people". The new wave of computer games does not suck you into endless repetition.

Portal is a game where you solve puzzles by shooting two holes on different walls, ceilings, or other surfaces in your environment. These "portals" are connected (as if by a wormhole), so whatever goes in one, comes out the other, with the same momentum. I recently started playing this game and can not get enough of it.

Braid is an even stranger game in which the player gets to control the flow of time. The selling points of the game are listed on the game's web site:

• Every puzzle in Braid is unique. There is no filler.
• Braid treats your time and attention as precious.
• Braid does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.

Braid's programmer, Jonathan Blow, self-financed the game as he coded it over three years as a statement about how video games could and should be different.

Braid does not look like any other computer game. The artwork is great. It was done by the artist behind the surreal web comic A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. Braid also does not sound like any other computer game. Its atmospheric music helped to win me over.

With the success of these games, even more ambitious games are in the works, on topics such as non-Euclidean geometry (Antichamber) and four-dimensional space (Miegakure).


In a world where video games have become mainstream, it makes sense for a niche to develop for games that emphasize originality. I am glad that quirky subcultures exist to sustain this kind of bold experimentation.

Videos of the Omegathon Bananagrams tournament

A couple of short videos from the Bananagrams round of PAX East 2011 Omegathon have shown up on YouTube.

As I understand it, there were 24 Omeganauts at the beginning of the Bananagrams round and 12 after it. This suggests that each team played Bananagrams once and winning their match was essential to advancing.

The first video shows the beginning of a match between two teams.


Watching this video, you can see the difficulties in having two people work on the same grid, particularly at the beginning. The team that the camera spends most of the time on does a pretty good job of coordinating their grid formation verbally. Starting with the long word HASTILY was a smart move. Also, the first team was able to get off to a really fast start because they got an easy set of letters to work with. The other team had to contend with a J, a Q, and two Xs.

The second video anticlimactically cuts to when the match is already over, and there is some controversy over whether the word HASTILY is legal. It's not nearly as interesting as the first video, but I include it for completeness.

---

Further reading:

• My previous post on the Bananagrams Omegathon round with photos and discussion of Bananagrams doubles

Follow-up on Bananagrams at PAX East 2011 and Bananagrams doubles

Since this year's PAX East Omegathon paired up players into teams, the Bananagrams round was played in doubles mode. The picture below (from the official Bananagrams Twitter feed), shows a winning grid from the first round of the Bananagrams part of the Omegathon.



I attempted to read off the words from the grid and got:

   H A     P
  NOON B ZOO
   R DEER  IDES
  AS         A
   EEL    FIAT
     E  Z U  E
     A  O E  N
     D COIL
   TEETH
   A R U
   K   MUTER
   EON   I
    N   ME
   PEST
      I
     YET

A few comments on this picture: The grid incorporates a lot of the short words that I find myself using including EEL, EON, YET, and ZOO (two ZOOs, actually). CHUM also seems like a useful word to have in one's Bananagrams vocabulary. And observe the left and right branches of the grid and the way that the players have positioned themselves. If both players are right-handed, it seems to make sense for the player on the right to move closer to the table, so he can more easily reach the upper-right corner of the board with his right hand and still easily cover the lower-right corner of the board. You can see a similar posture adopted in photos of other teams.





It appears that the player on the left sometimes also turns toward the center; this is probably the best strategy, as it will allow the left hand to contribute more.

I've wanted to experiment with Bananagrams doubles for a while now. Knowing that it has been successfully played in the Omegathon gives me confidence that Bananagrams can work well as a team game.

UPDATE: Some video from the Omegathon Bananagrams round is now up

Bananagrams to be an event at the PAX East 2011 Omegathon

PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a semi-annual convention for fans of video games that also includes a few sessions about role-playing games, interactive fiction, and board games. A major event at every PAX is the "Omegathon", a multi-round game tournament for which the twenty (this year, thirty) contestants are chosen randomly from the pre-registered PAX attendees. The Omegathon always features a different set of games. Past selections have included Mario Kart, Doom, Connect Four, Dance Dance Revolution, Tetris, skee-ball, and Pong. The four games that have been announced so far for the March convention in Boston are Katamari Damacy, Operation, Jenga, and Bananagrams. While it won't be a tournament between the best Bananagrams players, I expect that there will be coverage of the event through video or other media, and it will be interesting to see how the competition is set up and how it plays out.

The Omegathon has never before included a word game. Bananagrams will be the first.

---

Further reading

• Follow-up on Bananagrams at PAX East 2011 and Bananagrams doubles
• Videos of the Omegathon Bananagrams round