Further PAX excitement: I have reserved a large suite on the top floor of the Back Bay Hilton. (Room number TBA.) When PAX begins, this will become the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction Hospitality Suite.
The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction is the label we've adopted at the Boston IF meetups. We intend to make games and such under this label, someday; but our first offering will be this room, where we will welcome all PAX attendees on behalf of Boston and its rich IF history.
(Hopefully, not all PAX attendees at the same time...)
If you know the IF community online, come by and meet us in real life. (See the PAX page on IFWiki for the list of familiar names who will be at PAX -- it's a long list, and I promise several of us will be hanging out in the room at any given time.) If you're curious about IF, come by and ask us about it. If you want to play some IF, or learn about how to write it, come by and see the software demos we'll have running. If you want to eat potato chips, we can provide those.
(Really, you don't need to be a PAX attendee to visit the room. If you're in Boston and you missed getting a ticket -- we hear they're selling out fast -- you can still come hang out. But you're going to be sad on Friday night when we all leave to do the IF panel, and then watch Get Lamp.)
The current plan is for the doors to be open noon to midnight Friday, noon to midnight Saturday, and maybe noon to 3pm on Sunday. (Excepting those two IF event times on Friday.)
Further details will be organized on the wiki page. We'll probably have a SpeedIF event (write a complete IF game in two hours -- bring your own laptop), maybe some less-formal panel discussions, maybe show clips from Get Lamp that didn't make it into the Friday evening showing.
One other event I forgot mention in the last post: Emily Short and Jeremy Freese will be speaking at MIT on Monday, the day after PAX. This is for Nick Montfort's Purple Blurb series, and the details aren't officially out yet, but recent Purple Blurb events have been 6pm in MIT room 14E-310.
For purposes of organization and tracking and stuff: I posted about the IF room (and events) on the Penny Arcade forums.
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=110766
And I posted about it on GeezerGamers (a webforum for grown-up Xbox Live players).
http://www.geezergamers.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=856972#856972
Top floor of the Hilton! Fancy! Looking forward to stopping by the room. Will the speed IF round be occurring in the room, or at PAX? I'm still on the fence about signing up for the convention...the fact that they haven't posted any semblance of a schedule isn't weighing in their favor.
SpeedIF will be in the room. (I know of only two IF-related events on the official PAX schedule: the Get Lamp showing, and a panel discussion on IF storytelling.)
Chatter on the PA forums indicates that the PAX schedule won't be ready for a few more weeks. Chatter could be wrong, of course. But scheduling for a large convention is a big juggling act, and we didn't hear anything at all until the beginning of January.