Geek Parenting Panel. From left to right: Jonathan Liu, Curtis Silver (standing), Michael Venables, Asha Dornfest, Rael Dornfest, Cathe Post, Dave Banks, Ken Denmead. (Photo: Tim Post, used with permission)
Sunday morning was the Geek Parenting panel, with several GeekDads, a GeekMom, and some guests. We’ll have some summary posts about the panel later this week for those of you who missed it, including a list of all the various games that were mentioned either during our presentations or during the comments and Q&A with the audience. The last three times we did PAX panels (here and in Boston), we packed the room and had to turn people away, and we always ran out of time. This year for PAX Prime they put us in the big room, with 1,200 seats, and gave us an hour and a half instead of an hour. However, we were also the first thing Sunday morning, and the Pegasus Theater was over in the Sheraton rather than the convention center. I think both of those factors worked against us, because we had a smaller possibility of somebody just walking by and coming in to our panel (or seeing the line for it).
On the other hand, it meant that everyone at our panel wanted to be there, and we took the extra time to take more comments and questions from the audience, which was pretty cool. Each of us introduced a short topic, and then we did Q&A, and then gave a lot of stuff away. Again, we’ll have more about the panel from the individuals, but here’s the list of topics:
- Dave Banks: Why 3D should die. (In brief: it doesn’t work, and it’s bad.)
- Cathe Post: Kids’ games that are like Mom & Dad’s (Pokemon, RPGKids, HeroQuest)
- Rael and Asha Dornfest: Creating geeky family culture, learning through gaming
- Michael Venables: Why kids like to game; education and gaming
- Jonathan Liu: Good alternatives to bad kids’ board games
Ken and Curtis walked around the room with microphones so that people could make comments or ask questions, and we had some pretty great audience participation (including one really enthusiastic little kid).
