Like many other Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing games, Scarlet Blade is a game in which a player designs a character, both physically, by selecting options that define their characters appearance, as well as functionally, by choosing a class (damage dealer, tank, support, etc.) to play.  That character is then launched into a world in which they will kill monsters, level up, collect loot, and craft items.  Nothing exceptional going on here in terms of the conventions of the genre.

The one notable difference between it and other games of this sort, though, among all of these fairly standard MMORPG conventions exists in character creation.  Simply put, there are no men.

PAX is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Regularly the show and its Boston counterpart (the one PopMatters was nice enough to send me to) attract attendees in the tens of thousands. Each show has been larger than the previous one to the point that they no longer bother keeping track. Among all those masses of people are an equal number of varied experiences, some quite similar and others so fundamentally different they don’t even start at the same place. Their interests, their goals, their purposes and day-to-day, minute-to-minute desires are all fundamentally different. And somehow PAX finds a way to cater to them all.

Now this is true of any convention large enough to need police to corral people into the correct lines at the start of the show. And thanks to my press badge, my experience was going to be fundamentally different to the vast majority of people in attendance. PAX East is a fan convention, and while it may have started as a way for Penny Arcade to create a convention dedicated to all the things that site’s proprietors love, it really has moved beyond them. There’s a good chance that if you talk to a random person at the show that they wont know what Penny Arcade is or anything about it, only that they loving gaming, and that this is a convention hosted in their town or, as in my case, on their coast as a celebration of gaming. That part of PAX has remained the same.

Tomb Raider is ostensibly an action game, but it’s filled with an unusual amount of very specific horror imagery for an action game. It’s smart about how and when it uses these visual cues, and it’s clear that the developers understand how this kind of imagery affects us as gamers and people and even what such imagery represents within the greater context of the horror genre.

Oh, League of Legends, I wish I could quit you. After years of playing Riot’s immensely popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (an already abstruse genre commonly shortened to MOBA), I still find myself going back to the game time and again. Unlike the massive game worlds, random play experiences, or user-generated features that have traditionally kept my attention for so long, League of Legends has offered little variation in either maps or rules. Nearly four years after launch, the game has only four maps available to players, two of which I play almost exclusively. Its staying power is maintained not by expansive shifts in the core experience, but by minute updates and additions that ripple outward into hugely varied and surprisingly educational forms of play.

Within the title of Don’t Starve is its instructions and its goal. Don’t starve.

Simple enough instructions for a game, though the game has layers of familiar systems that make not starving a bit complicated.