I love the internet, especially the way that this new medium allows news to travel so quickly across the globe without ever passing over a traditional news desk. However, one drawback of this free flow of information is how hard it can be to confirm facts and mitigate the risk of reporting bad information.
As such, I have been cautious about the reporting the small nugget of news to come out of a Q&A session at PAX Prime (Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle) with Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins (a.k.a. Gabe and Tycho). According to the story being told, Penny Arcade Expo is coming to Australia in 2013.
PAX is an unusual event, a blend of expo, convention, marketplace, LAN party, and more. Gabe and Tycho founded it in 2004 when they found that none of the existing annual events offered the blend of content they were looking for. While it attracts a large number of exhibitors from the video game industry, PAX also includes board games, table-top role-playing games, music, networking events, and more, a blend that now attracts as many as 70,000 visitors per year to PAX Prime alone.
I was handed the news in the form of a link to PCMag.com. They attributed the news to Venture Beat, who in turn attributed it to Joystiq, and they to Twitch.TV's PAX coverage. That was where the trail ran cold, as a search of the word "Australia" turned up nothing on the site. So, off to Google I went, but every site I could find reporting the news either attributed to one of the links in the chain above - PCMag, Venture Beat, or Joystiq - or gave no attribution at all.
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Finally it occurred to me that since it was a live Q&A session when the news was reportedly announced, maybe I should try searching for video. While I could not find footage of the panel, I did find Machinima's Inside Gaming YouTube video report, in which a reporter at the event repeats the news into the camera. Check it out here, from 1:35 to 1:42.
That's right, seven seconds. Cherish them; they took me two hour to find.
Without a formal media release from Penny Arcade, what exactly is there to report? You have essentially the whole story already - no dates have been announced, not even a host city for the event.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this story, if it doesn't turn out Gabe and Tycho were just having a laugh, is that many other countries and regions have been pushing for a local PAX event. There are currently four every year, all within the USA, with PAX Prime in Seattle being the original and biggest event. Joystiq reported that a visitor from the UK asked about PAX UK, and the best the Penny Arcade boys could offer was to say that they "want to go there".
Australia, so far from the rest of the world and with such a small population, seems like a strange choice for the first international PAX, and many observers are surprised, and even angry. Will publishers and exhibitors come all this way? Do Gabe and Tycho already have some signed up? We just don't know, and until Penny Arcade releases something more official than a brief comment in a Q&A panel, we won't know any more.
 - James "DexX" Dominguez
DexX will be a guest of Ubisoft in Paris this week. Apologies in advance for any delays in comment moderation.
DexX is on Twitter: @jamesjdominguez
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