I’m back from PAX now. What I learned at PAX this year is that it’s impossible to be editor-in-chief of a website, attend and cover a big event, do my due diligence meeting and greeting readers and publicists and publishers, and update a personal blog. Well, it is for me, anyway. I suppose this is just my mortal frailty speaking.

On the plus side, it seems like the more inert the front page here becomes, the livelier the forums grow. I believe there were a couple dozen Talking Time members at the dinner last night, based on the photos I saw. That is crazy. Crazy nuts, even.

I had a pretty good time myself. The highlight of the show — professionally at least — was a 15-minute interview with Ken Levine. Yes, all those words happened in 15 minutes. It turns out a quarter of an hour with Ken Levine is like 30-40 minutes with a normal mortal. Words form in dense, rich clumps in the mind of Ken Levine, and they are very good words. No hyperbole here: This is the first interview I’ve conducted in my eight years in the press in which the subject somehow managed to address the big concerns I intended to discuss before I even began to steer the conversation in that direction. I had intended to bring up the subject of maintaining the immersive illusion of Booker and Elizabeth’s running dialogue outside the tidy confines of a hands-off demo, but before I even got there he segued in that direction naturally from the topic of the voice actors’ role in the game.

This could mean that he has spies or mind-reading powers, but more likely it means that BioShock Infinite is being made by people who really and truly get it. To me, the text of this interview is far more intoxicating than the hands-off demo from E3. And that’s no small claim; that demo was kind of amazing.

Anyway, see you next year. Space cowboy.

Edit: I have no idea why, but this innocuous little posting is drawing a deluge of comment spam, so the comments need to be closed immediately. I’m sorry if you wanted to remark on it for some reason.