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Something like a Phenomenon By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman It became semi-cultic. All around the convention center, PAX attendees were near literally pimping themselves out trying to find another person with their matching set of 4 numbers. You had people that made makeshift signs out of swag bags, discarded cardboard, or notebook paper covered with 4 digit number sequences in hurried handwriting. Others chose to become like a spam bots in the bountiful DS Pictochat rooms asking if anyone in the chat had their number match. Whether you were at PAX for one day or the entire weekend, you couldn’t help but notice the bizarre numbers phenomenon taking place. If you didn’t go to PAX or are just completely oblivious to what goes around you, let me try to explain what was occurring. Apparently, Nvidia was holding some sort of contest throughout the show where you would visit their booth and receive a button with a series of 4 digits on it. Throughout the show you were to find someone with a matching button and bring them back to the Nvidia booth with you. Once there with your match, you were given a chance to spin some sort of wheel of fortune type prize wheel (one spin per matching pair) whatever you spun on the wheel you got to keep.
Because I own a 10 year old laptop that can only run: the Black Isle Fallouts and Rollercoaster Tycoon, I didn’t really spend too much time at the Nvidia booth. Therefore, I didn’t get a chance to actually check out exactly what was being given away at the prize wheel. However, towards the later part of the show (Saturday and beyond) I did see quite a few people triumphantly holding up boxed Nvidia Geforce GPUs as they marched through the convention center, so I can only assume that was one of the prizes. I can also assume that Nvidia had more “bunk” prizes to give away, as it seems stupidly pointless to just give out a bunch of graphic processing units. While contests at PAX are really nothing new (in fact, I heard that this was actually done by Nvidia during PAX 2007), it blew my mind to see how many people got into this contest. As I said before, it was really cultic seeing as to how many people were getting into this and to what extent they were. It even seemed to beat out Intel’s stupid “Wear our blue button and win something” contest, which seemingly yielded very little fruit (though I’m not 100% sure, since I’ve heard varied reports on what people got from Intel and I wasn’t really participating in any contests to give those who paid their way in to have a better chance). The weirdest part about the contest was the fact that people weren’t maliciously competitive with each other. Instead of having people blatantly try to sabotage other’s chances at winning, you’d actually find folks who were not only looking for their own number match, but also trying to find matches for friends and others they had just met. It almost like the situation was more of the people against Nvidia, rather than some sort of player vs player scenario. All in all this further proves that nothing is normal at PAX (and coming from LA where everyone is a dick, that’s a good thing).
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