I’ve written a few blog posts in the past recapping my adventures working video game conventions for 2K and Irrational Games, but still a lot of my friends and family wonder what really goes on. In an attempt to better demonstrate what the hell I do for work, I took some video with my iPhone while at PAX East this past April and put together the video montage you see above. After the jump is a photo slideshow as well as some videos that show what my fiance Meg and I were up to instead of celebrating Easter with the family.

I hope you enjoy!

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On Saturday night, AOL co-founder Steve Case started spreading the word on Twitter that President Obama will sign the JOBS Act into law this coming Thursday. This piece of legislation is intended to make crowd funding through approved portals, like Kickstarter, a legal option for startups. In recent months there has been an uptick in the number of crowd funded video game development projects on Kickstarter and last night I finally backed my first project, Serellan’s “TakeDown,” a tactical shooter akin to SWAT 4 and the original Rainbow Six games.

With PAX East 2012 happening next weekend, I can’t help but wonder if the day is coming when crowd funded games like TakeDown and Wasteland 2 are so pervasive that we start seeing them on the floor of the industry’s top trade shows? If we do, where would they belong?

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About a month ago a colleague and I sat down in the global headquarters of Ketchum Communications in New York and shared some thoughts on what the average PR or marketing professional can learn from the gaming industry.

The majority of video games these days are full of insignificant achievements that reward players for doing what they’d be doing anyway, like completing a level. Game developers are employing the basic behavioral psychology method of positive reinforcement to keep the player’s attention longer and to encourage them to continue playing when they’d normally want to stop. We see this method most commonly used in the social and mobile games market, but this same psychological tactic can be leveraged by PR and marketing professionals to promote virtually any product. Don’t be surprised if we see strategy used more often in the future.

In typical fashion, I’m posting these images from E3 2011 a few months after the show, but better late then never, right? In previous years, I’ve covered E3 from afar as a freelance journalist. The cost of the plane tickets, hotel rooms and meals was always more costly than what I’d actually make working the show. And honestly, with the press conferences live streaming on a half dozen different web sites, you can actually cover quite a bit from home. So this year was my first trip to E3 and I couldn’t have gone with a better group of people — the Irrational Games crew.

As one of two PR reps from Access PR staffing the booth, there was never a dull moment. From arranging interviews with creative director Ken Levine, to repremanding journalists for trying to record footage off the screen, to all the after-hour parties, E3 is both exhausting and fun.

Needless to say, I am incredibly fortunate to be working with such a creative and passionate group of developers. The energy and love they are putting into BioShock Infinite is inspiring and it paid off at E3 with over 75 editorial awards and 39 “Game of Show” awards, including the highest honor of all, the Game Critics Awards “Game of Show” award.

My colleague, Ryan, and I joke because we called the booth “our prison” since we rarely got to leave it and explore the show floor, but if you had to pick a prison at E3, we were certainly stuck in the best one! The following photo album is a small glimpse into my experience at E3 2011.