Posts
Going away for an extended period is, incidentally, a way to get rid of some unproductive habits.
WBC
WBC was at a new venue in a new location this year, a ski resort in Seven Springs Pennsylvania. In fact the resort is the town, there is no town of Seven Springs. Someone purchased a lot of land and set up a resort in the middle of nowhere, more or less, and takes advantage of the monopoly pricing that goes along with that. I know there were many people who had reservations about the new location, including me. As it turned out, the convention is very spread out - I overheard one person say his hotel room was over 1000 paces from the open gaming area at the other end of the complex - but the facilities are also much newer, and much more interesting to look at, then at the Lancaster Host where the convention has been for some years. (As the Britannia GM, Jim Jordan, put it: "Seven Springs is a really nice place and the game spaces were terrific compared to those we’ve had in the past."
Housing and food were very expensive (compared with Lancaster) owing to the monopoly nature of the location. Because the location in Lancaster is a tourist area, there were lots of hotels and restaurants short distances from the convention. At Lancaster I used to camp - a campground is only 400 yards from the Host, with a river running by and only cornfields on the other side of the river. One year I waited too long to reserve, and I'm getting older, so more recently I stayed in a decent (and cheap) Knights Inn a mile away. Nothing like that in Seven Springs!
My early impression was this: Yes, some things will likely be improved next year. But some things cannot change: the fundamental situation is that you're in the middle of NOwhere, and subject to a monopoly, with all the potential for slackness that a monopoly often entails.
The resort did try harder, evidently feeling a need to host conventions in the summertime because it doesn't get many people coming to the resort when skiing is not available. While I was scouting out the convention on the first day I was there (first Sunday) I discovered that part of the area where wargames were being played was not air-conditioned. I didn't visit there again, but I'm told that the resort put nine portable air conditioners into the area the next day.
There are other leisure activities available at the resort such as bowling, waterslides, zip lines, etc. But these are not cheap, the best deal being $30 a day to use any or all of them.
The nearest gas station is at least 9 miles away, and only one hotel slightly nearer than that. But I suspect more people will stay in that more-distant area next year than this year. My roommate and I were in four-story wooden buildings for skiers. (No elevator in sight, but if you're fit enough to ski then hauling baggage up three flights of stairs won't bother you.) While the literature said we'd be within a mile of the convention center, that was as the crow flies (or as the skier skis), driving it was over three and half miles one way. No ice, not even shampoo - but 6 bars of soap!
When you're already driving 3 1/2 miles, 9 miles doesn't sound so bad. I encountered someone at midweek who came up just for a day and night, and he had been told that the resort hotel, despite having 10 floors and something like 70 rooms per floor, was full.
Given the statistics (1 of 4 Americans over 60 is diabetic), many people at WBC must be diabetic. But the food on offer did not feel accommodating. Then again, they're geared for skiers, not lots of older folks.
With the uncertainty and "exclusivity" of the venue, you'd expect attendance to be down. Yet it seemed to me that there were about as many attendees as in previous years. For my Thursday evening talk I had about as many people as I would normally expect at that time. The Britannia tournament actually had more unique individual players than the preceding year (35). But I overheard GM's of other tournaments asking one another for help in voting (to get approval next year) because their attendance was so down, and I was told of another tournament that had something like 50 instead of 100 participants. Someone at my talk, sounding as though he had certain information, said the attendance was down.
So it has proved: “the overall paid headcount was down 22% from 2015 totals, attendees arrived earlier and stayed longer in the nine-day conference that no longer was split between pre-con and WBC week activities. 25 events drew triple-digit participation - up one from 2015 - as the average tournament field declined by only .7 player from 59.6 to 58.9 and 14 returning events actually posted their largest fields of the past decade. 152 of the scheduled 154 events achieved tournament status with fields ranging from a minimum of eight to 288 players for Splendor!” (Attendance in the past exceeded 1,500.)
As is typical of boardgame conventions such as WBC, it's a rarity to see a black person amongst the players. Lots of women and youngsters, though. As always, WBC is very family-friendly. The problem with family friendly is bawling kids (3 weeks old in one case!).
As many readers know, I do not play my own games once published. That's because I design games for other people, not for myself. But also my favorite game is the game of designing games, and playing my own published game rarely advances my game design. (I do play variations of my published games when I'm considering revision for a new edition, of course.)
At WBC this year I broke my streak, playing in the third heat of the Britannia tournament so that two other people could play (including the GM, who played twice to make up the numbers, and who had not been able to play in the first two rounds). I managed to win as green, but later announced my Retirement Undefeated rather than playing in the semi final! Mission accomplished.
I have never claimed to be a top class Britannia player. And some people would say that game designers are rarely very good at playing their own games.
More than 10 years ago, when I was just peeking back into the hobby I'd ignored for 20+ years, Brian Carr told me about some of the remarkable people who played Britanna, even though it had been out of print for some years. There are still remarkable people playing, and I once again enjoyed a "traditional" dinner with them at WBC.
The somewhat out-of-the-way vendors area at WBC was reasonably populated, though my friends from "Against the Odds" magazine didn't come citing the costs, and Worthington Publishing didn't come because one of their daughters was getting married. Still, GMT was there (and they're not at GenCon), Academy Games, Lost Battalion, and a variety of other vendors. One small publishing company told me he earned more in sales from Friday at WBC than he did all last year at GenCon. I bought the usual bits such as stands for cardboard pieces, a bag of unusually shaped blocks (I already have lots of normally shaped blocks), and even a counter sheet to make some counters for "free-form Britannia in outer space", which I'd conceived at the convention.
GenCon
There are higher proportions of women and minorities at a convention as you add other kinds of games such as RPGs and CCGs, and story-games of all types, along with other geek hobbies such as film and comics. GenCon seemed more crowded and yet more spread out (they added the indoor football (Colts) stadium). But it turned out that attendance was about the same as the previous year, about 61,000 unique individuals.
I don’t go to conventions to play games (though occasionally it happens). I figure I can play games a lot closer to home! I go to talk with people, especially game (and book) publishers. I did play four games this time, all of them my designs.
So I arranged, ahead of GenCon, to discuss a few of my games with publishers. Generally one makes an appointment, turns up at the booth (or other agreed place) at the agreed time, usually with a prototype, and you talk. Occasionally you might play the game with them, if it’s fairly short.
Where do these prearranged discussions take place? Sometimes we leave the enormous exhibit hall (which is crowded, rather loud, and rarely private) for an adjoining game hall, sitting at an empty table. I’ve even sat on the carpeted floor in the concourse outside the exhibit hall to show a game to a publisher. Occasionally a publisher has set up a (roofless) enclosed space as part of their booth, and the discussion takes place there. Or it may be at a table within a booth that’s open to the rest of the exhibit hall, so that we can actually play the game.
I don't attend the standard auction at either convention but I do look at the auction store, trying to find cheap sources of pieces. I couldn't find any copies of the boardgame Exalted (lots of Mediterranean galleys) but I did buy a copy of Risk Godstorm at WBC. (In case you haven't heard of it, and auction store involves people registering games with three prices which depend on the time of day, and these games are laid out on tables through which potential buyers circulate. Someone can buy at the current price or wait until later and hope that the game will still be available at a lower price.)
As you may know, GenCon applied "diversity" principles (that is, reverse immoral discrimination, not better than any other kind of immoral discrimination) to choose the Industry Insiders this year, with the result that I only recognized a couple of names. Add to that the problem that the Insider panels are added to the event list long after people have signed up for courses. When you find you've already signed up for something in the time slot, it's hard to get out of that one so you can sign up for another (there ought to be a single button to do that).
But this year I found I was sufficiently busy that I attended none of the seminars I'd signed up for, and only three altogether. One was really useful, one good, one a bust. None were Insider panels, for the second year in a row.
GenCon also made a subtle change that reduced free seminar attendance (most are free). They did not list, in the convention catalog distributed on site, the events that were already full. I can understand this for paying events, but for free events such as seminars, it was a mistake. People often attend seminars when they have a non-busy interval - that’s how I attended the three I made it to - and look in the catalog for what's available. The theoretically full seminars weren't there. Yet only perhaps a third of the people who sign up for a free seminar actually attend, and without the attendance of the browsers, overall attendance was down significantly.
I was told the smartphone app did list the theoretically full free ones, but many people rely on the catalog.
My not-officially-full seminar had twice the actual attendance of my two that were officially full.
When possible I like to hang out at one publisher’s booth during the day, to rest and to leave stuff I don’t want to carry around all the time. That didn’t happen at WBC this year, but at GenCon it was the booth of my book publisher, McFarland. There I met Karl-Heinz Roseman, who like Lisa Camp before him is a “good guy” interesting to talk with. He was especially busy this year, it seemed. My book sold out once again - does every year, a game design book at a big game convention? For some reason McFarland doesn’t “get it” and send more copies the next year . . .
I didn't see a single hex-and-counter wargame at GenCon. It's a story convention, a geek convention, only partly a game convention.
2017
I'm not planning to attend GenCon this year. This is a combination of things. The two conventions are two weeks apart, and I prefer WBC. It's more relaxed, and I know a lot more of the people and have a better chance of getting games playtested. I'm afraid the 50th Anniversary of GenCon may make it more of a ratrace/zoo than it normally is. I'm also put off by the immoral reverse discrimination being used to select the Industry Insiders, though it doesn't seem to affect the rest of the convention. I used to go to some Insider panels, but the past two years I've attended none. I also begin to suspect that game designers and designs get lost in the crowd at GenCon, so I'm going to try to approach publishers separately.
My Patreon is at:
https://www.patreon.com/LewisPulsipher
My thanks for the support from Rossan 78.
No comments:
Post a Comment