Gen Con on the Other Side of the Booth

When I started working in the game industry, it was at Gen Con. My very first day working full-time (not as an intern) for ICE was at Gen Con 1990. It was also my first Gen Con ever. I had never had the opportunity to go just as an attendee, for fun.

For those first few Gen Cons, my job was to "work the booth" a few hours each day, which meant sell product and chat with gamers. It was fun, actually, and got me into the habit of talking to and even making friends with the people who play the games I worked on -- something slightly rarer than you might think.

Then I went to work for TSR, and Gen Con really changed. TSR owned the convention, and everyone was required to work eight hours each day on some aspect of the convention, either "in the castle" (the TSR booth looked like a huge castle at the time) or in some other way, like selling tickets, organizing events, and so on. It was a lot harder to have fun at Gen Con with so much responsibility. TSR also valued game demos very highly and ran five or six of them in the castle for its different game lines. This was pretty worthless, actually, because you can't "demo" a setting in 15 minutes, and while you can demonstrate a game in that amount of time, who at Gen Con in the 1990s needed a demonstration of how to play D&D? But we didn't make the rules, nor could we effectively comment on them.

At Wizards, Gen Con became mainly a place to give seminars, which were usually relaxing and fun. Based on my thoughts on the worthlessness of TSR demos, I came up with the idea for the Dungeon Delve, where people wouldn't be taught the game, but they'd get a good reminder of what was so much fun about it. I'm glad that the idea, which has morphed a lot since then, still survives one way or another, even if it's no longer a Wizards of the Coast event.

When I ran Malhavoc Press, Gen Con consisted of hanging out in the Sword & Sorcery/White Wolf booth signing books and chatting with people, giving seminars, and occasionally running games here and there. Fun but sometimes taxing.

So finally that brings us to this Gen Con: my first one as an attendee after 18 years. (I did miss one Gen Con, one year, to be my friend Bruce Cordell's best man at his wedding -- I think I get a free pass on that one.) In many ways, for me, Gen Con has evolved into a gathering of my friends from across the country -- or the world. A sort of class reunion of game professionals and fans past and present. It was fun, and in some ways surprising. In no particular order, here are my observations from this year:

* Gen Con can be a hassle for an attendee. Long lines and confusing organization seem to the be rule rather than the exception. The smallest things can become big problems at such a large event. I spent almost a half hour trying to get a badge holder, for example. This kind of inconvenience is invisible to the professionals and, I suspect, the Gen Con staff.

* Most Gen Con staffers treat you very differently if your badge says "4 Day" than if it says "Exhibitor" or "Guest," and not in a good way. You'd think that the staff would treat the people who paid to get in (and paid dearly -- Gen Con is more expensive than Comic-Con) like honored guests or at least like paying customers, not like annoyances at best and suspicious potential wrongdoers at worst. This observation made me the least happy. I honestly had no idea.

* Lots of people at Gen Con have been there many times before. They're active on gaming message boards and other communities. It's not like 1982, when you didn't know anyone there other than the guy you drove in with. This means that the convention offers the unique opportunity to meet up with friends you see only at Gen Con, or those you've met only online, and play games with them. However, the event registration system offers nothing to help you accomplish this. So instead you set up games off the grid and scrounge some gaming space at a hotel or wherever you can. This is a HUGE missed opportunity. Gen Con should offer gaming space for these kinds of games and simply charge a small fee to reserve and use it. More and more gaming seems headed in this direction, and it will be interesting to see when the convention organizers realize it and catch up.

*Meeting face-to-face the people you've only interacted with online is fun and rewarding.

* The Gen Con bag that attendees get actually has some good stuff in it. But it could be better. The smartest manufacturers were the ones that actually had stuff in there you could use, which made you want more. The Cineplexity cards, for example, were usable for a very short game all by themselves and enticed you to buy the game. Sure, it's expensive, but more manufacturers should realize that Gen Con attendees are in many ways the thought leaders for the hobby: Get them, and you get many others when they go home and talk to their friends.

* Lots of people (like me) don't like sales pitches -- they want to look at a product themselves and maybe ask a question or two. The amount you're allowed to browse through products is directly proportional to the size of a booth. If it's one guy at a table, even if he's got hundreds of products, he's unlikely to leave you alone. A big booth with many tables offers the customer a chance to look at a new game in peace. The solution here isn't more big booths -- it's getting people sitting there to ease up on the sales pitches and high pressure sales. Particularly because many of them just aren't good at it. There's nothing about being a game designer that makes you a good salesman.

* If you've given the same sales pitch a thousand times that day, the person listening can very likely tell.

* Stocking a booth is hard. Too much and someone walking by slowly is going to miss most of it anyway. Not enough, and they're going to keep walking, uninterested. This is hard for manufacturers who have been at it for years. Do you bring the backstock, or just the new stuff? I think you've got to fall somewhere in the middle. Attendees want to spend money at Gen Con, even if they say they don't. It's where they're -- we're -- more likely to drop a bunch of money on an expensive item we passed by six months ago in the store.

* Gen Con is a lot of fun. There's great stuff going on outside the dealer's hall like the Gamer Olympics and the True Dungeon. And of course, all the gaming.

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