Thoughts on Gen Con

I think I need to re-evalutate my opinion of Gen Con. I used to hate it with a passion because it seemed that they would do some pretty stupid stuff. One year they were so paranoid that there were people who were inside the convention centre, not the hall or a game, that in order to walk around they were checking badges at chokepoints every like 15 metres. I got so annoyed because you had to line up every so often as a security guard who give you a dirty look and then squint at your badge.

Bad customer experience right there.

Then there's the time when everything was somewhere else. I don't know why, but apparently there was a push to expand things into more hotels and so unless you had your own room nothing was where it said it was in the guide. Seriously, nothing. I missed so many games because I was at one place, the HQ was closed and my game was at another place. They needed to make up for it by having longer hours to make up for the fact that if you didn't have the mysterious piece of papers that told you where things were or an HQ open when you went to the Hotel chances are you were in the wrong spot. What was frustrating was that it wasn't as if the rooms they moved you from were being used. I was moved from an empty room once, completely empty.

Bad volunteer experience right there.

This year was different. Surprisingly different. First of all the GM badge getting was phenominally awesome. It was smooth, well organized and quick. Seriously, there was a line up and the line up was continuously moving because they had planned for people being part of groups picking up their badges and moved those to a special line to get them out of the way of us stand alone folk. Serious hats off to them all for that.

As per normal my stuff went off on Thursday and then the rest of the con people were busy playing actual games. That doesn't really bother me that much anymore. It used it, it used to hurt a lot actually because I always wondered why people wouldn't show up. I'm a little older, a little wiser and I get why they don't show up.

That's getting a head though. Wednesday was when I helped out at the Red Dragon Inn. That's right, there was a whole restaurant inside the Mariott that had turned into the Red Dragon Inn. It was pretty sweet and there are lots of pictures of the place. It was lots of fun hanging out there.

Friday there was more helping out at the Smirk and Dagger booth, because I can only get by with a little help from my friends, and much of the same thing on Saturday.

The good news from the con is that I got a project almost accepted. Not that it didn't make it, it's just not finalized so I'm not going to talk about it just yet. I'm excited about it and can't wait to actually get to work on it.

I know I'm not going into as much detail as other people, but you know what it's been a while and I'm pretty boring at Gen Con. I didn't do crazy things but there was a lot of personal stuff that went on and a lot of good times were had but isn't really that what a convention is all about?