Con

So, last weekend was Gen Con So Cal. Adam, Ben, Jay and I headed out Thursday to begin helping run the greatest of all geekness, a con. Jay insisted on driving his car, which has good space, but Jay drives slow. It's a coinflip to me if not having to drive at all is better or worse than arriving a half hour later. Not counting the multiple times we drove in circles because the MapQuest directions did not take into account some truly amazing road construction in California.

Checking in went smoothly, and the original setup was nothing strange. They had no power for us, no sound system. On the bright side we did have a BAC (Big ass Clock) for a change of pace. The worst part is that, this time, the board games were at the far side of the convention hall, and the TCG's at the other side. So I was destined to spend the weekend walking back and forth a half mile at a time.

Speaking of which, I really disliked the layout this year. Here is my bad map representation of the hall.


---- ----
SSSS UUUU S = Sign In
AAAA UUUU A = Artists
WWWW UUUU W = Wizard's TCGs (Trading Card Games)
WWWW TTTT U = Upper Deck
RRRR TTTT T = Other TCGS
RRRR
EEEE OOOO O = Other Stuff, Kids Play etc
EEEE OOMM M = Miniatures
EEEE BBMM E = Exhibitors
EEEE BBMM B = Board Games
--------- R = Role Playing


The building was a big square, so this looks weird, but it's good enough to explain my issues. The first thing to understand is the target audience is a gamer, and the primary purpose of the con is to sell product for the exhibitors. You do this primarily through them PLAYING games, or trying them out, and then buying, which is why most exhibitor booths are highly directed towards demos.

Now, first, we should decide what is a destination location for these events. This is a retail term for places that people will actively hunt out. For a con like this, the obvious destination locations are the Artists, the Exhibitors, and the Wizards and UDE TCG areas. People don't happen upon Magic: The gathering as they are walking by, look at at it, and decide to sit down for a tournament. Someone in my TCG area came there because they know Magic and they came there to play. For UDE its even more simple in that they run Invite based events there. Half the people in UDE's area were personally invited there.

So theoretically those sections should go to the back of the con area. People will find them because they are looking for them, and it would be nice to make them walk through some of the less popular areas on the off chance that they seem something new they would like, especially if it's visually appealing.

Enter, board games and miniatures. Both game groups are MUCH more visually appealing than TCG's, and more likely to 'catch someone's eye' as they are walking by. While I agree that the artist area and the UDE section was visually appealing to someone walking in, it's not like they are going to draw people into Gen Con because Gen Con itself is a destination location. Not only that, but you can't get in to see the UDE area and the Artist area without buying a ticket, so it does not act correctly as an external visual draw.

If I were doing the layout, I would have done it like this:


---- ----
SSSS OOOO S = Sign In
RRBB OOTT A = Artists
RRBB MMTT W = Wizard's TCGs (Trading Card Games)
RRRR MMTT U = Upper Deck
WWWW MMTT T = Other TCGS
WWWW
EEEE AAAA O = Other Stuff, Kids Play etc
EEEE UUUU M = Miniatures
EEEE UUUU E = Exhibitors
EEEE UUUU B = Board Games
--------- R = Role Playing


So, as soon as you sign up you see some fun interesting things to your immediate left in the O section with the Gamer's Olympics and Paint a figure and such, and the kids play area is right there for easy drop off. Then as you walk down the hall you see board games on the right and minis on the left, both visually attractive areas, and they can set out games for people to look at, making it a second demo station (in addition to the exhibition area) as well as a gaming area. However, since those areas are slightly low attendance wise, right behind them we have the TCG's and the Role playing Games. The Role Playing especially is always heavily populated, and rather loud, so you get a feeling for a popular gaming atmosphere from the people and noise, as well as the visual attractiveness of the "cool looking games."

Further back you run into the Wizard's TCG on the side right as it the rest of the flow moves off to the next big visual aspect of the con, the artists and the exhibitor hall. Putting UDE in the back corner does take away from the stunning visuals of their area a little bit, but I think the visuals are more for the media than walk bys, and honestly, they will get plenty of walk by traffic being right next to the exhibit hall.

Yeah, I know I am anal about this sort of thing.

Some highlights for the weekend:

1) On the way down I asked everyone to bet me money that at some point during the weekend Tim Shields would come out of nowhere and invite me to dinner, and I was willing to make this bet not even knowing if Tim was attending. No one took the bet, which was good for them since Tim wasted no time and ran into me as we were checking into the hotel to invite me to a Scotch tasting Saturday night. Not quite dinner, but close enough.

2) Saturday morning we (being my staff) got accused of not showing up to run an event we were supposed to. Turns out the event was not even ours, but I did send staff down to run it in a pinch. So we went from the 'idiots who don't know their own schedule' to the 'super nice guys always willing to help out in a pinch' in the span of a half hour or so as the mistake was discovered.

3) Matt Tabak wins for best stories of the weekend. I can not relate the stories, but they have to do with a giant conspiracy theory in which he Disqualified someone in the top eight of the Versus Pro Circuit which coincidently got one of his friends into the top eight. Obviously just a funny coincidence, but great conspiracy theory fodder.

4) My favorite "I crack myself up" moment of the weekend came with the following exchange: (Jay) Don't be counting in French or anything, you Canadian. (Ben) Hey, I can count to one hundred in French. (Jay) What comes after one hundred in french? (Me) "I surrender"

5) I jumped into a booster draft as I was getting off shift (in so much as I actually stayed in shifts) to fill it up since the poor people were waiting for forever. I smashed them. I forgot how bad the average booster drafter is. I even played horribly. It was great fun though.

That's about it for highlights from the weekend. Last night we got a new puppy, so no sleep for me, but he is very cute. The best part is that the original puppy owners/breeders named them colors to keep track of who was who (by the color of their collar or something). We got "blue." To make it easy for the puppy, we named him Bluebeard the Pirate on his papers, matching the theme that our other dog is named Captain Simon of the high seas. My three year old son, however, disagrees with our naming, and has decreed that the puppy must be named "Blueberry Juice."

No really, he came up with that on his own, and won't let it go. Fortunately we can just all call him Blue and everyone is happy...

Gonna play some poker tonight I hope, so some interesting fun coming in that respect as the next two evenings should be poker filled activities...

Have a good one all.

(edit to fix the font on the floorplan layouts so they were readable)