I love gaming conventions. I love them in all shapes and sizes, though I admit my particular Goldilocks zone for conventions is a mid-sized local or regional con of less than a thousand people. But I have attended and enjoyed cons like Gen Con despite its size. I just really love coming together with fellow gamers and enthusiastically sharing our hobby for two to four days.
So when I tell you I hope I don’t see any in-person conventions happening until 2022, I want you to understand how much it hurts me to say that.
Because I want to get out to a convention so bad it sometimes wakes me at night (no joke, I had a nightmare a few weeks back where I had finally got to a convention, could hear people playing games and talking inside, and couldn’t find a door to get in. *shudder*). Before COVID-19 reared its ugly head and turned our lives upside down, 2020 was going to be my year for cons. I had a half-dozen or so lined up to attend. I was looking forward to meeting up with folx I only talk to on Twitter, meeting new people, checking out new games. It was going to be glorious.
But COVID-19 happened. And conventions did the right thing and shut down in-person events which is good and right. Many provided online replacements of one kind or another which was fantastic. And not a small slap in the face to all the people with accessibility issues who had asked for years to have virtual attendance options, only to be told the effort and expense made it impossible. We’ll touch back on this point in a bit.
Now we are into 2021. A COVID-19 vaccine has been developed, it’s effective, and it’s being distributed. But even given the most optimistic projections of how that distribution is going to go, we’ll have no where near everyone vaccinated in time to safely run an in-person convention of any size in 2021. It just shouldn’t happen, and any con organizers who do so are being murderously and callously negligent. And I don’t care what provisions the con says they have made or what protocols they have put in place. Out of all the folx I follow on Twitter I would say a few hundred go to large cons on a regular basis. Just based on the sheer volume of post-con “Ugh, concrud!” posts I see from them, there is no way anyone can run a convention that wouldn’t turn into a superspreader event. And instead of the con crud complaints we would see accounts go silent as people got sick and died.
Now, it should be understood that you are going to see many conventions advertise dates for in-person cons in 2021. It should be understood that the majority of those are doing so to satisfy an aspect of their convention insurance; they have to show they made a good-faith attempt to run the convention and were forced to cancel by outside forces. So don’t be too quick to unlock the Torches and Pitchforks Shed when those pop up. It’s right to express doubt and push for them to explore virtual options, and you should do that. But save the mob for the cons that actually try to push through an in-person event, despite common sense and reason. I know I’ll be keeping an eye out for them, and those cons will quickly go on my “Never Ever” list.
So what do I want for cons in 2021? Well, a few things, actually. I really hope we get more conventions running virtual cons this year. As demonstrated by the number of conventions of all sizes which managed to cobble together the resources and run virtually, with varying degrees of success, I think more conventions have had good examples set. The basic template for doing it has been established, and while a bit bland it works. So I definitely want to see 2020’s virtual cons come back, new and improved. But I also want more conventions to figure out a virtual option. Not just so we have more options this year, but so that conventions can show themselves that it can be done and should continue to be done. Because I guarantee all the disabled gamers out there, told for years that they could not be accommodated due to the effort and expense involved, have been paying attention. So now is the time to do that work, or for cons to admit they didn’t do the work because they didn’t want to.
Connected to that I would love it if conventions organizers took 2021 to really examine the structure of their conventions. I think a lot of how conventions are run and continue to be run is based not in what is actually good for the attendees or even good for the convention, but in the non-stop cycle of running an annual event without any real attempt to reflect and iterate. A lot of stuff happens at a convention because it has “always been done that way” or “people expect [X] so we have to deliver”. But in my experience those excuses are based in assumptions and not any actual data. I would love to see conventions break down their con model, examine every part of it, question their attendees closely about what they want and need form a con, and so on. You have an entire year, free from the annual organizational cycle; use that time to break down your events and build them back up, better and stronger. Here’s three hints for free: 1) when we get back to in-person events, if your con has no way for someone to attend virtually, you’re doing it wrong; 2) if I attend your con and can’t find a space in which to sit quietly for twenty minutes without interruption, you’re doing it wrong; and 3) if you measure the success of your event by ever-growing numbers of attendees, you’re doing it wrong.
Speaking of virtual cons in 2021, this coming weekend is Session Zero Online, an amazing event that celebrates local game designers in the Philippine Tabletop Role-Playing Game community. Not only am I excited to attend a convention I might never have made it to otherwise, and get to talk with so many excellent designers and artists. But they are hosting the convention on Gather Town, a platform which allows them to created an actual virtual con space. As an attendee you login, create your icon, and wander your icon through the space. You can check out their test server here. But if you’ve played video games on the Nintendo or more current games like Stardew Valley, you will settle into it quite nicely. I am eager to try this out and get to “attend” a convention, even if it’s just in icon form. But if this works well I hope other events will take notice and adopt it for their conventions.
I have more to say about cons in general but I will save that for another article. Or three. But let me know what you think about cons in 2021, virtual cons, or even something you don’t think I’ve thought of. I’d love to hear from you.
