The Journal Of E. A. Kolb

I just returned from GenCon in Indianapolis this past weekend. If you're uninitiated, GenCon is the premiere convention for tabletop gaming (pencil & paper role playing, board games, tradable card games, live-action role playing, miniatures) in the United States. (Take a moment to reflect upon and appreciate how many acronyms I didn't bomb you with in the previous sentence.)

The last time I went was in 2005 and then only for two days. This year, I bought my 4-day badge in advance and bought tickets to events I wanted to be at. I went with Nate (

statichd3) and we met up with other members from our WoW guild: Bloc. Most of these folks are more direct friends and acquaintences (i.e. uofirob and deusinnomen), but the greater circle was about 8 people.

Most of the time there, I was hanging out with Nate and Sean. We had a hell of a time. Here's a rundown of what all we did:

• Played in a late-night preliminary round of a Munchkin tournament. None of us won.
• Participated in Mayfair Games' event. Their flagship game, Settlers of Catan, features five resources: ore, grain, sheep, brick, and lumber. By demoing their products, you would acquire badge ribbons. Get all five and you become a Knight of Catan. This enters you in a drawing for their new $500 wooden Settlers of Catan set (among other prizes) and gets you 50% off one of their products. Mayfair Games makes a lot of great games, so we had a tremenduous amount of fun doing this. I picked up Pillars of the Earth (apparently inspired by a Ken Follett novel).
• Purchased the US edition of Ticket To Ride. Demoed the Nordic Countries edition. Like it, but not nearly well enough to pay full price for it too. (All the Ticket To Ride variants except Switzerland are full kits.)
• Played in a Call of Cthulhu draft tournament. Finally learned the game literally minutes beforehand. (No offence to Nate, but he wasn't the best teacher on that.) Was surprised at how the people in that tournament were generally likeable people. Usually, the TCG crowd is filled with callous jerks (of all ages) with attitude. Played three rounds (Swiss), lost three. Still played pretty well for only having just mastered not completely butchering the rules.
• Played in the World of Warcraft TCG Bounty Tournament. Played one round against another surprisingly cordial fellow. Lost two matches to one. Could have continued, but opted to go to the Mayfair Games drawing instead.
• Turned the terrible demo deck of Magic: The Gathering that came in the swag bags into a servicable deck. Had fun playing M:TG for the first time in a decade. Subsequently built two theme decks (vermin and Fallen Empires' thrulls) from my single long box of black cards.
• Played a bit of the new Maple Story TCG with Sean. Maple Story is a free-to-play online MMO that actually is a competitor to the product I'm working to build now. The TCG comes from a partnership with Wizards of the Coast and, despite its cutsey younger audience draw, is actually very impressive as a game in its own right. Sean bought into those cards, so I won't exactly be playing this any time soon.
• Sat on a demo of Tomb from AEG. At first glance, it looks like a fairly standard dungeon crawling board game. It's not overly complex (unlike World of Warcraft: The Board Game from Fantasy Flight) so learning to play was pretty simple, yet one can see the depth of play can go a long ways. Where this was really interesting was in its variety. The demo was done with 8-10 characters available to put into your party. There were another 80 or so characters in the box that weren't in the demo. The stack of event cards (monsters, traps, treasure) was about 8 inches tall. You're not likely to exhaust the game in a hurry. Nate invested in a copy of that and I think we're both looking forward to the first excuse we can find to play it.

We had a fantastic time. I made some notes on what not to do next time. I think we may have been a little over agressive in what we signed up for. Our couple of TCG drafts were fun, despite both Nate's and my amazement that we weren't deluged by agressive TCG-scene assholes. The Munchkin tournament was mostly superfluous. Had we actually won, that would have been a lot less time we'd have had to just play games. We signed up for a session of Innsmouth Escape from Twilight Creations. We saw that ahead of time and the production value wasn't impressive. Plus we didn't want to interrupt what we were doing at the time for that.

We were smart to bring carry-on sized suitcases on wheels. More room than backpacks and not much more trouble navigating the hallways.

Photos I took with my camera phone can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eakolb/sets/72157606805434810/

 

Earlier today, I just got back from my business trip to San Francisco via a red eye. I got on a plane at 22:25 PST at SFO and landed at 09:40 CST. I noticed that when I landed, there was a different issue of Time magazine was on sale in the news stands than the one I bought in California last night.

I did manage to get some sleep on the 757 from SFO to DTW. I had the presence of mind to ask for an exit row seat so I could stretch my legs out at least. It was a center seat, though, so I was only as comfortable as I'm accustomed to being sandwiched between two dudes. But at least I wasn't suffering from the big-sardine-tiny-can problem I dealt with on the way into SFO.

Anyhow, the whole trip was about this Anime Overdose convention. deviantART was invited to the conference to do a panel discussion on Saturday, so I was flown in from Illinois, along with one of my gallery directors - Allison Carmichael (mangapunksai on DA) - who was flown in from Rhode Island. The host from Los Angeles was there as well, but with much less of a commute, obviously.

The panel discussion went alright. It was the first panel discussion we've ever given, and it was plagued by a few key issues. First and foremost, we miscalculated our audience. We were anticipating a larger crowd with DA members making up less than 50% of the attendees. It turned out that we had about 50-70 people in attendance with about 80% of them already members of the site. As such, our material on the underlying concepts of deviantART in general weren't so avidly received. One of our bullet points was that there's a natural predisposition for people in the anime community to use the features we offer out-of-the-box (so to speak). Since this is true, everything we were talking about prior to opening things up for Q&A were pretty well understood by our audience already. Another key problem we had was outside out control. They just hadn't wired up an internet connection into the ballroom until we needed it, and when they did, it was going through a really bad proxy server. That turned out to be nothing but trouble for us.

On the whole, it was a learning experience for us. It could have been much, much worse for the first panel discussion we've ever ourselves done. We've already learned a lot for the next time we have to do that - and there will be more.

As for the rest of the convention, that was actually less unnerving than I was afraid of. It did take a while to adjust to being surrounded by the zeal of the cosplayers who came dressed up as their favourite anime characters and whatnot. Soon, I came to look at it like as this being something they feel passionately about and they're really into it. The costumes were just one outlet they had to express their appreciation, and that's fine. However, there were a few people who, uh, really should have thought twice about the choices they made. Since I'm writing publicly about this, I don't want to give specific examples, but feel free to ask me about it in person if you have the opportunity and I'll spoil your lunch.

And it's not like I was a stranger in a strange land entirely. You could think of it the same way you might think of me going to France - I can speak the language, but I'm anything but fluent. I can communicate about a handful of anime series, a lot of games, a fair amount of music (Uematsu, Mitsuda, Shimomura), a number of well known artists (Toriyama, Miyazaki, Amano)... but when you start talking about individual episodes of Dragonball GT (and they did), I don't understand half of what you're saying. Regardless, I found most people I had the chance to talk to pleasant. And I did manage to do my fair share of geeking. I came home with a plush soot, as seen in Miyazaki's Spirited Away, and a copy of Final Fantasy Pray, a 1994 collection of vocal arrangements of songs from FF1-FF6. I also have a neat shirt which I understand is a Full Metal Alchemist shirt. I don't know anything about the series, but I needed a bright anime-related shirt to wear under my suit jacket for the panel. (Angelo has a dress code I was previously unaware of - we're not allowed to "dress up" for an event of this nature. So, since I tend to dress like Al Gore anyway, I needed something substantially more casual than I tend to wear in public.)

Also of note, of course, is that this was the first time I actually met Angelo and many of the others from the LA headquarters in person. I've worked remotely for the entire history of my involvement with the deviantART administration, so it was good to finally get to meet everyone. At one point Samantha, Angelo's assistant, asked me what it was like to be suddenly immersed in these people's worlds, so to speak. I compared it to my relationship with Kristen - we met online, then we met, and now she abuses me (lovingly) and I find some way to deal with that. Likewise, with the DA people, we met online, then we met, they abuse me (lovingly, I'm sure), and I find some way to deal with that. Of course, this was in jest, but it's true nonetheless.

We had a good time. It was a good way for me to first experience San Francisco. I'd like to go back with Kristen someday and explore the city more on our own. But now we'd know a few good places to visit, to eat, and to get a good drink. For now, it's good to be home.