(First post on svccg in over three years - guess we can classify Yahoo's
threat to
remove that group for inactivity as a bluff.)

At 03:59 PM 9/3/2008 -0400, curevei@... wrote:
>I assume Chris will have something to say on this, but I got into a 45 minute
>discussion with the CCG coordinator Monday at ConQuest about how to get
>CCGs to work at cons. The reality is that they are dying off. Even KublaCon,
>which has its roots in ManaFest - a convention originally for only CCGs, is
>seeing a major contraction.

It's sort of interesting you should bring this up now, given that Chris Shorb
just sponsored the first return of VTES to one of the Strategicons in several
years. For the benefit of the NorCal people, here's a history:

The VTES elders in Los Angeles had been sponsoring tournaments at the
Strategicons for years when I first encountered them. The "Strategicons"
are OrcCon (President's Day), Gamex (Memorial Day), and Gateway (Labor
Day) - all produced by the same outfit (Strategicon) at a hotel near the LAX
airport in Los Angeles. I guess the Radisson is the hotel now although
they've been in the Westin in the past. When I lived in the Bay Area, I
never bothered because there were Bay Area cons during the same
weekends but when I moved to Phoenix, they became my lifeline to VTES.
Gaming in Phoenix is pallid, the game conventions - such as they are -
are anemic in comparison to what I'm used to, and there are few dedicated
VTES players at all.

The problem with holding VTES tournament in Strategicons had to do with
prize support and player interested, as stated by the more vocal players.
We'd pay for full convention badges and get meager prize support; the
players who made themselves heard to Mike Curtois and Robert Goudie
insisted that they had no interest in anything else going on at the con.
Robert and Mike listened and moved the events out of the Strategicons and
first into a bank-provided meeting room and later into Mike's house. The
latter is certainly more comfortable but a bit of an imposition to Mike and
his wife and parking is a minor issue. (We actually hold our tournaments
in his living room since he refurbished it - not in the garage. It really is a
VERY good venue as long as the tournament doesn't go over 6 tables,
which hasn't been an issue.)

Attendances wanes and waxes but seems to be on a slow degrade over
the past several years. Mike is down to hosting one Saturday a month
for pickup games, so this seems to be in line with a general diminishing
of the game's popularity over the years and not because the move out
of the convention was a bad idea.

The Labor Day event this year was sponsored by Chris and moved back into
Gateway at the Radisson. This was because Mike and Robert hadn't been
holding Labor Events since about 2005 because at the time the NAC was
still being held at GenCon and the southern California contingent was in
the habit of going to GenCon en masse and playing VTES night and day for
the whole week (the origin of the "Week of Nightmares"). Upon return in
mid-August, interest in the game went out the window and attendence at a
Labor Day con was down to a trickle - so they just called it off the last
couple of years. Now, of course, the NAC has moved out of GenCon and
was held after Labor Day last year and will be held after Labor Day again
this year.

The attendance last Saturday was actually pretty good - in line with the
attendance at Mike's place and actually a little higher I think. Several
players who hadn't been seen in a couple years crawled "out of the
woodwork" and showed up. The reason for this was apparently mixed;
some people who can get to the hotels around LAX find it a pain to drive
all the way up to Mike's house in the northern LA area. The LAX airport
area is in the middle of LA and is presumedly much better served by
public transit. Also, I think there _do_ turn out to be some players who's
interest in gaming is more general and were simply at the con anyway,
so they dropped by Chris's events. I think that element was likely there
all along; just that these particular players - being more marginal CCG
players - were less vocal to Mike and Robert than the ones who wanted
to move out of Strategicon.

I'm not sure what lessons you can learn from this for purposes of
reinvigorating
CCGs at Cons. Chris and the Strategicon management did one thing that was
very good: Strategicon allowed players to show up for Chris's events under a
$10 single-event badge which was very reasonable. On the other hand, since
this only allowed play in Chris's events, it's not really conducive to
general con
attendance except insofar as it provides a greater incentive for people who
might
have mixed interests to attend and buy a full convention badge. I suppose
that's
good. On the other hand, the fact that so many VTES players in LA have no
particular interest in a game convention makes me question whether the
crossover is worth conventions going after. One big problem with CCGs in
game conventions is that tournaments take so long it's hard to mix them with
other activities anyway. I trotted around the dealer room once in all that
time
just because I simply never had the *TIME* to do anything else besides VTES.
I'm not complaining. Just stating a fact.

I don't have any big summations here. It is what it is.

Fred