petrea_mitchell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
petrea_mitchell) wrote2022-06-09 08:05 pm
petrea_mitchell) wrote2022-06-09 08:05 pm
Entry tags:
Gaming tracks
The Worldcon offerings for a particular area can be equivalent to a small convention for it. The filk track is pretty much everything you'd find at a small filk convention, the film track is a small film festival, and so forth. When thinking that the gaming at a Worldcon could stand to be modernized, then, the question is: what would you expect at a small gaming con that you don't currently see at Worldcons?
What recent Worldcons have offered has been an open gaming area, with do-it-yourself signup sheets for people to fill out if they want to run a game, and sometimes a stack of boardgames to borrow.
What I feel is missing:
Well, here I am in charge of gaming for a Westercon, which is in some ways a much smaller regional imitation of a Worldcon. Tonopah doesn't have any local organized play branches as far as I can tell, and a con expecting only 200-300 people is probably not big enough to get PAW donations. But being a very small con in a world where Warhorn exists makes it easy to set up online signups.
Warhorn is a platform for game signups used by many, many, many local gaming groups, quite a few small gaming conventions, and occasional non-gaming cons. (In the US, there is technically a second option, Tabletop.Events, but it wants to be your registration system too, because it's funded by taking a cut of registration fees. Warhorn can handle registration payments if you want, but its funding comes from the sale of premium accounts and from donations.)
Anyway, Westercon 74 is possibly the first Westercon ever to have pre-con game signups! I was going to say that I wasn't sure anyone was going to actually use it, and it was probably going to serve more as a proof of concept to maybe show the next NASFiC that this can be done, but lo and behold, someone has already signed up for a game there.
What recent Worldcons have offered has been an open gaming area, with do-it-yourself signup sheets for people to fill out if they want to run a game, and sometimes a stack of boardgames to borrow.
What I feel is missing:
- Pre-con signups. It's the Web era! We have the technology!
- Play-and-win games.
- Active outreach to organized play groups.
Well, here I am in charge of gaming for a Westercon, which is in some ways a much smaller regional imitation of a Worldcon. Tonopah doesn't have any local organized play branches as far as I can tell, and a con expecting only 200-300 people is probably not big enough to get PAW donations. But being a very small con in a world where Warhorn exists makes it easy to set up online signups.
Warhorn is a platform for game signups used by many, many, many local gaming groups, quite a few small gaming conventions, and occasional non-gaming cons. (In the US, there is technically a second option, Tabletop.Events, but it wants to be your registration system too, because it's funded by taking a cut of registration fees. Warhorn can handle registration payments if you want, but its funding comes from the sale of premium accounts and from donations.)
Anyway, Westercon 74 is possibly the first Westercon ever to have pre-con game signups! I was going to say that I wasn't sure anyone was going to actually use it, and it was probably going to serve more as a proof of concept to maybe show the next NASFiC that this can be done, but lo and behold, someone has already signed up for a game there.