Every anime convention has game rooms for card games, live action role
playing games, and the like. The game rooms are sideshows to the anime
convention's main events. But what would happen if the game rooms were the main events?
You'd get the Gen Con Game Fair, the huge convention of game players.
Tens of thousands of fans attend this event, which is the biggest of
its kind - on the same level as Comic-Con International, Dragon-Con or
Anime Expo.
For many fans, this is the heart of the show, the dealers' room. It
contains several football fields' worth of booths selling games and
collectibles. Some of the vendors are familiar to anime fans, and a few
are surprising.
One of the first booths in the hall belongs to what would seem to be a
non-gaming business, the U.S. Army. Guess again: the Army has used war
games for a couple of centuries, and that form of training has moved to
the computer simulation world. The Army was handing out its version of
a first-person shooter game, complete with a warning for blood and
violence.
Look up from the Army booth and there are some banners that look
suspiciously like the stuff you'd see at an anime convention. Walk that
way...
...and you'll find an ADV Films booth, fully stocked with the company's
anime and live-action DVD's. The usual ADV producers who attend anime
conventions weren't at Gen Con, but they were expected to get to the
following month's Otakon.
