If
the author of this web site was a hard core gamer, he would have spent
more Gen Con time watching the games, talking to the players, and
examining the state of the gaming industry.
But the author isn't good enough to master the fiendishly complicated
contests that Gen Con offers. And this was a weekend divided between
racing and the convention, so the only way the author made himself
useful was to take pictures of people in costumes. Anyway, people who
visit this site are more interested in costumes than the latest Magic:
the Gathering cards, anyway.
Gen Con was not filled with costumers, but there seemed to be a demand
for them. On the convention's Friday, a couple dressed as Arucard and
Seras Victoria from Hellsing was constantly stopped for pictures, along
with a couple of Star Wars costumers at the hall display promoting the
Star Wars Celebration in 2005.
During the costume contest, an interesting pattern developed; the
younger the entrant, the more likely the entrant was to wear an anime
costume. Two of the best of the anime costumers, Tristen Citrine and
Erika Door, teamed up for an entry in shimmering, original costumes. At
this writing, we can't tell you the outcome of the contest because we
had to leave the convention for an auto racing job before the awards
were made.
To understand why an anime convention site would be interested in a
gaming convention, walk into the huge Gen Con dealers' room and look
for Yu-Gi-Oh. For each of the two years that Gen Con has traveled to
Indianapolis, Yu-Gi-Oh has dominated the dealers' displays. Ironically,
that game has played a larger role at the Gen Con dealers' room than it
has at any of the anime conventions attended by this site. But Gen Con
was the first big convention to be held after the theatrical release of
the Yu-Gi-Oh movie, a film that received bad reviews from the
mainstream press but made more at the box office than the critically acclaimed Hayao Miyazaki movies.
Anime fans are part of that change. A month and a half earlier, the
Ragnarok Online booth at Anime Expo was one of the most popular
features at that convention. There were two Ragnarok costumers at Gen Con.
Gen Con uses old sci-fi acting stars such as David Carradine, Gil
Gerard and Walter Koenig to attract fans. From what we saw, those guys
got little more attention at their (pay) autograph tables than Dragon
Ball dub actors Sonny Strait and Dameon Clarke (who signed stuff for
free).
Gen Con came two weeks after Indianapolis was filled with NASCAR fans
who were in town for the Brickyard 400. Both crowds were mostly
young, male and wore T-shirts, and there was lots of beer consumed. But
there were about ten times as many stock car fans as gamers. We won't
venture a guess as to which crowd was more normal.
The better comparison is between Gen Con and Otakon, the previous event
attended by this site. Both events started small - Gen Con began as a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons players in Lake Geneva, Wisc. - and both got so big that they had to move
to major convention centers. In Indianapolis, Gen Con was expected to
attract over 30,000 games for each of four days of competition.
Actually, both the race and the convention had dealers' rooms of sorts,
but the race's room was a little larger and outside - the NASCAR
souvenir trailers that lined the infield of the Indianapolis Motor
Speedway. As always, Gen Con's exhibit hall took up most of two halls
at the Indiana Convention Center. And we heard the same sort of talk
from the Gen Con dealers' room as we heard at Anime Expo: some video
dealers who were caught selling obvious bootlegs were make to get rid
of that product.
As for this site's convention travels: we're in the middle of a spell
where we'll spend time at home to make money for more convention trips.
Things are going to get very interesting in September, thanks to a
nicely-timed United Airlines fare sale. That made it possible to book a
two-convention weekend, where the site plans to spend Sept. 17 at Nan
Desu Kan in Colorado, then head to AnimeIowa on Sept. 18. The most fun
was to book a half-price flight for the following weekend's trip to
Anime Weekend Atlanta, a cheap fare that nicely compliments the even
cheaper motel room down the road from the convention site.
This site has an artists' alley table for AWA, and will spend most of
the weekend selling pictures and books. At the other September
conventions on the previous weekend, we've been asked to present panel
discussions on costuming trends (imagine that), but we'll set aside
some time for picture taking - for this site, for Animerica and for the
new Japanese cosplay book project.
Our involvement in that project got off to an interesting start, with
an E-mail message from Ippongi Bang and her husband, describing how
they wanted to have U.S. costumers in their project as asking if this
site could help. So we put out the word, hoping that a few female
cosplayers would respond...and we were overwhelmed with the response.
