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Gen Con - Author's Notes - 2006 We attend Gen Con because it's close to home and gives us a chance to compare the gaming world to the universe of anime convention fans. It's also useful to see a convention's impact on the area where it's held. While the previous weekend's Otakon had to share downtown Baltimore with the Yankees-Orioles baseball series, Gen Con ruled downtown Indianapolis. Even the presence of the Indiana State Fair, an event a few miles to the northeast that attracts 60,000 people a day, didn't diminish Gen Con's dominance of the downtown area. The area between the Indiana Convention Center where Gen Con was held and the area's hotels and shopping mall was all but a private walkway for gamers. It's interesting how people think alike. We noted in our Thursday walkaround that Gen Con's hardcore gamers were older and more male than the fans we see at anime conventions. A day later, we spoke with Matt Greenfield of ADV Films and agreed that the gaming contingent was getting grayer with each passing year. And the following day, a story in the Indianapolis Star said that Gen Con was looking for a new generation of fans to succeed the generation who had been part of the gaming world since the convention began at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Gen Con is in no danger of fading away, and the convention has confirmed dates for the Indiana Convention Center through 2010. Some events had to be shuffled around in the center and neighboring hotels to make sure everyone got the room they wanted. But look at the very long term of gaming and you see an aging fan base, much the same as sci-fi cons have experienced. While every inch of the dealers' room was filled - even the autograph areas were cut back to make room for more booths - the largest displays in that room seemed less elaborate than in previous years.  On the other hand, we seemed to spot more anime costumers than before, including three Vash the Stampedes on Saturday (we got pictures of only two of them). The future of gaming probably could be seen in the young girl we spotted in the dealer's room, tightly gripping a new box of Pokemon cards. It could be spotted at the booths that were demonstrating anime-themed Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist card games. Head outside the dealers' room and you could have found a Bandai room dedicated to the Naruto game, where some of the players were wearing Naruto costumes. A thought off the top of our head: most of the Gen Con displays and dealers, as always, dealt with card games and card-style computer games. Considering the number of Final Fantasy costumers we spotted, we wonder what Gen Con would be like if there every was a serious presence from Square Enix? It also could be interesting in 2007 since there's talk of the E3 convention, dedicated to video games, being deliberately cut back - might that lead some of the vendors who typically head to E3 to go to Gen Con instead? At least three anime dealers fresh from Otakon were at Gen Con. We chatted with them briefly  during the convention; it was hard to hold a longer conversation because each booth had so much business, and the dealers seemed to be as busy on the closing day as they were on Friday and Saturday. The chatter was that John Sirabella of Media Blasters wanted to sneak away from Gen Con, in order to get a bicycle and participate in the charity ride with Lance Armstrong at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Gen Con's anime mini-convention was across the street from the main show, in a few ground-floor rooms of the Westin Hotel. There was a small but steady flow of fans through that area, with most of the traffic on the typical Friday through Sunday anime convention dates. We'll guess that more people would have attended that mini-con with more promotion, especially if fans had been told in advance that some ADV Films and Funimation representatives were going to be on hand. We kept track of Gen Con's plans through their web site and forums, and we didn't see any listing of those people before the convention. It should be noted that there also was little advance promotion of Gen Con's main media guests.  Gen Con was held on the weekend before the scheduled dates for the inaugural Amerikon, which was to have been held an hour's drive south of Indianapolis in Columbus, Ind.  Amerikon's promotion dried up and the convention apparently disappeared; some astute promotion from Gen Con could have gotten some of the people who wanted to go to that event to head to the Gen Con event, instead. Gen Con's costume contest was one of the events that moved in 2006, switching from the convention center to a Westin ballroom one floor above the anime events. We missed the contest because Saturday was a work night for us and the show started one hour too late. Beyond that, the convention was lucky that they were able to hold any Westin events after the building sprang a big leak on Friday, supposedly from an indoor pool, that drenched the area outside the secondhand first floor meeting rooms.  On Saturday, the hotel still had blowers out to dry the wet carpets. From Dave Williams at ADV came this tidbit: actors Greg Ayres and Monica Rial managed to get to the AmeCon in the U.K., despite the travel disruptions resulting from the breakup of the airline bombing terrorist conspiracy. The actors were lucky enough to head across the Atlantic before the drastic increase in security measures, Williams said. Geting back home to the U.S. might be an adventure, though... Gen Con Main Page