MIB North Extras: Director's Cut: Want More?

Director's Cut - Want more?

(Warning: one naughty word ahead, and many more if you follow the links.)

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Warren Ellis (link) is a writer. His words dangle like a mirror ball of razor blades -- gleaming, hypnotizing, ever-revealing a new side, and the potential at any moment to fall and make a bloody mass of anyone trying to get too close. His fans are legion, his detractors myriad, and his projects past and present (examples being Transmetropolitan, the Warren Ellis Forum (link) at Delphi, and the current Global Frequency) are the work of someone who wants to create something better than what has gone before.

Warren Ellis also has several outlets for his random thoughts and bile -- currently, his Bad Signal (link) mailing list and Die Puny Humans website (link) provide frequent glimpses into his forebrain. As good as his comics are, I actually prefer the experience of reading these, and letting their implications slide around inside my own mind.

Here's a concept I can thank Warren Ellis for: Why are gaming conventions so astoundingly uninteresting?

Yes, I know, that's not a Warren Ellis concept. A Warren Ellis concept sounds more like "Gaming has been humping Tolkien's corpse for decades. Wake me once the necrophiliacs fuck off." I am, sadly, not so blunt or unforgiving. My tolerance tends towards the unreasonable side of the fence. (This explains a few of the comics on my monthly pull list.)

Still, when I look out over the typical gaming convention, too often I see hundreds of individual basements transplanted from their parent's house to a table at the con. I see tournaments featuring the same game, the same way, over and over, for hours. It's the weekly gaming group, with a dealer's room grafted on.

I want more. I want convention events to be sexy, dangerous things for people who want to get them a little something they can't get at home. I want events that take the potential of 20,000 people and funnel it like a firehose at players. I want events that go beyond last year and are spectacles never before seen in the history of man.

And, even more to the point, I want gamemasters and company representatives who have the confidence to do this every year. Don't pull out the same module you're run for the last five years just because you've had the event fill with eight whole people every year. Story tournaments? How quaint. Familiarity is the common currency traded in at game cons, when a healthy dose of pop mentality - some new, something danceable, something traded up to next year's model as soon as possible - is needed.

I have tried, in my planning and events, to do something above and beyond. I have had a few spectacular failures, and more quiet successes. I'm beginning to feel the pulse and rhythm throbbing under the thick skin of gaming. A keyboard or two, and you could even dance to it. I'll DJ for now, but I want company.

Do you want something more? And what are you willing to do to make it happen?...

Alex Yeager
AlexYeager@yahoo.com
SJ Games North US MIB RD/Cheapass Games Demo Monkey