In which MetalJim puts off his pilgrimage for another year…

For the past year or so, I have been seriously contemplating a trip to the mega big Origins game expo in Columbus, Ohio, over the 4th of July Weekend.  I got my act together some months ago and reserved a hotel room about 5 blocks from the convention center.  The somewhat dodgy electronic registration system for the convention is live.  However, I have decided to give the Con a miss.  Here’s why…

First of all, I am still planning on going to a big boardgaming convention in Atlanta from June 21–24.  It’s called Oasis of Fun, and I expect to get a pretty good fix of gaming, especially boardgaming, during those days.  This Con is only a 4 hour drive for me, everything is located conveniently in one hotel, and I will be meeting up with a couple of my good friends from Connecticut.  This Con will be all boardgaming, all the time, without any real event “structure”, just 100 or so people playing all sorts of cool boardgames from sunup to midnight. 

Now, relative to Origins, the Oasis of Fun won’t really have any significant dealer room, and I won’t have any opportunities for RPG events, Magic: the Gathering events, etc.  So, there are definitely some things that Origins would have that the Oasis event wouldn’t have.  It’s also the case that, as I described it above, the really big honkin’ game conventions have an atmosphere all their own.  That atmosphere is akin to a kind of religious experience for us gamer types, in that it’s a chance to take part in a massive shared experience with a whole bunch of gamers.  It may not 50 thousand hippies in a field on the Woodstock farm, but it is still thousands of gamers coming together.  Not all in the same room playing the same game (ack – imagine the smell!  and a very long wait for your turn to come around!), but still all feeling one big cosmic gaming vibe.  So, there are perfectly good reasons why a self-respecting gamer like myself should make the trip.  I haven’t been to a convention on that scale since Origins was in Baltimore in 1991, and that really was a fun and eye-opening experience for me.

So, here’s the deal.  One, I don’t really have any plans to meet up with any specific gaming buddies at Origins.  It turns out that several of my boardgaming regulars here in Nashville are going to make the trip, but they have their own plans and would probably be signing up for different events than the ones that I would choose.  I have no one to share a hotel room with, so that’s roughly $130 a night for three nights.  It’s a six and a half hour drive each way from Nashville.  Factor in gas, food, and $100 worth of registration and game entry fees, and this thing gets up around $600 pretty easily.  So, there has to be enough of a unique gaming “value” to make the trip worth $600 to me.  Right now, I’m just not feeling like that would be the case.

Here’s another part of the problem, and I admit that this is partially due to my “newbie” status when it comes to dealing with registering for this particular Con.  I got my name on a mailing list some months ago so that I would receive a pre-reg booklet in the mail.  I finally got a post card in early May telling me that I could register for events online.  At the time I got the post card, the online system and the event listings were nowhere near operational.  I was able to download the event listings in the middle of May, but I was under the impression that the actual reigstration hadn’t been opened up until very recently (last day or two) even though I just found a link to a Google announcements group saying that the registration actually was opened on May 24th.  So, I probably missed my chance to register for some cool events, except that I couldn’t actually confirm this unless I spent $60 to buy a Con badge so that I could gain access to the arcane online event registration system.

The event listing files were made available on the web as poorly formatted Excel spreadsheet tables.  The events themselves were something of a mixed bag, and not really that impressive, just going by the listings.  For instance, many of the D&D events were listed as RPGA modules.  This is great if you play actively in one of the major RPGA campaign settings, but not much good for me, as that’s not something I am involved in.  There were plenty of listings for Call of Cthulhu RPG events and even some diverse events using the FUDGE system, which would have made me happy, but there wasn’t quite enough quality in the RPG listings to keep me busy for a whole weekend.

It was also the case that the CCG listings left me feeling “meh.”  I wrote an article here about my exploits at the Magic prelease for the Future Sight set.  Now, about a week after the Origins con, WotC is doing a big worldwide rollout for the Tenth edition of the Magic Core Set.  It would have really added some value to the trip, for me, if WotC had decided to do some sort of special pre-release tourney at Origins.  Unfortunately, WotC doesn’t really like to do this, because it just speeds up the rate at which the new set gets “spoiled” and leaked to the Web.  Thus, I could play in one or two sealed deck tournaments at Origins this year, but those events would feature Time Spiral– Planar Chaos– Future Sight, a format which I know well, but which isn’t really that fresh or exciting for me.

Back in 1991, the only other time I’ve been to Origins, the RPG that I was most excited about was something called Shadowrun, then a relatively new game.  At Origins that year, I was able to attend a convention panel where I got to hang out with two of the main writers of the Shadowrun rulebooks, and I was able to ask them a lot of questions about why things worked a certain way in the rules system, and even got a little insight into where the game was going.  That was one of the big highlights of that particular trip.  Looking at the “seminars and special events” for 2007, I didn’t see anything that was anywhere close to that exciting for me.

A big reason to go to a big Con like Origins is to soak up the ambience of the massive Dealers’ Hall.  I don’t currently have that much room in which to store “impulse buy” swag from such a marketplace.  Nor are there new games or products coming out that make me want to get to the Con for a chance to be the first kid on my block to buy that particular game.  Traditionally, of course, GenCon rather than Origins has always had the reputation as being the place where new games make their premiere and can sometimes be had ahead of their street date.  Still, there isn’t any hot new product coming out at Origins that makes me want to be there.

I could show up to Origins to play board games, but as I mentioned above, two weeks ahead of Origins I get to spend the better part of three full days doing nothing but play board games, without having to schedule specific events or pay $2 every time I sit down for a specific event.  There won’t be very much getting played at Origins that I won’t have at chance to try at the Oasis of Fun.  Oh, I might be able to play in a Settlers of Catan tournament, or even the Hearts tournament at Origins, but the potential value of those experiences doesn’t really match up to my outlay for the trip.

So, am I being a stick in the mud?  Is it okay for me to tell the organizers at Origins that their registration system is woefully inefficient and quite frankly a disincentive?  Is it okay to feel like there’s nothing so exciting going on in the industry to actually make me want to show up at the Mecca for independent table top game developers?  Is some part of me deadf if I’m not interested in shelling out good money for the chance to glimpse pimply girls in anime dress-up costumes?  Or am I correct in thinking that there are plenty of better things to do with $600?