Author: Zubon

One thing I may not have expressed well about Gen Con is the size of the event. There were 56,614 people there. That is people, not triple-counting people who attend several days, and it probably does not include the people who showed up but were not officially attending the conference. Origins felt like a large event at 12,902 attendees; quadruple that. I heard folks spreading the rumor that the event was going to spread into the stadium next door next year, as it has already filled a convention center and spread into nearby hotels, which is a nice idea, but Gen Con would nearly be a sell-out crowd for the stadium and that would be just to pack people in seats watching something. As you might imagine, gaming takes up a bit more space than watching a game.

As Adam Smith explains, The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market, which is to say, you get more niches when you have more people. Games at Gen Con have editions listed for each, in case you insist on D&D 3.0 not 3.5 or refuse to play the revised version of Betrayal at House on the Hill. The vendors can similarly serve narrow markets, such as the booth that did green screen photo shoots for cosplayers to give them exciting, customizable backdrops. A popular game might have an entire floor, and the anime area was larger than some anime conventions.

It’s kind of a big deal. If it repeats this year’s growth, attendance will break 60,000 next year and 70,000 the next. There must be some limit to how big the event can get, but they do not seem to have found it yet.

: Zubon

A first order preference is what you want or like. You want pie. A second order preference is your preference about your preferences. You also want to lose weight, so you do not want to want pie. You can keep going to higher orders, where you might run into ambivalence as you miss being interested in something, so you neither want nor want to want it but you kind of want to want to want. Don’t go too deep down that rabbit hole.

I frequently find myself wanting to like things more than I like them. “This is my kind of thing. I should like this. Why don’t I like this?” It’s like I have some misguided loyalty to “my type,” even though I know a thousand details can make it not work. I tend to commit and stick with things, which is good when something goes through a bad patch but bad when it parks in the bad patch and starts digging a hole.

I’m past wanting to play any MMOs, but I still faintly want to want to play because I want to like them. I miss the original ideal of virtual worlds. I love the gameplay of League of Legends, but the community is still highly problematic, so I want to enjoy the game more than I actually enjoy it. Ingress is interesting in the abstract but mostly tedious when I play it more than casually.

I’m not sure of my higher order preferences. I recognize that having a disparity between first and second order is a problem, so I do not want to want to want to play, but I have a certain wistfulness and I am going to cut that thought off there because that way madness lies.

: Zubon

Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. … Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself-love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they are saying is, ‘You like stuff’, which is just not a good insult at all, like ‘You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.
— John Green

This has been my first con season, and I must say the best part is seeing so many people having so much fun. Gen Con has about it an aura of enthusiasm. Card games? Here is a tournament with hundreds of tables going at once, and that is not the only one, and over there is the entire hall devoted to them. Next to it are areas devoted to board games, from championships to “learn to play” sessions. The dueling successors to Dungeons and Dragons are there, with a large area for the launch of D&D 5th Edition and most of a floor for Pathfinder; just walking by the Pathfinder gaming area was an experience, with themed rooms, groups forming and shouting that they need one more, and generally an air that these people really are going to slay an army of dragons and save the world.

I have really enjoyed the costumes, but I think “outfits” make me happier. That is, there are many costumed characters, but even more people are dressed up without being a particular character. There are more hats and corsets than I see the rest of the year. There are Victorian and steampunk bits, from formal dresses to someone who just felt like wearing goggles. There are more utility kilts than I expected even given that these are gamers. Hair colors stretch far beyond the normal human range, and that was before I ventured into the anime area. People are here to play, and being playful is good. Your steampunk goggles and bronze rocket pack get admiring looks, not confused stares and laughs. The weirdos are the Colts fans who arrived in their thousands for the game last night; why wear a blue and white jersey when you could have a fez and/or chainmail?

: Zubon

He does indeed sift and sort, but he does not know that he is “sifting and sorting.” He is much like a dog who is offered a dish containing a mixture of good foods and bad foods. He spits out the bad foods and eats up the good foods. The doggie does not complain nor criticize the bad foods; he is far too busy enjoying himself hunting out the good foods. And so after the meal is over, if someone asked him how he enjoyed his dinner, the doggie would say, “Delicious! I found so many good foods!” (By contrast, [the grinder] would say, “Horrible! Most of the food was bad! I had a hell of a time finding enough good food to make a meal”)
— Raymond Smullyan, This Book Needs No Title