Prospering at Game Conventions and Conferences
- 2 hours on-demand video
- 3 articles
- 8 downloadable resources
- Full lifetime access
- Access on mobile and TV
- Certificate of Completion
Get your team access to 4,000+ top Udemy courses anytime, anywhere.
Try Udemy for Business- What people do at cons
- How to save money going to cons
- Descriptions of some specific conventions and conferences
- No materials, no prequisites
"Game conventions and conferences" is for typical hobby game players and for game designers. Conventions (where people play games, mostly tabletop games) and conferences (where people talk about creating video games) are common and attendance is growing. They vary in size from dozens of attendess to more than 50,000. There's probably one or more within a hundred miles of you.
In this course I talk about what people do at cons and how you can save money when attending, and I describe several specific cons in the southeastern and midwestern USA: GenCon, WBC, Origins, East Coast Game Conference, and PrezCon.
There are no requirements or prerequisites for the course.
This course is likely to slowly grow over time.
Lewis Pulsipher
- Anyone who's thinking about attending a game convention or conference
Why would you travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to attend a game convention or conference? Here's why.
This class, for your enlightenment (not entertainment), is about game conventions and conferences: what people do there, what game designers (specifically) do there, how to save money.
Description of the grandiosely-titled World Boardgaming Championships, a 30-some tournament-oriented board and card game convention in Pennsylvania. Friendly and relaxed even though many of the players are extremely good at their games. I go every year.
A short video from the 2018 World Boardgaming Championships
A short video about tournaments at (and from) the World Boardgaming Championships. Background noise is player talk during the Britannia tournament.
GenCon in Indianapolis is one of the oldest, and the largest, game/multigenre convention in the world (though Essen Spiel in Germany formerly had that title, and ChiTag in Chicago, a toy convention, may be larger). Being there is quite an experience.
Regional game conventions are typically small (200 or less), short (2-3 days). There are also regional "geek" conventions not primarily about games, but with a game segment.
Here I talk about three such conventions in north Florida, Feburary 2016. Video, photos, comments.
At big conventions you'll see little booths occupied by newbie publishers, trying to flog their one, or two, or three new games. The next year it will be a different set, as the publishers rarely find that their experience was worth the expense and effort.
This is entirely a tabletop convention thing.
This is two and a half of the more than six minutes I recorded as the GenCon 2013 cosplayers paraded past. For some people, games are about story (for others, games are "all math" or "all about people"). GenCon is a story-convention as much as a game convention, so cosplay is common as gamers (and others) try to "live" the stories they love.
Cosplay is much less common at smaller conventions.
I'm in the "all about people" camp, and do not understand why people so love to dress up, but they do.