Another year of Gen-Con has come and gone, and with it another year of marathon gaming has come to an end. For those of you that don't know, Gen-Con is a yearly gaming convention that draws thousands of gamers of a variety of shapes and sizes to the city of Indianapolis, Indiana to indulge their gaming habits and desires.
The entire downtown area of Indy is transformed into gaming central for the event, and the streets are flooded with gamers from all over the the mid-west, as well as the entire country.
Thursday: Hotel Check-in at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, across from the convention center. The rest for the group skipped the convention center to check in to the hotel, but fuck all that. I had badges to acquire. Badges for walk-in was a hefty $78, but that's for a 4 day pass. The center itself is always welcoming and WELL air conditioned, as Indy is always hot as fuck in August. I was actually surprised at how hot it was this year, as it's been a fairly cool summer. Being from Chicago, I have come to expect the heat of mid-august, but it has been unseasonably cool this year.
So, needless to say, I sweat my ass off.
:Interlude:
So, as you can see, I started writing this way back in August, and I had intended to give a day by day account of my trip to Indy Gen-con. Well, as shit happens so often, I got side-tracked and distracted, and this particular article never got written. None the less, I do want to touch base on the basics of my experience, minus specific details, which have all but escaped my tiny little head.
The most central to my Gen-Con experience is the V:TM Larp my friends attend every year. For those of you who have no idea what the fuck I just wrote up there, let me explain it to you. I'm talking about Vampire: The Masquerade, or Vampire, for short. This is a game, for all intents and purposes, that has been out of print for about 3 or 4 years now. It's originally a table-top role-playing game set in the World of Darkness. Why do I still play this game, especially since White Wolf, the game's publishers, have created a totally new system in a totally new world?
Good fucking question.
I don't have a very worth-while answer to that particular question, actually. I've been playing the live action version of the game for the better part of ten years now, and I have a very firm grasp on the system, world and characters. Sometimes, old habits die hard. So, every once in a while, we pack up the table, throw on some costumes and take the game "outside", for lack of a better term.
Anyways, I like to equate this experience to a magician's convention. It's like a sad group of hacky, worn out has-been types trying desperately to recapture their past glories, spending hours reliving fleeting moments of former fame.
so, needless to say, a lot of people that play this game are faggots.
Never the less, there are typically 7 or 8 decent players, who just enjoy the old system...
To be continued.
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12 years ago
