Been a while since I wrote
a convention report and I’ve never written one from an Organisers point of
view, which is strange, because I’ve been organising this section of Games Expo
for a number of years now.
Most people don’t realise
the amount of work it takes to put something this size together, it’s not the
same as one day conventions when you’ve got a single hall for a few hours in
the middle of the day and all you have to do in the evening is make sure that
everyone knows where the aftercon party is.
That may seem obvious to a lot of people, but there’s still a core out
there who believe that they turn up and just because they turn up, so
everything must work.
For those that don’t know,
I run the games section at Expo, that encompasses the entire roleplaying games,
room allocations, special events and tournaments, and then on the days of the
Expo, I cover the front desk to make sure there’s a senior person always
available to the public.
We’re at the sharp end of
the stick, if a member of the public has a problem, the first point of call is
usually the people they can see, and that’s us.
Everyone knows where to find us, and then there’s the matter of which
shirt they look at. Technically the Expo
organiser shirts are Maroon in colouration, but I can tell you know that when
people look, the shirt is Red.
And we all know Red shirts
are expendable...
Not here, that’s for sure,
I see comparatively little of the show itself every year, because for every little
problem that we solve, there’s another one just around the corner, and you
never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
So that’s where we start,
the staff that work the front desk have to be polite, at all times, no matter
the question, no matter the way in which its delivered, we have to be nice. For
most of the people going to the Expo, they are just the sort of people we love
to get at the event, they’re gamers, they’re the family of gamers, and they’re
just there to have a good time.
It’s when you get an issue
like someone needs disabled access in one of the few areas that the hotel does
not provide that access.
It’s when you get someone
turning up three minutes before an event starts saying they’ve changed their
mind and want a refund when you know you can’t resell that ticket and them
dropping out may cause a problem in the tournament itself.
It’s when you get someone
wanting to do something that you know you can’t let them do, but they’re
determined to do it anyway...
That’s when we need to be
at our best, when everyone else is at their worst.
But that’s not the most of
it, for us to be able to make sure there’s a solution, we already have to have
everything in place to begin with. The
rooms need to be allocated, the trade halls need to be laid out to the
centimetre, tournament space needs to be allocated, umpires selected, and not
just any umpires, umpires that have no allegiance to any club or group, lest
there’s any suggestion of impropriety.
We normally start planning
within a month of Expo finishing, gives all of us time to have something in our
life that’s not Expo. Don’t get me wrong, every person, from the
top to the bottom, does this because they want to. We don’t have conscripted labour here, even
though of a certainty there’s not enough money in it to replace a full time
job, and certainly we’d earn more taking a second job at Mcdonalds, but there
is no better thing than to be working in an industry you want to, doing a job
you want to, and most importantly, helping a hobby you love.
Just after Essen, we open
the trade bookings, and if last year is anything to go by, everyone got in
there within not weeks, but days, and
there’s something to be noted there. In
previous years, we’d still have space till early march, there wouldn’t be much
of it to be sure, but there’d be some... Now we’re to the stage where we don’t
have that time any more, anyone asking for space in the months leading up to
Expo is likely to be disappointed, because the waiting list is long and there’s
a whole lot of people who’re on that list from some months earlier.
But that’s just the start,
when all the trade space is gone, we need to make sure we’ve left enough space
for the free gaming and the tournaments, because the decision was made when
Expo was first created that it would be a show for gamers to play games and not
just to buy them. We need to allocate
space for the RPG’s, and here’s the point that most people miss when it comes
to RPG’s...
They don’t make money...
They do if you sell them,
but they don’t when you’re running them.
Between the cost of
putting a GM up for the nights of the show, giving them basic expenses so it
doesn’t cost them to come to the convention and run things for us and the
amount of admin it takes to arrange 300+ games into six different areas and
eight different slots, not to mention the amount of time it takes to get those
GMs in the first place?
No contest...
To break even on that,
we’d have to charge double what we do, and as much as people like playing
RPG’s, they don’t like playing them at £1.50 an hour...
So we make that as a loss,
but it’s important to understand that we make that loss because without
roleplaying games, we wouldn’t be Games Expo, we’d be Board Expo, and there’s already
other shows for boardgames only, this way we appeal to everyone, and because of
that, more and more people come along and the divisions between the two
different camps start to blur because most people play both at some point, and
it’s good to see that we’re all just gamers at the end of the day.
Then there are guests, and
with those guests, you’ve got to factor in getting them to us and then making
sure we’ve got someone covering them for the whole time to make sure that their
needs are covered in case we want them back again. Then while they’re there, we need to make
sure that they’ve got things to do, but not so many things that they don’t get
to see the show.
Then Events! Tournaments,
games, things you can’t find anywhere else.
Next year we’ve got even more unique things coming, and I can’t talk
about them just yet, but examples for this year were the one hour taster
sessions for RPGs and the Alien Laser Tag Zone (in which Expo triumphed over
Esdevium...), the Dragons Den for prospective games designers to pitch their
games at experienced developers and producers and many others.
We can’t do this with the
team that we started with originally, so we’ve got specialists in to deal with
the things that we can’t, from Paco Jean who deals with all our Seminars, to
Matthew Comben who does the layout in the programme, and the unsung members of
the team like Caroline and Lindsey in the office, who no-one ever sees, but
they’re the glue that holds the rest of us together.
We’ve got one more year at
the Hilton per the contract, and then who knows, but we need everyone that ever
liked anything we ever did to be with us as we go forwards, because it may be
us that build the show, but it’s you that make that show, and without you, it’s
just us in an empty hotel, so what do you say?
Are you with us?