More on Informality and ACNW

I'd like to clear some air about the previous post -- which had some good discussion in comments, but also generated rancor. First of all, I should clear up some things. It is always difficult to compare experiences. People of differing opinions often have differing experiences. Here I'd like to discuss about the larger cultural context of gaming.

I should give some context to my AmberCon NorthWest visit. I am not a fan of Zelazny's Amber novels -- nor am I a fan of Wujcik's Amber Diceless RPG. I had played in one Amber DRPG campaign in 1992, and I basically hated it. The campaign I played essentially reproduced all of the bad features I noted in the book: NPCs who vastly overpower the PCs, competition between PCs without the option of fair contests, and Sorcery broken. I had read the first Amber series shortly prior, and I liked it enough to finish it but was not especially thrilled. However, over the last year, I had heard good things from two people (first my gaming friend Madeline, then online correspondant Lee) about AmberCon NorthWest, so I decided to try it out. In part, I specifically wanted to see what the alternate culture was like.

Mark W wrote:

I haven't been to an Ambercon. I have, however, been to similar single-fandom microcons, both in and out of RPG-land.

The biggest things these events have in common is that often no-one even knows they exist unless they have already penetrated the outer layers of an insular fan culture ... There is a sort of "reverse network effect" that discourages recruitment in these kinds of mediafan communities, and I see no reason why this would be any different for gaming. I would be curious, though, to know how many of those newcomers become regular attendees - my guess is that there is a non-negligible attrition rate among people who find that the reality does not mesh with their expectations, but I doubt there's any straightforward way to know for sure.

This doesn't sound like my experience of ACNW -- but I'd welcome more comparisons to the communities which you met with. ACNW was something of a close-knit community, but it seemed to be that way through a direct network effect. That is, people who came would tend to come back bringing their friends and family. I'm not sure how many people were there -- I would guess between 100 and 150 (though some only stayed part time). Since I was only there one year, I couldn't say about the attrition rate. Perhaps Lee could say more.

As for demographics -- naturally most people were from the Northwest or Northern California. There were a number of people from England, though. Compared to mainstream gaming conventions, I saw relatively more couples and families attending. In registration, the organizers made an important point that all games should be classified as "teen friendly" or not -- something I rarely see in mainstream games. I also think that the percentage of women was greater -- I'd guess maybe 40% compared to maybe 15-20% at my local gaming conventions like ConQuest and DundraCon. What was even more notable was that there were many more games GMed by women: 30 by men, 20 by women, and 12 by both. That's much more than I've seen in either mainstream game conventions or surveys of gamers, where female GMs are generally less than 10%.

People tended to hang out together a lot outside of the games -- though this was influenced by the venue, which fairly isolated (i.e. there were only really two places to eat). Most games were Amber Diceless or a variant, but there was also Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, and Polaris.

As a side comment, I think there is a pretty major cultural difference between film, television, and comic fans and literary fans. I don't know much about the former -- but this felt very different than my encounters with TV or comics fans. I felt similarly from my visit to WisCon, a literary science fiction convention.

Mark W wrote:

I think that the "cultural" approach to functional play clearly provides things that formal design can't. I just don't think those things have much of anything to do with the actual experience of play, at least not in any reliable way. I think the big benefit is as a filter against agenda clashes (technical, creative, whatever) - people are strongly trained in a Right Way To Play, and those who don't find that fun either adapt or fall by the wayside. Pretty soon, the community is homogenous enough in terms of preferences that it rarely experiences overt dysfunction.

Well, I'd offhand agree that the larger context of play is probably more important for the informal approach. I'm not convinced that it requires a larger total investment in training, though. I had no problem jumping into play at either ACNW or Knutepunkt. It may require more in the way of selection -- but that would have to allow self-selection or selective recruitment, since I didn't see much "weeding out" during the cons.

I think that each side examining the other might well help. For example, I think that games based on formal design can still benefit from the cultural context of play. At the same time, an informal environment like ACNW can still benefit from formal design. Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, Polaris, and Star, Moon & Cross all made an appearance there. I think Polaris and Star, Moon & Cross both worked pretty well with the crowd there.