campus gaming awareness

[poppocabba]

I am going to a campus with a combined enrollment of nearly 40,000, and yet only one rpg organization that is primarily focused on larps.
so my question is how to build up a campus gaming organization. what promotional tracks will work? to what if any level should I involve outside gaming organizations?
so far I have set up a small run of 50 flyers, and been in constructive dialouge with the existing campus organization. there is a tremendous amount of interest in actaulizing the campus gaming community from the outside, but the existing organization has had bad dealings with outsiders in the past, and to make matters worse the membership seems to be larp exclusively

[james_west]

I had absolutely, precisely this situation at Georgia Tech when I started a huge gaming club there about seven years ago. Here's what it boils down to:

(1) Jump through all the hoops to allow yourself to reserve rooms and become a 'legitimate' student organization.

(2) Lots of flyers, and put a new flyer out every couple of weeks until the thing really takes off. Then still put a flyer out every couple of months. I did some ten foot tall, eight foot wide banners hung from balconies and bridges on campus (need permissions to do these, and if they're too pretty people will steal them.)These are done by projecting the art onto the banner using an overhead projector, then tracing it, then bringing down the tracing and inking it.

(3) Have a regular place and time for open gaming as the core of the club, eg a specific room in the student center, every saturday from noon until 10 pm. Make sure you yourself show up there -every- saturday with something fun to run as a pick-up, until the thing takes off enough it isn't needed.

(4) You may find them pretentious bastards, but invite the local game companies (The Window guys, for instance) to show up and run things.

[Ron Edwards]

I'm the faculty advisor for the role-playing club at my campus. The club was founded just this last fall.

We seem to have done the right thing by following the same guidelines as James; everything he says has worked well for us.

Also, with mixed success, I've tried to emphasize that the CLUB is not the GROUP. We want people to spin off into their own groups, using the club and its open-gaming night as a way to meet other gamers. Already one member has had to be squelched from considering the open gaming night to be "his group," by enforcing a one-shot policy.

The reason for this is that I've seen several campus gaming clubs turn into cliquey gaming groups.

Best,
Ron

[Cameron]

There was a gaming club at my college, which was a fairly small liberal arts college (Lewis & Clark College). I can say honestly, and with no sense of irony, that nothing turned people away from gaming better than the LC Gaming Society. The members were greatly lacking in social skills and outspoken; the combination of both traits was overpowering.

I knew 30+ gamers at the school and only 5 of them chose to be affiliated with the Gaming Society. It sucks when the prime location to find new gaming buddies is anywhere the Gaming Society isn't.

[Knight]

All I can say is a big "me too" to Cameron.  The RPG society at Aberystwyth are just an embarresment.  They're primarily LARP-focused, of course, and can often be seen forlornly wandering about in costume.  A group I recently came across apparently were playing gay Mexican bandits who'd just raided Liberace's wardrobe, but turned out to be, in fact, elves. They also apparently have a long tradition of pissing off the staff of the student union.

Now that I've got all that petty bitching off my chest, I'd say that ideally I'm not really looking for an organisation that is some kind of overarching group, rather one that acts as a facilitator for forming normal groups. Somewhere where I can meet other roleplayers and determine if they're the kind of people I want to game with. I dislike gaming with strangers - the best groups I've been in have been founded on friendships outside gaming, rather than the other way around.  

[Ron Edwards]

Knight wrote,

"ideally I'm not really looking for an organisation that is some kind of overarching group, rather one that acts as a facilitator for forming normal groups. Somewhere where I can meet other roleplayers and determine if they're the kind of people I want to game with."

That's exactly what I'm after with the current campus group. It started up in January, and the real proof comes next year, to see if it can sustain itself past the starting members and their friends.

Best,
Ron

[james_west]

Mine was at Georgia Tech, which of course has the advantage of being 20,000 geeky white males, but the club grew to a membership list of ~200, with 30-50 people showing up on any given Saturday, within a semester. I just checked their website (I left five years ago) and it was still being updated as of January this year, which is a good sign. I never really had the problem with people mistaking it for "their game group" ...