Gencon Feedback [Designers/Boothies]

[Jason Morningstar]

If the nightly cashout is a cherished old chestnut from days of yore, maybe it should be available to the old timers in some capacity but not to us whipper-snappers.  There's clearly some emotional investment in it, and it may just be a handful of people for whom it is really important. 

I have no dog in the fight, opting out, but I am in favor of pretty much anything that makes it more likely that IPR will keep happily running the financial side of things. 

[timfire]

(I apologise if this has already been covered and I just missed it while skimming the thread.)

There are two things I think noone has covered yet: First, I think we need to develop a quick questionaire for the products (What's the premise? What's the 20-word pitch? What makes the game unique? etc.) and make it MANDANTORY next year that everyone fills it out. We talked about it last year, we talked about it this year, but still not everyone knew enough about every game to pitch it effectively (or even at all). As noble as Clinton's Demo-meeting was, not everyone was able to attend. We need something mandantory, and we need something we can pass out. (A meeting won't work 'cause late-comers would be left out.)  If everyone filled out a questionaire, we could compile them into a document and print it out for all the booth participants. I would gladly handle the logistics of such a questionaire.

Second, book placement on the rack was an issue, as I think someone might have mentioned. The books on the bottom didn't get the love they deserved. I think the solution is to raise the racks off the ground. I think milk crates or something would do the job. If this is too much hassle, then we need to give real conscious thought as to where we place books. We can't just throw them up. The books on the top definitely get more attention.

[Jason Morningstar]

The premise/elevator pitch/awesomeness idea is really good Tim, and we should definitely do that.  There were a couple of games I knew nothing about on Thursday, including all the D20 stuff. 

I wondered about rack placement, but assumed the IPR team had something worked out to rotate stock up and down - my games seemed to alternately get eye-level love and bottom row disregard day by day, and I felt it all evened out.  Whether this moving about is good or bad, accidental or intentional, I have no idea. 

[Iskander]

We tried to rotate stock so that everything had its moment in the sun, but honestly, I agree that some books got short shrift. Tim's idea is a good one, and I have already been investigating various stock storage options that would double as platforms and tables for future display racks to bring more of the stock closer to eye-level.

I didn't do as good a job of getting the stock laid out as I would have liked - we just didn't have time on Wednesday night / Thursday morning to do a really good job of arranging it. That's one of the reasons I asked everyone to bugger off out of the IPR space on future mornings: we couldn't spare the time to say "Thanks, but we don't need another pair of hands right now," even. Initially, the real time-crunch was the floor, and that's got to stay high on the list of fix-for-next-year priorities, and after Thursday, the stock storage non-system slowed us down... so that stays high on the list, too!

Nevertheless, you should bear in mind that it will never be possible to completely avoid having some books in the shade some of the time. Not if we want to be able to have 90+ books out, again. We can mitigate the problems, but I don't think we will ever be able to eliminate them. Stock rotation will remain a feature of the booth, I believe.

- Alexander

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

Tim, I might suggest making everyone answer the Big Three.  I think those three questions, more than any others, can capsulize a game so everyone has a basic idea about what it does and how it plays.

Peace,

-Troy

[Steve Segedy]

I know that the booth already owns the wire racks, but assuming for a moment that we might invest in new displays, would it be realistic to suggest table-top racks?  My understanding is that GenCon provides an 8' table for each booth block.  With two of those end to end, we'd have space for up to 5 36" racks (like these, for example) in a row together.  That would allow for display of up to 120 6" books. 

Although this rack design means that some books are in front of other books, they would all be closer to eye level, and at least mostly visible.  They'd be easier to rotate (front to back, rather than top to bottom) and having the skirted tables would provide more room for stock storage directly underneath the displays.

[iain]

I personally had a great time at the booth this year. Coming back with my first game and getting a lot of positive feedback was a big boost for me and will see me returning next year.

Selling space was definetley a problem, but hopefully that can be solved fairly easily by some  planning out the booth a little better next year.

Although I did well out of the con, I felt that Ron's 'let's make sure the new guys get their games shown over the first two days thing' was maybe not as fully supported as it could have been and that we should maybe have had rack space specifically labelling these new games for the first day or so of the con. Just so the new guys get the exposure they need to get the sales coming in.

However, apart from these two quibbles I really enjoyed myself and though the atmosphere at the booth was miles better than last year.

Thanks very much to all who played and gave feedback on my game and to those who ran games for me. I can honestly say I didn't play a game I didn't enjoy.

Cheers
Iain

[Jonathan Walton]

The experience of being at the booth: 100% awesome.
The effectiveness of the booth in doing what it was supposed to do: decent.

I already threw down radical notions of reorganization in the other thread, so I won't repeat that here.  My main concerns are these:

-- Size.  I think total booth space needs to double.  No joke.  I spent half my time standing around, because there was no room for me to do anything.  I just waited until the demo tables opened and then herded people to them.  There was no space to talk to potential customers that wasn't in someone else's way.

-- Specialization. People need to join forces in teams that focus on a smaller subsets of the games at the booth.  There are just too many products to deal with otherwise.

People seem to be mostly posting suggestions that are Like Last Year, Only a Little Bit Different.  Honestly, as a newcomer, it's my responsibility to say, "Bollocks to that!" and push for more radical changes (just like it's the Old Timers' responsibility to reign me in when I go to far).  The Forge Booth, this year, to me, looked WAY too small for the amount of activity that was going on there and definitely wasn't anywhere close to holding the amount of activity that I thought could have been going on there (if only there was more space and more specialization).  It's nice that it went relatively well and that we sold a lot of books.  That's sweet.  But I think you guys are settling for the Status Quo when it doesn't really apply anymore.  The models that worked when the booth had 20 people are not effective anymore.  Next year you will have at least 50 people (if not more) and at least 120 products (if not more).  That is fucking nuts.  In the current system, that is completely unmanageable.

Did anyone else notice that, this year, a bunch of the old school designers just sat back and left most of the demoing and talking to the new kids?  Their sales probably sucked because of it, but there really wasn't anything else for them to do, really.  As far as I could tell, Clinton wasn't demoing TSoY, Paul wasn't demoing My Life, Vincent wasn't demoing Dogs, Matt W. wasn't demoing Primetime, and Matt S. wasn't demoing Nine Worlds or Dust Devils, Ralph wasn't demoing Universalis, and I doubt Ron demoed much Sorcerer.  There were a few exceptions, like Tim K. demoing some Mountain Witch and Ben demoing some Polaris and Emily demoing some Breaking the Ice (and those all came out just last year) and Luke Crane demoing games like a madman, but the games that people think of when they think of "Forge games" were, to a large extent, not being demoed at the Forge Booth.  Which is a damn shame.  These are the games and the designers that have brought the Forge Booth to the point where it is now and I really wished they had been more visible.  Heck, I would have loved to run some of those games and get people excited about them, but there was just no space.

Basically, I feel like the booth did not adaquately serve the designers who were there this year. The new kids and the new games got a lot of traffic, but even then some people didn't get as much attention.  And I definitely felt like the older games got forgotten.  Personally, I'm dreading what it will be like next year if the booth size increases just slighting (adding two more 10x10's is just not going to be anywhere near enough) while the number of booth members increases by 30% again and the number of products increases by 50% (because most of the previous year's members will have new games).

Specialization is also super critical in keeping the booth from becoming a faceless sea of people and products.  Even now, I only had a good conversation with probably half the people at the booth, and I was trying really hard to talk to everyone.  For me, the indie community is about the close bonds between people and the excitement that comes from that.  If you're working hard to sell my game, I want to know that and appreciate you for that.  As it is, I have no idea who pitched and sold copies of Push and I have no way of reciprocating.  That doesn't encourage the building of working relationships.  For all I know, Joe sold 15 copies of Push by himself and I should have done a better job of telling people how much Perfect rocked.  I felt very disconnected to the process of selling Push.  Fifty people bought copies of my product and I only talked to 5 of them. And I didn't even talk to the people who sold them the copies.  That blows.  Where's the personal connection with your fellows?  Where's communicating with your audience?  I sure as hell am not doing this for the money.  I'm doing this because I love my fellow designers and love the people who love my products.

Seriously, where's the love?

[Jasper the Mimbo]

What's the premise? What's the 20-word pitch? What makes the game unique?

When I originally heard the idea of the Game Menu, This is what I thought it refered to. I think that adding a extra line or two to each entry on the Menu would be a great help to everyone pitching games as well as to customers who take a Menu and are trying to describe games to other people. Something like:

Polaris       TAO Games          $20
Apocayiptic Farie Tale Fantasy at the Top of the World.
Winner of the 2007 Indie RPG of the Year and Most Innovative RPG of the Year Awards
www.tao-games.com

Doesn't seem like it would change things much.