Hey folks,

I will likely not be doing the Indie Games Passport for 2008 -- with Brennan missing GenCon, the amount of additional work I'll be taking on as IPR booth captain is going to eliminate my ability to be a part of this project again.

I believe Jonathan Walton has expressed some interest in taking this up, but will need others to help him out as he doesn't believe he'll be able to solo it.  Please direct any offers of assistance in his direction.

Fred

What sort of skills does he need?

The main thing is contacting all the people who might want to be involved.  Last year Fred had most of the Forge-related booths and a few others, like Grey Ghost, signed on before I joined the project to help with graphic design.  Then I emailed a bunch of other small press game companies and asked if they wanted to be on board, and we got 3-4 more folks signed up.  If we want this thing to keep getting bigger, demonstrating the breadth and diversity of indie games, getting a variety of different outfits on board is important, I think.

Secondarily, we'd need to figure out what the purpose of the passport is and make sure that we nail that.  There were a bunch of reflections after last year that we need to re-read and process, learning from what worked and what didn't work.  Seems like many participants were happy just to collect all the stamps and wanted to keep the brochure as a souvenir, which would have had them going home with a booklet that basically advertised all the participants products and reminded them of the cool stuff they saw at GenCon that they might want to buy later or ask their LGS about. I think we need to make that possible.  I'm not sure how important the contest aspects of last year's passport was, but, again, I need to re-read all the reflections and feedback, since I was at GOD/IGE most of the day last year and didn't see the passport in action much.

If this is going to happen, I'd need a few folks who are willing to help me contact companies and get them on board.  This also involves brainstorming and researching who we should contact.

Ideally, these people should also be interested in talking through this past year's experiences and coming up with a passport program that will build on last year's successes and be, ultimately, better.  This may end up meaning "simpler is better."  A one-sheet passport that is a map of small press booths in the convention hall, lists names, descriptions, websites, and purchasing info for the companies, and has space for each booth to give a colorful, signature stamp... that might be all we need, honestly.  Maybe there could be a custom INDIE PASSPORT 2008 patch (I know where to get those made from Jason Morningstar) for the first 150 people who get all the stamps, like you get at some National Parks for completing those kiddie questionnaires.  At least, that's my initial impulse, since I'm into non-competitive contests where everyone who completes the task wins something, but I'm definitely willing to discuss and help with other people's ideas.

The way I remember it from last year's threads, a problem was that the passports were wanted for both souvenirs and for a raffle, which caused minor conflict. Perforating the passport to allow separating the raffle ticket from the memento part would allow hitting both points at once, which would perhaps increase motivation to finish the passport. I also like Jonathan's suggested reward badge instead of a raffle, but I would likely personally pass on it if the criteria for winning were being first over the finishing line - I don't much like doing a race through a giant convention as the first thing when I get in. (Of course the "first X people to finish get a price" wasn't intended as a competition in that way by Jonathan, but that's kinda how it reads to me.)

The map function is important as well, I know that I would appreciate a map (booth numbers at least, if not an outright visual) of the indie-relevant convention landscape myself. I'd appreciate it enough to pay a couple of dollars for it, actually, but that's just me and a half dozen others, so doing a free passport is the smart move. Regardless, I love the idea of having some kind of condensed bird's eye material on the indie hotspots to hit at the convention; most of the audience is probably in the same boat with me in not really having a clue about what's cool and what's not. If somebody compiles something that acts as orientation tour map, that's certainly useful.

Continuing from the viewpoint of the passport audience, as an audience member I'd also like somebody to exert some editorial quality control on what's included in the passport and what's not. This would especially be the case if the number of booths in the passport was more than something like half a dozen. I wouldn't mind trying to fulfill a larger passport as an audience member, but only if the participating booths were actually interesting and relevant for me. So diluting the message by including bad booths (fully accepting that badness is largely a factor of individual interest, of course) would, for me as a consumer, make the passport less interesting. What the quality control guidelines would be (being technically indie, being forgite, being innovative, being of high quality, being something Jonathan himself likes...) I have no idea, especially as somebody would be offended anyway. I just hope that the passport won't have something that's a downer for somebody navigating to the booth on the strength of Jonathan's recommendation.

Perhaps somebody should locate those feedback threads from last year and post links.

If you want a prize that everyone can get, with minimal production costs, then give everyone who completes their passport access to download (and/or a CD burned on the spot, on demand, at the con) a pack of donated prize PDFs.  I'd happily donate something from Evil Hat's catalog -- it's easy for lots of publishers to support too, with minimal material outlay.

I'm in...

The FlamesRising.com crew will be at the Abstract Nova booth this year and we'd love to take part in the Passport.

I can help recruit and/or spread the word to other small press folks as well. Should I point them to this thread or some other information post?

Regards,

Matt

iago wrote:
If you want a prize that everyone can get, with minimal production costs, then give everyone who completes their passport access to download (and/or a CD burned on the spot, on demand, at the con) a pack of donated prize PDFs.  I'd happily donate something from Evil Hat's catalog -- it's easy for lots of publishers to support too, with minimal material outlay.

The pdf price is a nice idea. Affordable and all. Let's see what Jonathan kicks up content-wise, and we just might get a nice range of submissions from folks. Might even consider spending the couple of hours on some kind of autorun feature and a cover pagelet with IPR contact information and links to the cd/whatever contents. Not that difficult to do and makes for a slick finish.

Hey Jonathan,

If I'm not mistaken, the 'stops' on the passport are (essentially) all commercial entities (say, 'the Forge booth' or 'the Playcollective', etc.)

What about including other organized activities, like the Helping Hand in the endeavour?

Obviously, this suggestion carries with it my implicit willingness to help out.

Cheers,
D

Darcy wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, the 'stops' on the passport are (essentially) all commercial entities (say, 'the Forge booth' or 'the Playcollective', etc.)

What about including other organized activities, like the Helping Hand in the endeavour?

Yeah, I think more non-commercial events are definitely going to be featured more prominently on the passport this year, including the Indie RPG Awards and Luke & Jared's Game Design Seminars and various other things.  Gimmee a week or two to work up a prototype of the passport and then we can shop it around to various interested parties.

Heya, another person to contact would be Jerry Grayson of Khepera Publishing: He and the others in his booth are indie to the core: Self-author/publishers, all. Me and Ewen will be also working the booth selling our not-really-independent game (though we're publishing independently), but we're only like 1/4 of that crew. The rest would totally meet the criteria of the passport, if it goes down this year.

-Andy

Do you need someone to donate blank CDs and 'burn' them with the prizes?  I have a pretty large PDF collection anyway so I could do a lot with out even needing additional files.

Scott

iago wrote:

Darcy wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, the 'stops' on the passport are (essentially) all commercial entities (say, 'the Forge booth' or 'the Playcollective', etc.)

What about including other organized activities, like the Helping Hand in the endeavour?

We did this last year; the Games on Demand area was one of the stops on the passport.  We should definitely want to highlight both commercial AND free/play-oriented independent endeavors with the passport, I would think.

Started putting it together.  I'll have details up next week so we can start signing up booths to participate.

[img]http://plays-well.com/passport.jpg[/img]

Any progress on this?

Let me know how I can help.

-Matt

Sorry, I've been buried in a paper for work that's due June 15th.  And also with doing layout for the ashcan for Brennan's How We Came to Live Here.  After next Monday I should be all over this and we can really get rolling.  Apologies for the delays.