Gencon Oz is now only three sleeps away (well, four if you’re like me and not starting until Friday).\u00c2\u00a0 So far my experience has been less than stellar. It’s like they don’t actually want me to come. Nevertheless, I aim to go to Brisbane this weekend and have an awesome time.<\/p>\n
The website’s a pain in the bum. Finding the list of events is an exercise in frustration, and the schedule is far less complete than it needs to be. At last check (I registered before the cut-off date and then left it all alone), there was no information on any screenings other than the Dragonlance movie<\/a> (which I can no longer find), and nothing on meeting any of the celebrities<\/a> other than Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis.<\/p>\n And don’t get me started on the schedule structure. Apparently, events are allowed to start and finish at any time. That’s awesome if I only want to do one or two things each day, but how the hell am I going to pack my day out with as much gaming goodness, get a lunch break, and make sure that there’s no overlap with my next event? Some events are three hours long, some are four. Some start at 12, some at 1pm.<\/p>\n The registration process was somewhat painful as well. Due to the seriously poor structure of the schedule, one has to hunt through pages and pages of event descriptions, sift through duplicates, and find the event code that matches the event to the session.<\/p>\n Now obviously, the Gencon software is more complicated and feature rich than the one I wrote for SydCon<\/a> and Eyecon<\/a>, but the key to any strong scheduling platform is discipline by the administrator. If you put constraints on the system, things run smoother and you can assess the need to bend the rules on a case-by-case basis.<\/p>\n All that being said, I’m still excited that Gencon is going ahead. I mean, this is Gencon<\/em>, the mecca of roleplaying conventions. I’m keen to hang out with gamers I haven’t played with before, to hear the thoughts of big names in gaming, sci-fi, TV and movies. Professionally, I’m interested to see how big cons are run, and to see if there’s anything to bring back to Sydney.<\/p>\n Most of all, I want to play games, surrounded by hundreds of other people with the same hobby in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gencon Oz is now only three sleeps away (well, four if you’re like me and not starting until Friday).\u00c2\u00a0 So far my experience has been less than stellar. It’s like they don’t actually want me to come. Nevertheless, I aim to go to Brisbane this weekend and have an awesome time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[7],"tags":[12],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p149Qe-7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.daedalist.com\/conjunction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}