Reviews: You'd Think We'd Be Better At This Sort of Thing

This will have to be an abridged review; it's been a busy and distracting day. You see, today is a special annual event celebrated by cultural subgroups. It's a holiday of sorts; albeit an obscure one.

I'm speaking, of course, about the day Gen Con events are available to order. What did you think I meant?

As holidays go, though, this is not the most fun of events. To get registered for Gen Con...actually, I'll start at the beginning. Gen Con is the annual convention for role-playing games, miniature games, and assorted other games. It's geek's paradise, at least in theory. Getting events for it, however, is hell.

Imagine 30,000 people desperately trying to go online to the same website in order to get some of the most popular events, many of which having only 4-6 openings. The servers die early and often. This year, it took me 2 1/2 hours, and of course my favorite events were already filled. Now, this was partially my fault. The events almost never become available on a weekend, so I was off my usual plan, and the stress of this year made me sloppy and careless.

For example, on a good year, my plan for getting events is: download the schedule days early, go over it with a fine-tooth comb, create a file listing my desired events and sorted by date and identification number, go on the website very early, log in, and get as far into registration as they'll allow. If possible, even list all the events I want on the site and paste them into the order form.

This year, my plan was: realize it was event day about 2 this afternoon, panic, take an hour logging in while trying to download the events list from an equally busy folder, fumble through it to find enough events I'm interested in, and try to get them purchased. Often, I fail. But that's pretty standard; nobody gets some of the really tough ones. But I ended up missing a few of my standbys.

And, so, my review of Gencon's events system is a solid C-. It's not lower for two reasons. First, there aren't really fair ways to give four tickets out to ten thousand people, and they're not responsible for making these events, just organizing them. And secondly, we're gamers. This is a system to be mastered. It's a game. It has winners, losers, and rewards for the former. It's not their fault I forgot the rules this time. Nonetheless, all of this just made my screenplay writing even farther behind, and for that they must pay.