This past weekend was the four-day gaming extravaganza of Gen Con. For the first time since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, my work was in attendance. For the first time in even longer, I was part of the Dire Wolf Digital team sent to staff our booth and meet with industry partners.
It was a fun but very exhausting event. That's true of Gen Con even under normal conditions, and despite what some people may think, things really aren't "back to normal" just yet. Proof of vaccination and mandatory face masks throughout the convention center were part of this year's strategy to keep this event from being a super-spreader... and while I'm glad the organizers chose caution, it did increase the "degree of difficulty" for Gen Con.
After nearly two-and-a-half years of working from home, it had certainly become easy to take for granted the benefits of that situation. Plenty of people have kept on going to their work, including retail and restaurant workers who have often been mentioned in public debate. "No one wants to work," some have groused, with very little concept of what such work actually entails. I would have thought myself more informed, more sympathetic... but until I spent four days shouting over the normal convention ruckus and the muffling effects of a face mask too? It was pretty abstract.
Gen Con was a lot of fun, and the new games we were showing there seemed to go over really well. I brought back a load of games I scooped up from the show floor, finally got to put some faces (or at least, eyeballs above a face mask) to a number of people I've been emailing for months and years), and got a pleasant reminder that people really like what we do.
And also, I have almost no voice right now, my sleep schedule is wrecked, and my feet still ache. But hey, all things considered, I feel quite fortunate.
No comments:
Post a Comment