ImagiCon Review

As I men­tioned last week, Imagi­Con was my first real con­ven­tion.  The turnout was dis­ap­point­ing, with high esti­mates being around a thou­sand vis­i­tors.  The event suf­fered from disorganization,but while I was there, I got the scoop about the cur­rent Birm­ing­ham con­ven­tion scene, and that shed some light on the sit­u­a­tion.  Birmingham’s big con­ven­tion last year, Omega­Con, had around 3000 vis­i­tors.  They also went around $60,000 in the red because they bit off more than they could chew.  Con­se­quently, Omega­Con did not return this year.  Around 5 months ago, some peo­ple got together and decided that they would do what it took to make sure Birm­ing­ham still had a con­ven­tion this year.

Despite hav­ing only 5 months to plan, the staff at Imagi­con pulled off an event that I highly enjoyed.  The first thing Fri­day, I saw one of my old gam­ing bud­dies head­ing in the front door.  We hugged and headed in and were greeted by an impres­sive Cap­tain Jack Spar­row, who invited us to give blood.  Our first order of busi­ness was to find out when Chris would be DMing.  The gam­ing room was empty, so we wan­dered around, get­ting a feel for the lay­out.  I was thrilled to see an old friend, J.F. Lewis, in the main hall.  He was eat­ing Sub­way and prepar­ing to sell his newly pub­lished vam­pire nov­els, Staked and Revamped.  Soon there­after, Shad­owhelm also found me.  I was thrilled, and imme­di­ately com­fort­able, being amongst my people.

There were movies being shown on two screens all day and night.  There were show­ings of Seren­ity, Dr. Horrible’s Sing A Long Blog, some MST3K, indi­vid­ual favorite episodes of shows, some hor­ror movies, and some anime.   It was nice to go and just relax in the quiet rooms after run­ning around in cir­cles.  There was 24 hour gam­ing, too, in the­ory at least.  The poor turnout meant that the real gam­ing actu­ally didn’t get going until around noon on Saturday. The dealer’s room was also a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment to me.  I had expec­ta­tions of any­thing I could pos­si­bly want for a gamer, a SciFi geek, or an anime addict, but mostly there were tee shirts and Star Wars toys. I had been plan­ning on sup­port­ing my dice habit, but no dice ven­dors were to be found. Alas, no cool new dice bag for the hubby, or nifty glit­tery new Game­Science dice for me.

On Sat­ur­day, Chris finally did get his game up and run­ning  and set­tled into some hours of gam­ing, even intro­duc­ing a newby to GURPS.  Most of the tables in the gam­ing room that were filled had peo­ple play­ing 4.0 D&D.  Mean­while, there were pan­els on mul­ti­ple geeky issues, includ­ing writ­ing, pub­lish­ing, para­nor­mal activ­ity, cos­tum­ing, and hard sci­ence.  This is where I per­son­ally had the most fun, and I intend to write later on about some of what I learned in var­i­ous pan­els.  I won’t overdo my thoughts on those mini-seminars, but they made the whole con­ven­tion in my opin­ion.  I def­i­nitely remem­bered how much I enjoy soak­ing up new infor­ma­tion.  Armed with my pretty green jour­nal, I flew from class to class, stop­ping only to make sure the kids (large and small) were hav­ing fun.

Actu­ally, the children’s track was the most sorely lack­ing area.  My chil­dren had a lot of fun, but mostly because they made their own, and I had thought to pack them goody bags to enter­tain them.  The gam­ing room being half-populated was a bless­ing for us, as my two boys were set up in a table by them­selves beside Daddy’s GURPS game.  The kids’ track wasn’t entirely neglected, but there were some glar­ing omis­sions.  In Atlanta, Drag­onCon offers day­care for the price of an extra ticket.  That would have been ideal. The McWane Cen­ter, just down the street, always makes a pres­ence at any event there might be chil­dren in Birm­ing­ham, but had no rep­re­sen­ta­tion at this con­ven­tion. They would have fit in per­fectly, too.  There was a magi­cian who put on a few acts and strolled around the grounds hand­ing out bal­loon hats and ani­mals, but that was about it, except for a room filled with col­or­ing books and a few tired look­ing teenagers try­ing to think of ways to enter­tain chil­dren by them­selves.  Sun­day was actu­ally the best day for the kid’s track, with a Jedi Acad­emy and jiu jitzu demon­stra­tions, which were incor­rectly labeled nin­jitzu in the pro­gram.  Unfor­tu­nately, by Sun­day, all the adult attrac­tions had dried up, and only the ven­dors remained, try­ing to squeeze the dwin­dling crowds for every shiny penny they were worth.

All in all, this con­ven­tion vir­gin had a won­der­ful time.  There were def­i­nite areas that needed improve­ments, but I’m will­ing to cut the staff of Imagi­Con some slack.  They only had 5 months to pre­pare, and appar­ently a shoe-string bud­get.  Next year, they have so much to build on and learn from, that I would whole­heart­edly rec­om­mend peo­ple look into attend­ing next year’s Imagi­Con.  I already have been brain­storm­ing for ways they could improve, which shows that they sparked some pas­sion in me. I saw so much poten­tial that a lit­tle cre­ativ­ity, dis­ci­pline and orga­ni­za­tion could have helped, that I’m seri­ously already look­ing into ways to par­tic­i­pate myself next year.