Gen Con 2004–2007 and the Blogging Years

Distant Era returns for individual mini character portrait sessions at Gen Con 2024 (check for the link at the bottom of this post). As the big convention approaches and we prepare for the event, I’ve been looking back on Gen Cons past.

Last week, we went back in time to the earliest Gen Cons I attended in Milwaukee—1999 and 2001. I missed 2002–2003, the last Milwaukee Gen Con and first Indianapolis Gen Con, but have attended every Gen Con from 2004 onward, in a variety of different roles that reflected whatever my focus was at the time.

My first three Gen Cons, I attended as an enthusiast and a fan. After that, I started to get more involved in the convention itself. That’s the focus of this week’s chapter, the era between 2004 and 2007, in the midst of which fell “the blogging years.”

The Rise of Geek Culture and the Gen Con Renaissance

Take yourself on a trip back in time to 2004. It hadn’t even been a year since Return of the King completed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and subsequently took home the Best Picture Oscar a few months before Gen Con. The latest Harry Potter book was The Order of the Phoenix, and the latest film was The Prisoner of Azkaban. X-Men 2 (X2) had come out the year before, and it would be three years before the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with the release of Iron Man. The latest book in A Song of Ice and Fire was A Storm of Swords, and in spite of how incredible those first three books were, and how obsessed I was with them at the time, the world at large wouldn’t know about them for another seven years with the release of the HBO show in 2011.

This is all to say that fantasy, science-fiction, role-playing games, and comic book media were at the very end of their long, nascent stage as cult entertainment enjoyed mostly by geeks. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter—with the help of two Spider-Man films by Sam Raimi and two X-Men films by Bryan Singer, each of which enjoyed a better sequel film—brought quality sf, fantasy, and comic book entertainment into the public eye on a grander scale than ever before. They aren’t alone responsible for what happened. There were many other influences that helped. To my recollection, however, these were the biggest cultural influences that brought fantasy entertainment into every household so that the culture at large began to understood it on a much broader level. What’s more, adults and children could enjoy most of these together. The result was that year after year, more and more fantasy lovers flocked to game fairs, Renaissance festivals, and other gatherings where they could indulge in and celebrate their passion.

Gen Con 2004

By 2004, the “geek culture” fire had sparked, but it hadn’t spread yet. Which meant that Gen Con was big, but you could still get a hotel room for $30/night outside of town without a problem.

Gen Con 2004 was a refreshing experience for me personally. I’d just finished a well-reviewed production of Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene at The Artistic Home in Chicago. I had even smoked a real pipe onstage, which seems strange now. I’d started to think about leaving acting to focus solely on writing. As the touring casts got younger and I got older, I’d given up the road and took on a full-time tech job in 2004. A month after my last Gen Con in 2001, the World Trade Center had fallen. The real world seemed darker and more dangerous than it had in the relatively humdrum ’90s. Within the past year, America had gone to war. I’d finally paid off my debts from a five-hour hospital stay in 2002 and had a consistent income. So going to Gen Con in 2004 felt like a reset, a relief, a place to take a break from worldly worries for a weekend.

In the early 2000s, after the move to Indianapolis, Gen Con offered a pretty swanky experience to the average gamer. Hotels were cheap, downtown parking existed, four-day badges cost under $100, and swag bags overflowed with swag. You’d get dice, even adventures and/or magazines if I remember correctly. The booths at the convention were giving away product—like hardcover D&D books—on the roll of a die or the spin of a wheel.

 Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 had been released within the past year, and D&D had begun a miniatures skirmish game with prepainted plastic miniatures, also useful in D&D games. A friend gave me a pack from the first set as a Christmas present, and once the paychecks from my new job came in, a portion found its way to my miniatures fund.

In fact, my greatest excitement for Gen Con 2004 was the release of HUGE pre-painted plastic D&D miniatures in a set called Giants of Legend. As I explored the convention, I found myself at the D&D Miniatures skirmish tables, playing game after game, making some new friends, and winning new minis to add to my warband with each game.

Gen Con 2004 was perhaps the last year I attended Gen Con strictly as a fan and enthusiast, and I couldn’t have enjoyed it more… except that I wanted to be part of what was going on. Not just a participant but a part of the reason for it, and these feelings began to tug at the corners of my heart like minnows, and as I strolled the aisles, this restlessness stirred within.

Photography in 2004

The Gen Cons between 2004 and 2007 were incidentally my years between slr cameras. Near the end of 2003, I stopped shooting film. I wasn’t sure what this whole digital thing was all about, and I naturally didn’t trust it at first. I wasn’t certain it would deliver the same quality of film—and it didn’t at first. I didn’t bring my old Canon FTb film camera to Gen Con, so I don’t have pictures from Gen Con 2004. Right after the convention, however, I buckled and got a Pentax point-and-shoot digital camera with lots of manual settings, which had been important to me from my time shooting film. I probably thought I could replace my film camera with this, and from 2004 to 2007 I used this camera exclusively. Nevertheless, three years was all it took to make me realize what I missed about shooting with my traditional slr camera.

Here’s a selfie from that first point-and-shoot digital Pentax, taken shortly after Gen Con 2004.

Gen Con 2005–2007: The Blogging Years

In 2005, the Wizards of the Coast forums were looking for participants to blog about Gen Con and share their experiences by reporting on the event.

This was the era of the online community forum, where people with similar interests gathered to post thoughts, questions, and comments on a company’s dedicated forum. For many, this was the place to go back then. Prior to this, D&D writers and editors had been names in the design credits of books or people you may happen upon at a convention—if you made your way to a convention. On the community forums, writers and designers began to join the conversation, connecting with the community online. It was a new kind of interpersonal connection.

As far as social media went, MySpace had begun to take off, but Twitter had yet to hit the scene and Facebook hadn’t been released to the public at large. The forums were a place where everyone with a similar interest could connect.

I volunteered as a community blogger for WotC at Gen Con, and for three years I reported on my experience at the convention as “Drammattex’s Photo Blog.” That blog no longer exists. Well, mostly. I had the foresight to save the 2007 blog. Yet, I do have the photos from all three years of blogging for Wizards of the Coast, some of which I’ll share below.

Gen Con 2005

Euro-style games like The Settlers of Catan had galvanized the tabletop board game industry, and now companies like Days of Wonder were making exquisite, beautifully produced games like Shadows Over Camelot, introducing many of us to cooperative board games.

Here are some selections from the 2005 blog.

Gen Con 2006

Perhaps the coolest thing to happen at Gen Con 2006 was that my longtime college gaming buddy Scott Scribner won the US National Settlers of Catan Championship. They later flew him to Germany to compete at Essen. This was only the first time Scott would be the US National Champion, as he won the championship in a later year as well.

Here are some selections from the 2006 blog.

Gen Con 2007

One of the most significant events at Gen Con 2007 was the surprising announcement that Dungeons & Dragons was getting a fourth edition. This was my final year as a community blogger, though I can’t remember why; I think the community reporting went away the following year, perhaps with the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, three technologies that essentially made a community reporter irrelevant. Unlike with 2005 and 2006, I do have a record of the 2007 community blog, and I’ll post the first entry below.

Here are some photo selections from my 2007 Gen Con Photo Blog.

The Blog

So what did I actually write in my Gen Con blog? Here’s an excerpt from the first entry of the one extant blog I have, from 2007:

The problem is, there’s too much to do. As usual.

If you haven’t been to Gen Con before, it’s a little bit Disneyland and a little bit Christmas. Even the most jaded of us gamers can’t help it. We stream into that exhibit hall at 10 A.M. like a dam that’s sprung a leak. 

When they open for the first time, the doors to the exhibit hall are picture frames allowing us only glimpses at the world beyond their borders. We can see a little: sellers and demonstrators making last minute adjustments to their stores – bright colors on new, never before seen products; the base of some massive display looming high overhead somewhere beyond the doors… it’s all promise at this point, all potential energy. 

And then we’re in. 

I can only describe it as the way I used to feel when my cousin Dave used to visit. At eight, I was (supposedly) too young to own my own D&D set (“Ages 10 and up!”), but Dave had one. And when Dave’s family drove down from Naperville to Pinkney, MI, or Bettendorf, IA, or Enon, OH, or wherever the Air Force had put us at the time, I knew that adventure was going to follow. 

I would jump up and down from the second their van turned the corner onto our street, and I didn’t stop jumping until I had my character sheet in one hand, dice in the other. Something was going to happen.
Dave always got out of the van, smiled this devilish grin and said “Oh, just wait ’till you see what I’ve got planned. You’re gonna be in so much trouble.”
I couldn’t fraking wait. 

That’s what Gen Con is like on the first day. 
It’s just like that. That childlike excitement comes back from wherever you (forgot you) ditched it, and you take to the hall like a mad pack of rats on free cheese day (they must have at least one day like that in their lives). 

Entering the convention hall is like standing in line for the most anticipated movie of the summer on opening night: when the cinema employees finally open those doors for the film, everybody does that jog-walk into the theater to grab that prized middle seat in their favorite section. 

That’s opening day at Gen Con. The WotC booth gets flooded right away. Chunks of the crowd break off and fly to WizKids and Mayfair and Giant in the Playground, each chunk absolutely 100% certain that everybody else waiting outside the doors is going to the exact same destination. So you’ve gotta jog-walk, man. It’s the only way to beat the rush. 
It’s funny. And nobody can resist it. The Gen Con spirit overcomes even the scroogiest of us. 

It’s hard not to burst in through the doors. It’s hard not to turn your head in every direction at once. It’s a little bit like walking through the House on the Rock in Wisconsin which, if you haven’t seen that, is kind of like watching Moulin Rouge at the IMAX, which if you haven’t seen that, is something like watching the grand finale of fireworks on the 4th of July, which if you haven’t seen that means you need to get yourself down to Gen Con and see what I’m talking about. 

This is what I look forward to tomorrow. We all get to be kids again. We all get to play. For four whole days, we get to forget everything else and we get to play.

The community blogs stopped as far as I know. In the early ’00s, I had a great time reporting for the Wizards of the Coast community forums, and writing the blog gave me a means to be involved in some small way with the convention and to talk to people I might not otherwise have approached. I wanted to be even more involved in the game industry, and the following years would provide those opportunities. But that is another story that will be told another time.

Distant Era at Gen Con 2024

Distant Era will be at Gen Con 2024, photographing individual subjects in twenty-minute mini sessions as a convention special.

If you’re going to be at Gen Con and you’d like to be photographed in your favorite cosplay (or if you just want a headshot), please let me know here.

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