Updated Sept 5th, 2010 at 7:02pm – thanks to all of you who have contributed to the discussion!

It’s the Sunday morning of Dragon*Con 2010 and I’m spending my morning recuperating from having walked 5 or 6 miles around the East Coast’s fan-driven answer to Comic-Con yesterday. I woke up thinking about how much my beloved nerdfest has changed over the past five years and thought that I’d jot down some notes for later discussions with my friends who are also attending this year.

Truth is, I suppose the old girl has been changing ever since I first started going in the late 1980s, but lately it’s becoming hard to see what first made me fall in love with Dragon*Con. During a stopover at Trader Vic’s I participated in an impromptu panel called “Dragon*Con Might Just Suck” regarding how this year’s convention has been particularly lackluster. My fellow panelists Carl, Joseph and Timmy made some very good points and I’m distilling that conversation into the following four points:

• Invasion by Non-Fans
• Economy & Events
• Social Networks
• Scale
• Age

Before I elaborate on what the ‘con has become, let me say that I’ve come to know a lot of the people who volunteer at the convention. These people have become my friends and without them the event would collapse under its own weight. I’ve known the convention’s Director, Pat Henry, since the mid 1980s (it was at Pat’s comic book shop that I found the contest flier for the Batman competition that I won back in 1988) and I have nothing untoward to say about him or the Dragon*Con staff. They all bust their asses to make this thing happen and I appreciate it. What follows is simply an evaluation of the experience of the event from a long-time attendee’s perspective.

Invasion by Non-Fans

Is the “social order” of the convention in jeopardy?

The “invasion” of the convention by non-fans is the most obvious challenge the event is facing and it has drastically diminished the quality of my own experiences there. The thing that made Dragon*Con so special, that makes any science fiction/fantasy convention so special, is that the rest of the “real” world goes away for a weekend; you’re in a safe habitat, surrounded by your fellow Fans. Even if you’re not fans of the same comicbook/movie/book/game/etc, there’s still a very special language that all true nerds share, be they gamer, costumer, Trekkie, comicbook geek, horror fan, etc, etc

Over the last five years the rest of Atlanta (the non-fan element) has discovered that the best party of Labor Day weekend is at Dragon*Con and as a result they’ve invaded the convention in sufficiently large numbers as to make the costume-to-person ratio ridiculously low. I can’t tell you how many young punks and urban hipsters I saw running around like they were in Disneyland, eyes agog, drinks in hand. Joseph remarked that: “At least 50% of the people I see here at DragonCon dont even have a badge.”

Bingo.

It looked like most of East Atlanta Village had crashed the party (I personally knew more than 10 people who were there without badges). Added to the mix were a bunch of drunken football fans who were in town to see the game between LSU and North Carolina… Dragon*Con costumers became playthings for them. I was personally accosted by a drunken brunette who kept grabbing at my costumed face and yelling farm-bred hoots which must pass for verbal communication at her chosen “college”.

So how did we get here?

In the end, regardless of what brought them to Dragon*Con, non-fans don’t understand or appreciate what really happens at the convention. They have no understanding of the programming that occurs in the bowels of the Hyatt. They don’t know what filking is. They don’t know about The Masquerade. They don’t know who Dawn is, or of the subtle irony that her talented creator is an overweight male version of his own goddess character. They don’t know about Pie. They haven’t watched Trek fandom wane as the Star Wars fandom grew, or that the steampunk movement is beginning to overshadow both of those franchises. These “outsiders” have no idea that the dealer’s room exists or why it is made of awesome for so many fans.

The gatecrashers just come to drink and gawk and enjoy “Nerdi Gras”.

With as many badgeless attendees as I encountered yesterday I can’t help but think that Dragon*Con (the company) might be experiencing a sag in revenue this year, which takes me to our next point….

Economy & Events

Fans face many events with limited resources

While queuing up for this year’s parade it was quite apparent that there was a significantly-reduced turnout for the 501st, the Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars. The reason for this was that the Lucasfilm-sponsored convention called Celebration was held in Orlando, Florida, two weeks prior to Dragon*Con, shredding the bankroll of a good many Star Wars fans.

Our friend Bob, known in Star Wars circles as Vader Painter, told me that like many of his fellow Star Wars fans his Dragon*Con budget for this year had been made razor thin in the wake of Star Wars Celebration, and that he wasn’t alone in that. You needn’t be a financial genius to realize that the fragile personal economies of many of our hardcore sci-fi/fantasy fans continue to suffer in this relentless recession.

And like Celebration, there are other events that clamor for the discretionary dollars of fandom: gaming conventions, renaissance festivals, comic book conventions, animation conventions, pirate festivals (I host one called PiratePalooza every year and recently started up Cardboard*Con this past March), toy fairs, horror conventions, the list goes on and on… and a dollar only stretches so far.

Social Networks

Social networks are ruling our actions

Carl and Foe asserted that Social Networks, specifically Facebook, have played a role in diminishing the excitement of the convention. Prior to Facebook our convention friends’ lives remained a bit of a mystery to us and so part of the fun of ‘con would be spent catching up on what had changed in their lives since the year before. Familiarity via Facebook isn’t necessarily breeding contempt, but it is certainly robbing us of the need for face-to-face communication and that’s at least worth a smack on the forehead.

Maybe we’ve seen so much of each other online that we have no patience left for each other in person?

To that point, Timmy pointed out that a lot of people have their noses buried in their smartphones now, walking past super heroes and vikings and cardboard troopers so that they can post things on their friends’ walls or send a text message. My friend Juliana railed at fellow fans who were live-tweeting a panel, their faces buried in their screens, instead of being there in the moment to listen to the actors discuss the show. It’s like going to a concert and then watching the video screen the entire time.

That’s how addicted to our social networks we’ve become… and I’m as guilty as the next person in this regard.

I suppose our new reality is unavoidably augmented these days?

Scale

Remember when you were a teenager? Transitions can be ugly.

As Joseph said, “Dragon*Con is a large con that’s operated as if it’s a small con.”

Exactly.

If you get to thinking about it, it’s a miracle that Dragon*Con has been able to handle 30,000+ people per day without a major incident during this decade’s growth spurt. This unlauded success required boatloads of dedication and energy from a volunteer workforce. Now increase the size of the crowd you’re trying to control and try to anticipate the problems that you’re going to encounter. With a volunteer staff numbering less than 200 and a guesstimated 2010 crowd size of well over 50,000 people you’re looking at an assignment of at least 250 attendees to every volunteer (some of whom grab their staff badges and then go AWOL).

[NOTE this article has attracted a lot of conversation today and several people who work on staff were kind enough to post replies and send messages correcting my understanding of staffing numbers cited in the previous paragraph. The main point is that my numbers were far too low in regard to the number of people working staff. BrundelFly commented that "I’m a 7th year staffer at D*Con, and it’s important to know that there is significantly more than 200 folks on staff. 200 individuals compose the volunteer staff of our technical operations department alone. In total there’s over 1,250 folks on staff. I know this still might seem low, but a 1/50 ratio is MUCh better than a 1/1000!". So, my apologies to the staff for my ignorance (I blame the fatigue I was experiencing from the previous day of tromping through hotels in cardboard armor). My suggestion to folks just arriving to this conversation is to make sure to read the comments for more viewpoints on this topic.... now back to the article...]

Looking westward, a question hangs heavy in the air: “When will Dragon*Con put on her big girl panties?”

When will the convention ramp up their staffing and hire professionals to operate the ticket lines? When will it hire crowd control experts and maximize the experience for its patrons. Notice that I’m not asking IF, I’m asking WHEN. This would seem to be the only logical step an event of this size could make to wrest control back from the situation its in.

The question is whether the con should, as my friend Tony suggested, move the blasted thing to the Georgia World Congress Center, away from the lookie-loos and gate crashers. This scenario would put the con into an entry-controlled space where only badgeholders would be allowed, but in the process it would change diminish the party atmosphere that the convention has enjoyed for the past decade, forcing many mobility-impaired fans to endure countless shuttle trips or long walks between the hotels and the convention spaces. It’s certainly not a favored option, and it smacks too much of Comic-Con which is the soulless, Hollywood-shilling black sheep cousin of Dragon*Con.

Wouldn’t it be a better experience to stay put and identify then resolve the problems experienced this year? (maybe we could ask the entire floor of gamers to strategize the potential issues the con might face, from actresses storming out of panels to attendees falling off of balconies, to Mecha-Godzilla eating the Hyatt)

I don’t know if a paid army will fight with the heart of a volunteer army, but this change does seem inevitable.

Age

Been there, done that

We humans are funny beasties: without change we get bored, with too much change we’re beset by nostalgia.

I’ve been going to science fiction conventions since the mid 1980s (shout out to DixieTrek!) and in that time I’ve witnessed and participated in more crazy and wonderfully hysterical antics than I could ever hope to remember or set down to paper. I’ve been astonished at people’s costuming creativity, been blown away by the unexpected (like the animated film AKIRA in its original Japanese, sans English subtitles), reduced to tears of laughter by the inventive heckling that used to happen in the Masquerade, delighted by late night video shows and unexpected role playing situations. Over the years I’ve met so many bright and shiny minds and made so many new and creative friends.

This year was different.  I didn’t have a “zoo crew” to hang out with and that was good, I needed a break and a chance to stand back and experience the convention on my own again. My first thought going into this year’s convention was that I was becoming like the character Louis in Interview with the Vampire; tired of life, tired of Dragon*Con. But, even with the systemic problems the convention is experiencing, and my feeling that there’s nothing new under the ‘Con, in the clear light of day I remembered that the experience of Dragon*Con isn’t made up of the events or the guests or the hotels, but of the people who are there.

The best memories of the convention are the ones that you make with your friends.
Now let’s get out there and be weird.

…

Let’s face it, Facebook, you have managed to make me look like a fool twice this week and while that’s not terribly difficult to do, I’m getting tired of it. This time around I find out that you fulfilled my wish for a way to view status updates only. No application updates, no notes, no videos, no links to helpful articles like this one, just plain old status updates. So where did you put this fantastic new Feed View? Why, down at the bottom of my list of Feed Views. While this is probably not a big deal for most of your users, it’s a really big deal for me because I subdivide all of my users into different categories to help me wade through them a bit better. So, let’s see what we have to in order to see the Status Updates view as our default page view. (Thanks to Amber Ward and her list of friends for this tip)

Step One
Look at the bottom of list of Feed Views for the word “more” and click it.

Step Two
Locate the Feed View titled “Status Updates”.

Step Three
Move your mouse to the right hand side of the “Status Updates” Feed View item, then click and drag it ALL the way up to the top of the list, letting go of it at the very top.

Step Four
Now that the item is at the top of your Feeds List, CLICK IT!!

Step Five
Celebrate! Now you can see all of your friends’ status updates without seeing all the additional blather that they or their apps may be posting.

Mind you, by following these instructions and never looking back you many never run across good information like THIS ARTICLE again in your lifetime, so be sure to use the News Feed and Live Feed views from time to time to get a taste of what your friends are yapping about this week…. you never know what those crazy friends might be up to!!

Happy Facebooking!

Jeepers, people. Has Facebook gone wanky (again) or what? Don’t worry though, it’s okay, I have a fix so that your Live Feed works nearly like it did before the weekend of the Great Facebook Flop of Late 2009…… but before I get to the fix let me first mention that I found these instructions on Facebook… and of all people, it was sitting up on the wall of our friend Hollis Gillespie, a well known potty mouthed Atlanta author with movie deals and book deals coming out her ears. While I admire and respect Hollis’ creative skills it galled me that I, a graduate of Georgia Tech with a double-secret minor in computer technology, had to rely on a woman whose cellphone is held together by rubberbands (no offense Hollis).

So the fix.

If you’re not already there, go to your Live Feed. If you’re on your News Feed you’ll see the link above the box where you can type your status update.

Once there, scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen until you see a bar which states “Older Posts” on the left and “Edit Options” on the right. (This is just above the site’s footer)

Click on “Edit Options” until a dialog box pops up featuring the “fine controls” for how you view your friends’ feeds. Note the lower area entitled “Number of Friends”. There is a text entry field located here which allows you to tweak the number of users that will be screened for appearance on your Live Feed.

For reasons unexplained this number is set at 250. If you have over 250 friends this is a problem… so change that number to something higher. Once finished, click the “save” button in the lower right hand side of that pop-up box and it will disappear, hopefully taking your new higher limit back to headquarters and restoring some normalcy to your friend stalking addiction.

Happy Facebooking!