Gencon 2008

On Thursday I took a road trip to Indianapolis Indiana with some friends for the Gencon 2008 convention. Gencon is one of the largest gaming conventions in the country. Fans of collectible card games, role playing games, miniature games and board games all find plenty to do at the con.

The pictures are here.

Back in my younger days, Dave and I would head up to Gencon when it was in Milwaukee Wisconsin. We would play RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons twelve or more hours a day. I look back on it sometimes and just shake my head. Look, I was young and experimenting. If I ever decide to run for public office, I'll probably have to answer if I've ever rolled a twenty sided die. Perhaps someone will dig up one of my old character sheets and ask if I ever used the aliases Jack Brash or Ho Bo.

Okay, enough for the jaunt down memory lane. I didn't play any games at this Gencon. I hung around with my friends consuming some adult beverages. I also took in some independent films showing at the convention.

The first film was A Great Disturbance, a mocumentary about four young men attending Celebrations III, a Star Wars convention that was held in 2005. The movie was laugh out loud funny. They did a great job of presenting these four over the top star wars fans. After the screening, some of the cast and crew answered questions. They talked about how they get such a different reaction at different showings. At Gencon, a lot of the viewers were Star Wars fans who "got" a lot of the genre specific humor. They told us that at the Indianapolis Film Festival, many of the viewers didn't have the same background and didn't find the same humor. I ended up with a free copy of the movie.

The second film was called Captain Blasto, a film by the makers of A Great Disturbance. They are distributing Captain Blasto as webisodes and they can be viewed here. I enjoyed Captain Blasto, it was a clever film. The entire budget for the film was $7,000. To put that in perspective, at one of the independent film festivals they attended the next cheapest movie had a budget of $130,000.

The final film that I saw was named Gamers. This was not made by the same people as the previous two films. Gamers was a comedy about a group of DND players on the cusp of breaking the record for playing the longest ongoing game. It was a pretty ridiculous, but funny movie. While A Great Disturbance and Captain Blasto are family friendly, Gamers is definitely not.