Car News

In the few years following Origins '93 in Fort Worth, GAMA retrenched, abandoning the wandering around the nation each year and settling down in Cincinnati.   This was great for GAMA's bottom line - no more travel expense for the staff, no more "where are they this year?" by the fans, etc.  However, for the advancement of RPG, supposedly what the Game Manufacturers Association is about, it wasn't so good.  In areas where there were major regional cons (Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc.), there wasn't much effect - the big regionals took up the slack.  In other areas, such as the Southwest, it was devastating.  The only con in that region to survive in that period was an anime/cosplay gathering with one small room for RPG, mostly filled by a few computers and unscheduled table-top free play.  Attempts to get a primarily RPG con seemed to flunk out their sophomore or junior year.

 A check of the convention schedule in the monthly CAR-PGa Newsletter ($5.00 per year by e-mail - plug) will show this has changed. The region has a few flourishing cons.  One specifically excludes electronics while including board games and miniature wargames.  Another specializes in 1980s style (but including new games of that type) tabletop.  These are hanging in there and growing slowly, but steadily.  They are all small, around a hundred attending, just attracting from a few counties radius, but they are there.  We could use a big convention like we once had every nine years, or even better, a permanent regional one, but RPG is no longer the dead issue it recently was.

On the other hand, there are no longer the defunct retail malls filled with first-person-shooters competitions first-person-shooting each other while the commercial media calls it role-playing games.

Paul Cardwell