Okay, despite the title of this post, it's not really about a con game, in the usual sense of confidence game, but rather about a game convention, so... I guess a game con. Obviously I called the post "Con Game" for the play on words, but while maybe it's a bit of a stretch I think it can be justified with the explanation that it's (at least in part) about games discussed at the convention, or possibly about the act of attending conventions contextualized as a game, and also I am very bad at titles.

Before I continue into the meat of the post, however, once again it's been way too long since I've actually put up a new article, and usually I spend some time at the beginning of the post apologizing for that fact and promising there will be new articles soon. I recognize that that may get tiresome and is kind of pointless, however, so I won't do that this time. I still feel the irresistible urge to include such an apology in the post, but this time I'll save it till the end of the post. Meanwhile, of course, this paragraph explaining that I will not be including the apology at the beginning of the post takes up at least as much space as the apology itself would have, rendering this entire exercise completely counterproductive.

So, anyway, I just got back from Gen Con. And when I say I just got back, I mean about a day and a half before this blog post went live, but of course I didn't write the post immediately upon getting home. For those unfamiliar with Gen Con, it's a big annual tabletop gaming convention that takes place in the United States, in the Midwestern state of Indiana. I've attended Gen Con every year since 2021 (and sporadically before that), and in both 2023 and 2024 I wrote blog posts about my experiences at the convention^[1]. So I figured this year I'd once again write a blog post about my time at Gen Con, more out of tradition than because it's really directly relevant to the Wongery.

(I mean, I guess it's not entirely irrelevant to the Wongery. Actually, despite my failure to get much done on it lately that's apparent to the viewer, the Wongery is a big enough part of my life that almost everything I do could be said to be relevant to it in some way or another. And in fact I can think of several ways in which what I did at Gen Con this year will or at least potentially could affect or facilitate my work on the Wongery. But I won't draw the connections explicitly in this blog post; I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.)

I will not, of course, give a play-by-play of everything I did at Gen Con. I'll only give a very broad overview and maybe mention a few highlights. I will say that one thing I did at Gen Con was spend way too much money... but I do that every year. Also, as happens every year, I kind of overstuffed my convention schedule with panels and workshops, to the extent that I left myself very little time to actually look around the exhibit hall floor, but I still managed to visit every booth in the exhibit hall, albeit some more briefly than I perhaps otherwise would have.

Last year I spent rather a disproportionate amount of time at seminars associated with the Gen Con Writers' Symposium, despite not being and having little prospect of ever being a professional writer. (I have had aspirations of being a professional writer in the past, and I guess possibly I sort of still do, but realistically it's never going to happen.) This year, however, I did not attend any Writers' Symposium seminars, not because I am no longer interested in writing nor even because none of the seminars interested me but just because... well, I guess just because it happened that none of their seminars this year interested me more than some other event occurring at the same time. There are always hard choices to be made at Gen Con, multiple events both or all of which that I want to go to but cannot because they are happening at the same time and I am unfortunately incapable of multilocation. And this time I guess it just happened that no Writers' Symposium events made the cut. That may not be the case next year.

I did, however, attend several events put on by the Gen Con Puppetry Program, which was not the case last year, not because I wasn't interested in puppets last year but, well, I guess for basically the same reason I didn't attend any Writers' Symposium events this year. As a matter of fact, I attended a total of—let's see—seven and a half hours of Puppetry Program programming, and got to meet and interact directly (albeit briefly) with professional puppeteers with impressive credits including Stacey Gordon, Bakari Prigg, Michael Schupbach, and Brandon Smith.

I did not, as it happens, attend these Puppetry Program workshops just for fun—although they were fun, and I recommend them to any Gen Con attendees who have even a passing interest in puppets—; I do have some puppet-related plans I wanted to further, inspired at least in large part by Puppetry Program events I attended at Gen Con in previous years^[2]. These plans are not directly related to the Wongery, however, so I will not expand on them here.

In commemmoration of its fiftieth anniversary, the game company Chaosium had a relatively large presence at Gen Con this year, which I suppose is at least tangentially relevant to the Wongery in that Chaosium's game system, Basic Roleplaying, is one of the seven systems initially represented in the Wongery's RPG space. (Although of course currently there's no actual BRP content there, because there's no content yet for any of the games in the RPG space; rectifying that fact is, aside from writing more articles, my highest current priority for the Wongery.) I attended several Chaosium-related panels and workshops, and got several Chaosium books signed by Chaosium writers and developers. Again, this was not entirely for fun; some of the workshops (if not so much the book signings) may further other plans I have, which again are not directly related to the Wongery so I won't go into them here.

Yes, the Wongery remains the project dearest to my fickle heart, but it's far from the only thing I'm working on. I have a lot of plans. Plans within plans. So many plans. They're all very stupid plans that will probably never work, but I have a lot of them^[3].

I have to confess that before I left for Gen Con I was having some misgivings about going at all this year. Maybe it's just that I've been under a lot of stress and feeling particularly pessimistic, but despite having enjoyed attending Gen Con on previous years I was doubting that I'd get anything out of it this year, and wondering whether it would be better if I didn't go. Of course, by that time I'd already paid not just for the convention attendance, but for the airfare, hotel room, and rental car, so that was a lot of money I wasn't going to get back if I decided not to go—plus I guess if I hadn't gone I would have regretted not going regardless, because I wouldn't have been sure I wouldn't have enjoyed it (I don't believe I have ever used the expression "FOMO" before, either in speech or in writing, but... well, I guess FOMO is a thing). And of course I did end up going despite my doubts.

Well, suffice to say that I did enjoy my experience at Gen Con and feel that I got a lot out of it and I'm glad I went. In fact, I've come to realize that I... just really enjoy conventions. The creativity and possibilities on display in the exhibit halls, the panels and seminars with more sources of information and inspiration—it's just overall something I find really fun and appealing. (The stop-and-start navigation through slowly shambling seas of fellow convention-goers, maybe not so much, but you can't have everything.) As it is, Gen Con is the only convention I regularly attend; it's my one big annual expenditure—but I'd like to go to more. I can't afford to, but I'd like to.

There are local game conventions in my area (much smaller than Gen Con obviously) that I don't go to even though they would be much cheaper than Gen Con just because I don't want to (and can't really afford to) take the time off work. But there are a lot of other conventions and conferences, game-related and otherwise, that I'd love to go to regularly if I had the time and money^[4]—those local conventions, yes, but also CTN-X, the Game Developers Conference, LightBox Expo, Origins, Produced By, SPIEL, Worldcon, the World Fantasy Convention... I think I'd be going to a lot more conventions if I had the time and money to do so. Which of course I don't, and probably never will.

Anyway, I said I'd put the apology for not having new articles up at the end of this post, so I guess I'll get to that now. I don't blame you if you stop reading here. Heck, I don't blame you if you didn't even make it this far through my turgid prose and stopped reading long before here, although if that's the case you're not reading this sentence either so there really wasn't much point in my addressing it to you. But anyway, yeah, sorry I haven't gotten up any new articles lately, and haven't had much new to show on the Wongery for the last few months. I swear I am working on some new (and some rewritten) articles, but honestly a lot of my time lately has also been going into taking Udemy courses that will in the long run help me make more Wongery content, especially for some of the subspaces—I've been learning about Blender and pixel art and other things I'll be able to use to make content for the Wongery. I've also been working on some projects that I hope will make me some money and possibly in the long run enable me not to have to work my current job, or at least not have to work so many hours at it, thereby freeing up more time for my creative pursuits, including the Wongery. But of course all the time I'm putting in to these things is time I'm not putting into writing Wongery articles, so... yeah.

I am going to make a concerted effort to get at least a few articles up this month, though. Heck, I'm going to try to get at least two new articles up this week. We'll see if it actually happens.

Also sorry I keep bogging down my blog posts with these inane apologies. I know I shouldn't; I know they do more harm than good; but I am unable to stop myself from including them anyway. As I'm pretty sure I've said at least once if not more before, I am a deeply flawed person.