This past week I attended Gen Con Indy. It is a large gaming convention with over 5,500 scheduled events.

:: WEDNESDAY

Right away my buddy and I noticed the time change. Every year before this one Indianapolis decided not to participate in Daylight Savings Time. My buddy Captain Squash decided he had to see a baseball game and asked me to drop him off at Victory Field as soon as we arrived downtown. Whatever! I navigated the one-way streets to our hotel, the Radisson.

Our hotel room was nice. It had a nice view of the War Memorial. The Rock Bottom, Qdoba, Penn Station and Hard Rock restaurants were all nearby. It was a short walk to the convention center. Unfortunately, it was not attached to the center by skywalk. But the weather cooperated and was nice most all week.

We made our way to the Third Annual Gen Con Forum Stink, a gathering of regulars who frequent the Gen Con online community forum. When we arrived they gave us a bag of swag — free promotional items and other stuff.

They had a passport game as an icebreaker. They had several categories such as “Veteran Stinker”, “Attended 10+ Gen Cons” and “Played True Dungeon”. When you found a forumite that matched a category you could ask them to place a sticker in your book. I met several new folks this way including LadyFlame from nearby Belleville. There were familiar faces there, too. I saw Solitude, Mike B, foXXtail, Jirel and Kahvi. I also met a fella from my hometown of Centralia! He is two years younger than me. It has been many years but I remember we were on the same JETS team in high school. Of all the places to run into a fellow Orphan, I ran into him at Gen Con!

They gave out ribbons this year that attached to the convention badge. I know that other conventions such as SIGGRAPH did this, too. The ribbons helped identify forum members throughout the rest of the week.

We spotted Tommy Tallarico wandering around the registration area after we left the Stink. He was polite and chatted with us about his G4 TV show and game compositions. He even posed for a photo with Captain Squash. He told us to see him in the Video Games Live event.

After a short phone call we ended up having dinner with John Bancroft, the gaming coordinator for Archon. We talked at Archon and some interesting gaming talk. John mentioned that the Gen Con folks recently announced that the Indy show will have 47,000 more square feet of exhibit space next year. He also mentioned that Gen Con SoCal show will be moving to the Los Angeles Convention Center in 2007. That is the same location as the old E3. Word is that since E3 announced its downsizing, Gen Con is attempting to attract a number of video game companies to its exhibitor hall. Speaking of gaming rumors, there is buzz that Wizards of the Coast may be working on a 4th edition of Dungeon & Dragons. It focuses more on miniatures and may be released as early as late 2007.

We left John and crew to go to the RAM to pick up a mug I had pre-ordered. We ran into more forum folks who were there for a post-Stink dinner. Captain Squash and I found an empty table and relaxed a little bit before heading back to the hotel for the night.

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