Dragonmeet 2015 Tabletop Gaming Convention

I was at the Dragonmeet tabletop gaming convention in London last weekend. I’ve started mentioning it around my blog, website and podcast that I’ve been interested in tabletop gaming for a long time and I’ve been actively getting into it this year. I’ve also started putting more time into what lessons can be brought from tabletop gaming into other areas, particularly with work in marketing strategy and planning. My talk at the European Planning Conference was about that, I’ve already mentioned I recorded it and I’m going to publish the audio as a podcast episode soon.

I met with several interesting roleplaying game designers, for some reason several of whom were science-fiction themed. I don’t know if it’s my own interest these days leading me towards those, or if there were more science-fiction themed roleplaying games who had stalls.

I attended a few different seminars, including announcements for Pelgrane Press and was particularly interested in finding out about a recently published collection of original story games – that’s a style of games somewhere between a board game and a roleplaying game, where players typically build a story together. It’s called Seven Wonders, an anthology of seven games from different authors. I’m interested because most of the game authors / designers are in large majority women, and because the topics were out of the ordinary fantasy or science-fiction tropes. These games propose questions like what you be ready to sacrifice to protect your family, what happens back at the village when the heroes are gone adventuring, or how dystopian societies come to be. Unfortunately the book was sold out by the afternoon when I thought of buying it, though there will be a new print run soon and I’m looking forward to reading it.

I’ve heard a lot of good feedback and reviews from Sarah Newton’s game called Mindjammer. The game is already published though she is currently running a Kickstarter crowdfunding project to for new adventures to be written within the same science-fiction universe, and there’s also a novel. I just backed the project, for those interested there are several levels of participating where you can save on buying the main book and game at the moment. I talked about the project with Sarah, she has been working on it for several years and hearing the description made me think of Iain M. Banks Culture universe. I’m apparently not the first person to say that, even though Sarah hadn’t read any of those novels when she starting writing Mindjammer. If you enjoy The Culture novels, I’d recommend checking it out.

I also met Carlos of Burning Games who successfully crowdfunded a science-fiction themed roleplaying game called Faith, with the interesting fact that it presents itself like a board game, with a lot of tokens and cards typically not needed in a tabletop roleplaying game. It intends to be a half-way to introduce people to roleplaying games, which is an interesting idea. I also met with Ed of Imagine RPG and talked about his sci-fi game called Era: The Consortium, for which he wrote 500 years of detailed and playable setting history.

There were many people playing and testing all sorts of games. I had the opportunity of trying Microscope, an ‘indie’ game. It’s pretty interesting, though I’d barely call it a game; it is a methodology for narrating periods, events, and scenes in the history of a civilisation (or of whatever you want I guess). There were many interesting ideas I think I can steal for brainstorming sessions and workshops, I bought the pdf and I’m going to study this a little further.

The convention is also an opportunity for game designers to test some game prototypes. I had fun meeting with Henry and trying his wrecking ball game prototype. The principle is simple and a great idea: you have to build a tower with cubes, try to destroy other people’s towers with a wrecking ball or a demolition truck while protecting your own construction. We talked about the best way to balance this kind of game, how much the pieces should weight or what size they should be, etc. I wish Henry luck and success with the next steps, at least it seems like a great idea for a game.

I attended a live recording of the Ken and Robin talk about stuff audio podcast, both of them are quite known and successful writers and game designers, several of the games they worked on were for sale during the event as well.

It was a great day, I was just a little disappointed by the fact that the attendance seemed to be pretty old on and very male skewed. I’m not sure if it’s representative of the event in particular or of hobby gaming in the UK though. Women are typically in minority from what I could see in similar events in France, maybe 25 – 30% women, where in this event there seemed to be like half that many unfortunately. Lastly, it was almost entirely caucasians in attendance. A little too stereotypical, mostly full of aging white dudes…  Even though I believe that hobby games are evolving in a good way, generally growing as a category and becoming mainstream in the past few years, there’s probably still more that can be done to encourage new people to play these kinds of games, including women and other ethnicities.

With my friends at the French tabletop roleplaying podcast Les Voix d’Altaride we are preparing for an episode on the topic of women and roleplaying games (in France / French speaking countries) and have already collected over 300 responses from an online survey to ask people about it, I’m looking forward to analysing the results.

In Prague for the European Planning Conference

I just had a fantastic week attending the 2^nd edition of the European Planning Conference in Prague this week. I was able to arrive a couple of days early and enjoy walking around and soaking in the atmosphere of old Prague earlier this week. The morning I arrived was bright blue skies and cold crisp weather, perfect for wandering and appreciating the architecture. As it started clouding over in the afternoon, I settled in a coffee shop to get some work done, particularly to write my conference talk. I had a few notes and generally knew what I wanted to talk about, but hadn’t properly prepared the work and the presentation just yet.

I met Kristijan who organizes the EPC a couple of years ago while we both worked for Saatchi & Saatchi in Asia. He was based in Vietnam, and I was on a business trip to Ho Chi Minh City, talking to wealthy car enthusiasts for market research purposes. A colleagues told me to get in touch with Kris, who was nice enough to take some time to show me around and sit down for dinner and a few beers while we talked shop. We kept in touch after that, he was about to move back to Macedonia where he’s from and told me at the time that he had a few ideas about organizing an event for planners in Europe. It was brilliant to have that perspective, given I often think of the centre of Europe in London or maybe Paris, and forget about the whole of central and eastern Europe that I don’t know well at all.

I was happy Kris invited me to speak at the conference, it was an enriching and fun two day event, I met fantastic people from all over the old continent: France, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Macedonia, etc. Kris told me the event was only one day long last year; he felt it was very rushed so he thought he’d try spreading it over two days this year. It was brilliant to also meet Jane (pronounced Y-a-nee or something I can’t actually write phonetically), Kris’ new business partner, they are in the process of creating a new agency, we talked about their new plans and I wish them the best in their new venture.

Tom Theys of FCB Global opened the conference with a talk he is testing and preparing for the upcoming Eurobest festival. I’m not going to give too many details before Eurobest, but it’s all about providing experiences and thinking ways to creative advertising and promotional pieces that will have an effect on changing people’s behaviours. This Nivea case study that I hadn’t seen is a great example of the kind of things he talked about:

Varia from Sid Lee in Amsterdam talked next, about the kind immersive and meaningful brand experiences they work on in the agency famously (at least partially) funded by Cirque du Soleil, who know a thing or two about creating memorable shows and experiences, like the Absolut Nights series of branded events for the famous vodka.

We ended the first morning with one of the two more academically inclined talks of the conference, Michael is working on a Phd, had recently interviews international diplomats to learn about their jobs, and studied the origins and principles of diplomacy. He told us of the lessons he drew from the world of international diplomacy and strategic planners could learn from it.

We had two energetic and brilliant talks in the afternoon from Achim Shauerte of BBH London and then Boris Nihom of Achtung! Amsterdam, both with interesting approaches and case studies from their respective agencies with slick, smart and fun presentations. Achim is really sharp, and Boris infectiously passionate. Boris shows us several interesting and practical case studies, like this stroller video. Before that Achim  had told us of the process they went through at BBH to create this pretty bold (and possibly kind of disturbing) advert for Audi:

I’m adding these videos to illustrate a few case studies and ads, though  they don’t do justice to the talks of course, there was more to it than that.

We all went for a nice dinner and beers to a nearby bar and restaurant in the evening to pursue geeky talks about advertising, marketing, branding, and more.

Friday Katharina started the day with a very interesting talk and an academic history lesson, as in the telling us of the principles of studying and learning history and the ways in which the discipline can be applied to develop foresight.

Robert who co-founded the idea crowd sourcing platform Future Bakery followed to tell us about his burgeoning nw business. He used to work for traditional advertising agencies in Prague for a long time before creative this new online platform a year ago. I wasn’t sure I understood what it was at first, and the more he told us about it, the more interested I was. It’s an online community – I guess à la Quora where he poses relatively simple questions to the audience of participants related to client briefs in order to crowdsource ideas and possible solutions to their business problems from a wide variety of locations and experiences. They’re not solutions or any replacement for the work of an agency or a creative professional, but they’re potentially ideas and perspectives you wouldn’t have considered otherwise. I was definitely left wanting to find out more about it.

It was a privilege to have Richard join us for a talk about whether it is more important for planners to be interesting or right. He lighted the room up with his enthusiastic energy and it was brilliant to have his perspective about planning and strategy today, as well as his comments on several pieces of great strategic work out of the APG awards case studies this year.

Tom and Richard both talked about the campaign to encourage women to practice sports in the UK from FCB, and, it’s worth checking out if you haven’t come across it:

Michail then told us of his original methodologies to create a compelling and original brand value proposition, including ways to cooperate with clients to create stronger value. It was very interesting and his models seem rich.

Finally, it was time for my talk closing the conference. I’d prepared a talk about what strategic planners can learn from tabletop games, one of my passions. I’ve actually recorded myself, hopefully I will be able to soon publish this as an episode to my podcast so in the meantime I’ll keep the details quiet.

I learned a lot and got time to meet and talk shop with amazing professionals in their fields. The European Planning Conference is really one of those where I’m not sure if I should just keep a secret because it was great to be with a relatively small committee and spend more time getting to know people properly as well as explore planning & strategy topics in depth, but at the same time it is a brilliant event and definitely deserves to have more European planners join for the conference next year! I hope I can go next year, I loved Prague and would happily go back. Look out for next year, I recommend it!

The First Ever Paris Comic Con

 

I’ve just spent a few days in Paris catching up with friends and professional contacts, which was lovely. It’s always a pleasure coming back to visit. A few weeks ago I was planning my trip and chatting with my good friend Elo whom I was going to be staying with.

Knowing my geeky disposition, she asked if I was coming for the first ever Paris Comic-Con event. I knew nothing about it, but seeing there were tickets still going for the Friday afternoon of the event we organised to go and check it out together. Being free to organise my own schedule is one of the great pleasures and privileges of working freelance.

I heard so much about the original Comic-Con in San Diego that I was defiinitely curious. The event has become the launch platform for all the new ideas spawned out of TV shows, the grounds for testing science-fiction, fantasy, and of course comic book adaptations into movies with all the might of Marvel’s cinematic Universe. From what I’ve read over time, it has become one of the largest marketing platform to reach fans and influencers for movie studios and all sorts of video content creators – oh and there’s some comic books to check out too. I had heard of impressive experiential marketing displays and events in San Diego, like for the latest Godzilla film. I didn’t really think anything in Paris would be as amazing as an interactive experience of the new Game of Thrones TV series season through an Oculus Rift virtual reality experience, but I guess I was still hoping for something memorable along those lines.

I’m not sure when it started being such a big thing, but these events also attracts a lot of attention for the people putting increasing amounts of efforts into hand crafting elaborate costumes to recreate the ones of their favourite fantasy, video game, or comic super hero characters. According to regular news and photo updates I’d come across that seemed to be the other thing to look out for when visiting. For some reason Brooklyn Brewery was sponsoring the Paris Comic-Con cosplay competition and promoting their Defender IPA beer. Apparently they had also sponsored the New York Comic-Con, they eem to have an deal with the event organisers. I get the name of the beer is super-hero-ish so it might be good exposure. At least I was there and the right audience to be interested in craft beer so I’m probably not the only one. I was very happy to taste a new IPA and it was the best beer deal available for purchase at the event, so bonus all round.

On a side note, I highly recommend reading Beer School. it’s the story of the Brookly Brewery and a brilliant business and branding book. It’s good to go find marketing and branding inspiration outside of the marketing and advertising industry itself. Did you know Milton Glaser designed their logo?

Back to comics, we have a strong culture of our own in France (and Belgium) when it comes to graphic novels. I was raised on Asterix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke. Once I finished on those and growing a little older I graduated to series like Lieutenant Blueberry, Black Moon Chronicles, and The Meta-Barons.

Alongside this, France was the first foreign country to import Japanese manga, and for studios to partner on co-creations. American comic books are historically less popular in France, whereas the Paris Japan Expo for manga and anime is absolutely huge. The international comics festival in Angoulême is the second largest event of its kind of Europe, attracting over 200,000 visitors every year. I was surprised Comic Con was coming to Paris; I guess the event is so successful it’s expanding everywhere. I was curious about their choice of venue. It was at La Grande Halle de la Villette, which is a good location but quite small for an event like Comic-Con. 

Maybe it was their first and they didn’t want to take too much risks on the location size. Given they sold advance tickets on a website they must have known how many people were going to show up. So I think many people were surprised that for an opening time announced for 1:30pm on Friday, people were still queueing to get in 2:45pm and that the only thing to do after that was queue some more to get in the main conference room – which frankly wasn’t impressive in terms of size, just separated by what amounted to a curtain from the few and far between booths mostly selling graphic novels you can find in any book or specialty store. Apparently they have received a lot of complaints about this on the social media channels.

I was lucky to be able to miss all the queueing thanks to my friend Elo who did it in my place while I was having lunch on the other side of town, and I arrived right on time to get in the conference room for a talk with Jeff Mann, of Industrial Light & Magic / Star Wars fame. He made all the models for the original movies. By then she’d been queueing for over two hours. Unfortunately the talk was not impressive, the questions were pretty bland, it took time to translate into French and then he was quickly gone. Pretty disappointing. Even more so for her whohad been waiting all this time.

We checked a few stalls afte that, some cosplay costumes, and talked to the people managing the booth of Star Wars fans and cosplayers, the only worldwide organisation of fans to have official agreements to reproduce the costumes apparently.

We managed to attend a second panel with French Youtubers hosted by the French Nerd blog, launching a new web series, this time many fans were in attendance judging by the screams and ambient excitement. They screened the first episode of their new series. Elo and I looked at each other in obvious disbelief and perhaps feeling a little old and/or out of touch when the audience was so excited and we thought the whole thing was just dreadful. Poorly acted and just a bad or at least overused idea: A popular band taken over by zombie-like fans who calm down when they sing crappy pop music.

I was interested to see the show was financed by a department or company part of Endemol, a large television and media production company. I was just not into it whatsoever. In the words of Danny Glover’s The Lethal Weapon character Murtaugh: “I’m too old for this shit”. We left the conference section in bemused disbelief. The guy who seemed most excited about the whole thing was probably older than I am, so it’s probably not even an age thing. I just didn’t get it at all.

We were pretty much done by then, the event was closing down, and we were ushered out. I have to admit I’m not in a huge hurry to go to another one, though I’m really glad I’ve attended the first day of the first ever Comic-Con of my hometown of Paris. And to have been successfully targeted as a craft beer amateur at the event while I was at it.