04/25/07

Anime St. Louis / ShowMeCon 2007 (permalink)

gaming anime convention con science_fiction scfi st_louis missouri showmecon travel

During my trip last weekend, I attended the ShowMeCon and Anime St. Louis held at a Marriot hotel. It was a joint anime/science fiction convention and attracted over 1000 nerds, geeks, and other socially awkward types to come together and celebrate their nerdiness for a weekend.

Aside from the other anime convention I attended this year, Naka-Kon in late march, I hadn't attended a convention of this type in several years. Prior to this year the last one I attended was Otakon in 2000, at a time when the anime fandom was just starting to get huge and there were still only a handful of anime conventions. Now, even living in the midwest, there is one or more convention almost every month within driving distance of my home. Even more surprising is even the smaller cons are attracting upwards of 1000 people.

This year was Anime St. Louis' first year at a bigger venue, and the first (and probably last) time they partnered with SciFi con "Show Me Con." According to the numbers they gave at the closing ceremonies, last year's con attracted only 300 people and was located on the college campus. This year they were hosted at a Marriot Hotel (who treated the con horribly) and had upwards of 1000 people in attendance. At least 80% of those in attendance were there specifically for the anime portion of the con.

Overall my convention experience was awesome, though there were problems. The hotel, a Marriot located in south-west St. Louis, pretty much dicked the con over with some bad business practices. Originally the convention organizers had reserved many of the meeting rooms and salons as well as the grand ball room to host the activities in. The hotel, however, decided it would be a good idea to double book everything and also promised the grand ball room to a wedding, a fashion show and a bat mitzvah, and gave the anime convention several smaller rooms instead. This made the larger and more popular events uncomfortably crowded, and caused many con-goers to be left out.

The combination of Anime St. Louis and Show Me Con caused some problems as well. Though the two cons were supposed to be partnered for the weekend, the two had separate schedules, meaning people without both did not know the full extent of what was scheduled when. Additionally, from what I heard, the Show Me Con folks did not fully live up to their part of the obligations and left Anime St. Louis to do much of the running of the con. Finally, most of the con-goes were attending only for one con or the other, and the two groups of attendees mostly ignored each other. In the end, it would have been better if either the two cons were kept separate, or, if they spent more time truly integrating the conventions with crossover panels, joint events and a shared schedule.

Even with it's problems I had a blast at the convention, and only wish I had more time to see more of the panels. The ones I did make it to were: Dragon's Keep, a combination LARP and play, Piano Squall's Concert, the Masquerade, the Swimming party (and Mankini Con, which will only make sense to those who were there), a Filking concert with Gary Hanak, the strange Japanese fetishes panel, a panel on MMORPGs, a panel on single player RPG gaming and the closing ceremonies. I will make a more detailed post later on a couple of the bigger events. I was definitely glad I attended the events of the convention last weekend and hope that I can make it back next year.