Player scarcity musing

[breakinglight11]

After a pleasant Easter vacation spent at home with my family, I am now back in town and glad to be here.

This week is going to be full for me. I'm working longer hours to make up for the ones I missed to go home. And I've got to get my two games printed and packed in preparation for Festival. I'm pleased to say that even after several drops and mixups, both Alice and Oz are full. NOBODY DROP NOW. Gah. I know captainecchi and electric_d_monk were having similar problems, even worse than mine, but it looks like the game is good to go now. I am happy to say that Steph is going to give larping a try, which brings the number of newbies I have directly or indirectly brought to Festival up to six!

One thing that's been on my mind is how tough it's been to get games to fill. Things look like they're going to go off okay for the con as a whole, but I know a couple of games have had to drop, and a few more may yet drop still. In the course of pondering the problem, I want to point out a few facts I noticed by comparing this Festival to last year's:

- Last year's Festevil had 118 attendees. This year's Vestival has 127.
- Festevil had 26 games on the schedule. Vestival has 20. I didn't bother counting the number of players per time slot.
- Festevil was 4 weeks after Intercon I. Vestival is 5 weeks after Intercon J.
- Only 1 game at Festevil was missing more than one player. 7 games at Vestival are missing more than one player.

This year we have more attendees, fewer games, more time to prepare and solicit signups, and yet this year more games are not full? What is the problem here?

Well, several theories have been put forth. The first and probably most likely reason is that I don't think there is a single new game running this year. Most of the games on the schedule are excellent, tried-and-true larps that have been well-received, highly recommended, and already have been played by lots of the community. I know I have played a fairly large percentage already, and many of the ones that I haven't conflict with games I'm running. So I'm only available as a player in one slot, and have a number of games already discounted for me. I know a lot of us more experienced people are in the same boat.  

The other thing is, I wonder if we should have started solicting people to sign up for Festival earlier than we did. It basically seemed to start just after Intercon, and although Intercon is a big deal and takes focus away from later events, it was farther away from Festival this year. Looking back through the entries of my LiveJournal, which is how I measure the progression of my life, I notice that Festival was a presence in my mind a lot farther before the date of the con last year than it was this year. It may be because I was in the process of writing two new larps for it, so I had a lot more prep work to do and therefore was planning much farther ahead. But perhaps we need to start pushing it earlier so people can block off the time on their schedules.

Something to think about in preparation for next year. I know that, as pleased as I am that Alice and Oz are both full for their fifth runs when other games have had a tough time of it, they will not be bid for next year, and probably will not be bid again at Festival for a while. I guess Intercon remains a possibility, as there are more non-local larpers, but I think they have hit, as Matt put it, market saturation. For next Festival we need to shot, I think, for more new games, to get the easy filling and high participation rate we got at last year's. Maybe I can do something to contribute to that effort.

Comments

[lisefrac.livejournal.com]

I think the timing is the issue - i.e. that game signups opened so late. I know natbudin made a promise to zrealm last year that game signups would be open by the end of the January, and that did not happen. As a result there are no Foam Brain folks, and very few RPIers, coming to Vestival.

Other factors:
- learnedax' wedding, which is sucking away people like laurion and dkapell
- Aleph, a larp-like strategy game, is running at RPI this weekend
- the proximity of PAX East and Anime Boston
- the proximity of Lifeboat

These are the things I discuss to death with Nat when he's around :)

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I wonder if such scheduling (or most such) conflicts can be avoided by careful planning for the coming year.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

It's not quite as easy as it sounds, unfortunately, although it is definitely doable. To make game signups open earlier, there are a few things that also have to happen:

1. The push to get game bids in has to happen much earlier.
   1. Part of the issue with that this year was technical - it took me a lot longer than I expected to get the bid form running correctly, and a few brave users (thanks, darkoni42!) to be my guinea pigs. Now that it's working, that should be less of an issue.
2. Space has to get reserved early, with confirmation. This isn't entirely in Festival's control, or even BSCF's. It also doesn't necessarily have to happen before games go up on the schedule - it's fairly safe to assume that space of some sort will be available.
3. Concom has to get mobilizer earlier. This year we had a lot of volunteers but very few people actually doing anything until fairly late in the game. I don't think this was lack of will so much as lack of communication/organization.
4. Tiered signups? Maybe? If Festival asks real nice?

For my part, although I'm more than happy to keep maintaining the Festival web site and ProCon, the app that backs it, it would be really great to have a co-webmaster or co-developer. (COSI students, are you listening? Ruby on Rails is fun to code in and great for your resume!)

[dkapell.livejournal.com]

Looking back at the Festevil website, you're not seeing the games that were pulled because they didn't hit minimum, I think. I know we pulled our game ("Sam and Max hit the Afterlife"), and "'Tis No Deceit..." was pulled for the same reason.

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

Ah, that is true-- I am basing my comparisons only on the data I can readily see remaining on the Festevil website. You seem to have better recollections/info than I-- do you think that things are drastically different this year?

[dkapell.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I haven't been paying as much attention to Vestival, as I've known I can't make it since before signups opened. Based on bronzite's comments below, I agree that the games being run this year are simply larger, probably as a side effect of being easier to re-run a old game than write a new game, and if you're re-running something, the size doesn't matter as much. If I was going to write something new, I might prefer to write a 12-15 person game, whereas If i was going run something old, I'd have fairly equal chances of running a 15, 20 or 30 person game.

Mathematics for the Win!

[bronzite.livejournal.com]

A quick breakdown of Vestival as it stands:

Friday: 83 (10 open)
Saturday Morning: 69 (5 open)
Saturday Afternoon: 83 (13 open)
Saturday Evening: 78 (3 open)
Sunday: 57 (2 Waitlisted)

We can adjust this total to actual player counts of:

73 74 70 75 59

That's pretty tight clustering, right there, especially given special considerations that come into play on Sundays.

Compare last year:

Friday: 58 (2 open, 2 waitlisted)
Saturday Morning: 36 (5 open, 3 waitlisted)
Saturday Afternoon: 68 (6 open, 1 waitlisted)
Saturday Evening: 46 (3 waitlisted)
Sunday: 45 (4 open)

We can adjust these totals to:
58 34 63 49 41

All of these numbers are lower, and more scattered. I believe that any considerations that Vestival is somehow running shallower than Festevil did is simply hogwash. The con is growing, but this year there were simply larger games.

Re: Mathematics for the Win!

[bronzite.livejournal.com]

For reference, the average Festevil game has 11.5 players/slot. This year the average Vestival game has 17.6 players/slot (i.e., Young Women counts as 2 games for the purposes of this calculation.) That's a 53% increase in average game size, so its no wonder that less games are filling -- there simply aren't enough player to fill the games out there.

[darkoni]

I will likely have some more thoughts on this when I get home from work later, but my first thought to combat the "I've played this game before" thing is to let people know they can play the game again in a different role. This doesn't work for all games, but some it can.

For School, we have three repeat players. The number of signups for the con also makes it look like there is a greater need for games, but I imagine there are people signed up who aren't coming at all, but just signed up for the hell of it.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

The number of signups for the con also makes it look like there is a greater need for games, but I imagine there are people signed up who aren't coming at all, but just signed up for the hell of it.

That's true, but the same was true at FestEvil. By my visual estimates, the false positive rates are about the same for both cons. I can probably give you real numbers if people are interested.

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

I would be very interested. It could be useful for planning next year.

[natbudin.livejournal.com]

I've added this feature to ProCon, so now you can see false positive rates for any con you're staff for. It seems like my estimates weren't correct - there are actually more false positives at Vestival than there were at FestEvil. Here are the numbers:

Vestival - apparent attendance 128, 16 false positives, real attendance 112
FestEvil '09 - apparent attendance 118, 7 false positives, real attendance 111
Festival 2008 - apparent attendance 107, 9 false positives, real attendance 98
Festival 2007 - apparent attendance 70, 7 false positives, real attendance 63

It looks like attendance is actually growing every year, but we've mostly leveled off. I think we actually have a lot of churn in our attendee pool, and a lot of the false positives this year are people who had been at FestEvil. If true, this lends some credibility to the theory that our numbers aren't as high as they might be because people don't want to replay games.

[in-water-writ.livejournal.com]

On the subject of "repeat games..."
Friday night, I'm replaying a game I had forgotten that I already played.... and only remembered I played it when I got my character sheet... which turned out to be the same character I got cast as last time! If I'd been cast differently, I never even would have remembered I played it before. I still don't remember anything that happened in the game, so I doubt I need to worry about spoilers.

But the only games Friday night that I hadn't played in before are the Trial, and Kind Friends Together, both of which are full. So, no options there if I wasn't replaying something.

Saturday, there are a couple of morning games I haven't played, and just recently added, one I really want to play, but I don't know if I can get to Brandeis that early, so I haven't signed up for anything.

For the rest of Saturday, there are only two games I haven't played- Camp David, and School for Young Women. School for Young Women has been on my Must Play list for a while, and if I didn't play that, I wouldn't have a night game option anyway, so, only really one choice for me there.

Sunday, I haven't played in any of those games, and was incredibly intrigued by (I think) the only brand new one.

So, I have to agree that the old-hats had limited options this year, and I haven't heard that we have a ton a new larpers this year.

[acousticshadow2.livejournal.com]

As for me... I work Friday and Sat so the only time slots that I can play in are Sat night and Sun... both of which I am in games. There are other games I am interested in, I just can't go to them because I work or they conflict with the games I am in.

[laura47.livejournal.com]

pop diva's new, yeah?

Lack of New Games

[(Anonymous)]

This is Alison, FYI, as I don't have an account. So myself and the people I've talked to have had the same problem with a lot of the same games running again each year. I'm replaying a game, and before that, I was signed up for another game to replay. I know that Brian had basically no choice in what to play as he had played almost everything.