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

[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.