Convergence

I was on five panels at Convergence. I also took Molly with me to the con on Friday and Saturday. So I kind of had two con experiences; one as a participant, and one as a parent.

( I'll sum up the panels first. )

I'll come back with another post about the con with Molly.

Convergence with Molly

Molly's primary fandoms are (1) Harry Potter and (2) gaming. At Marscon, she mostly wanted to sit around in her wizard robes playing games with people, and that was very clearly her primary goal at Convergence as well. springbok1 took her off my hands during my Friday and one of my Saturday panels; Molly wanted her aunt to take her to the gaming rooms and find her people to play Munchkin with.

Convergence has a lot of gaming. There are open gaming rooms near the Consuite, with boxes and boxes of games sitting around that you can pull out and play. The 22nd floor was also the gaming enclave (mostly) with two rooms set aside for RPGs, one for LAN-based video games, and a couple of open rooms for Magic: The Gathering and so on. There are also some organized demos where game companies bring some new game they're trying to sell people on; I think it was at one of those that Molly helped Abi win a copy of Munchkin Impossible (which Abi gave Molly, so now she has her own Munchkin set).

So on Friday, we went up to the 22d floor and Molly found some people to play Magic: The Gathering with her, which meant she had her first exposure to a really well-constructed strategic deck. (Some guy had a deck with only a single creature in it; an 11/11 indestructible artifact with trample. He also had a "copy artifact" spell a bunch of times, and a card that let him rifle through his deck looking for a creature card; the first creature card he found, he got to put directly into play, allowing him to get this 11/11 monster out without anywhere near the mana you would normally need to cast it.)

Back downstairs, Molly and I played a game called Scarab Lords, and then she sat down and watched two people playing Lunar Railways, which is a rail-building strategy game set on the moon. Molly watched them for TWO HOURS.  Here is a good example of one of the differences between me, and my daughter. Molly loves to play complicated strategy games; she also really enjoys watching them. I find complicated strategy games reasonably fun to play (if frequently humiliating, since I'm generally terrible at them), but watching them is up there with watching paint dry.

Some people did finally come in and play the Worst Case Scenario Survival Game, which was funny, and I watched them instead. Rarely have I so deeply regretted my failure to bring a book to read. I didn't feel like I needed to sit there right with her, but I also didn't feel like I could just take off and go to programming or something without her.

The railway players (who were very, very nice people and endlessly patient with Molly's curiosity and willing to explain it to her and let her look at their cards and ask them about their strategy) threw in the towel at some point because they wanted to go to dinner, at which point Molly was STARVING (yes, I had been periodically asking her if she was ready to go to dinner and she'd been insisting she wasn't hungry) and could not wait five minutes while I chatted with the friends I ran into on our way to Friday's.

We made the rounds of parties later; Molly's favorite was the Marscon party because they had a chocolate fondue fountain. WIN.

Molly wore her costume on Saturday -- wizard robes, complete with Gryffindor tie (conveniently, Gryffindor colors are the same as U of M colors) and a wand.

One of the room parties was a mystery party / LARP called Steam Century. They ran two mysteries, one each night. Molly wanted to try to solve it on Saturday night. The mystery involved a lost amulet, mysterious runes, and a spider cult. The coolest part was the study of Dr. Ritter, the murder victim, which was set up in one of the gaming rooms on Saturday night. You had to wait to get in, but it was worth the wait just to see it. The lights were dim and there was spooky music, and this carefully set up antique-looking study. If you opened a box and found a key, when you picked it up the room monitor would whisper, ""You hold in your hand an object of great power. You feel compelled to follow the acolyte" and would lead you around to the other side of a partition to a hidden spot with a glowing cow-skull creature. They'd rigged up multiple iPods to let it speak different lines (with voice effects) depending on what you did. It was really neat.

We did manage to solve the mystery and find the amulet. It helped that a couple of cast members fed us some very broad hints a few times; there was a guy dressed up as Hagrid and he clearly felt it his duty to help out Hermione. (Hagrid's costume was awesome; he even had a pink umbrella.) We did not make it to any other parties that night, which Molly noted sadly as we headed out to the car (at ALMOST MIDNIGHT) and I told her that was the way of cons; there were always a bunch of fun activities to choose from, so by doing one thing you were going to miss others. (Of course, when you're a grownup you can hit far more parties by opting out of sleep, but she'd already opted out of enough sleep, even for the 4th of July, and she was noticeably cranky on Sunday.)

Other random notes:

* We played a game of Othello. Molly must not trust my rules explanations because she insisted on reading the rulebook herself, then creamed me.
* On Saturday, we ran across some college kids playing Set who agreed to let Molly play. I think they regretted letting her play when their friend started mocking them for having their asses handed to them by an eight-year-old.
* We also played Payday -- remember Payday? I used to play this game in grade school. It's mostly luck. Molly beat me at that, too.

Convergence was a lot more tiring than Marscon, because it was so overwhelmingly big. Molly tended to grab my hand when we were walking places, and get nervous when we would get temporarily separated by the hordes of people. She also invariably turned the wrong direction when we would leave one room to go somewhere else. She had a good time, but Marscon-with-Molly was easier on me than Convergence-with-Molly.