by Brant Guillory, 26 February 2025
Time to dig into some more sessions! Meet interesting people! Piss them off1! Do the microphones work?!
The day started with an . . . interesting development. You might’ve seen out post on social media about the “emergency” press conference where, despite being media members of GAMA, we were invited to exit the media lounge, while other media members were allowed to stay, or even explicitly invited.
We’re about to get the boot from the Media lounge at #GAMAExpo for some sort of ’emergency’ press conf
Thing is there are *some* media outlets being allowed – ICv2, BGW, & others
We probably know what it is after last night (and didn’t go public about it!) but still getting 2nd-class treatment 🤷
— Armchair Dragoons (@armchairdragoons.bsky.social) February 25, 2025 at 10:47 AM
We’re going to address this in a larger follow-up discussion after the Expo, once we’ve had a chance to have a conversation with the GAMA staff when they’re not busy running a major event.
First of all, the view from our overlook in the media room, as the exhibit hall is slowly coming together
click images to enlarge
Our first meeting was with Daniel Block, designer of the upcoming Zeo Genesis sci-fi minis game, to be published and manufactured by the Holly Springs, NC-based Best Hobby. Yes, I drove all the way to Louisville to have a chat with a guy who hangs out at my FL(W)GS. Zeo Genesis is being designed to bring back the “feel” of some of the early US-imported anime from the mid-80s through the early-90s, with an alternating activation gameplay that tries to cut downtime between players to a minute(ish), while still stomping around with some big-ass dudes-in-armored-suits.
Most interesting, though, is that they are planning to do all their manufacturing in-house down in Holly Springs, which means we’re going to line up a field trip to go see the facility one of these days.
In the middle of the day, there was a quick break to try out the new camera-tripod-lapel mic-rig while overlooking the main hallway.
The highlight of the afternoon, and probably the entire Expo by the time it’s all said and done, was an opportunity for an interview with Steve Jackson2 for our Expo edition of Mentioned in Dispatches. Steve was very gracious with his time, and we had a guest co-host pop in to join us for the discussion. We talked about the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks that he’s got on Kickstarter right now3 as well as some predictions about what’s coming up in the world of tabletop gaming.
Our time with Steve made us late for the panel discussion on A Question of Trust: The Role of Media in the Tabletop Space. This was organized & chaired by Mike Dunn of Gaming Trend and tackled some thorny questions about interactions between publishers and creators on what they want from each other, how to provide it, and how to ensure the best working relationship. However, this panel and the audience discussion also brought up an interesting divergence in the ‘media’ part of the GAMA organization – is there/should there be any distinction between content creators who spend all their time on gameplay videos, unboxings, how-to-play videos, and journalists reporting industry news and behind-the-scenes content. No one has a good answer to this, but we’re kind of/sort of working on this discussion going forward.
Game night was another zoo.
Please don’t ask what all the games are; I couldn’t always see the names of the games
The video also overestimates the number of people in the room by about 1000! 🤣
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