The WSFS Must Be Crazy

[kevin_standlee]

I have to conclude that the way in which the World Science Fiction Society is organized is so utterly insane that to a significant number of people, they simply cannot believe that it really exists that way. The way they would set up WSFS is as a small, close corporation controlled by at most three or five people, and they certainly wouldn't let the attendees (a.k.a. "marks") have anything at all to do with the governance of the convention. And of course, the Board would decide where to hold Worldcons, keep all of the money, sign ten-year deals with convention centers, and otherwise engage in sensible economies of scale.

Because the "Worldcon Must Change to Suit Me!" crowd would never set up such a crazy situation as the members actually deciding what to do themselves (members obviously being too stupid to make up their own minds for themselves), they have great difficulty believing that anyone else ever did it that way. Thus there must be a Ruling Cabal (call them the "Secret Masters of Fandom") who really run things, so you just have to find those people and subvert them.

Alternatively, if you really are so stupid to have set up an organization whose mere members get to decide how things are run and where their conventions should be held, then those 4000-5000 people should just go away and never come back and give their property to Someone Else who can Do Things Right, which in this case means throwing away all of the things that those 4-5K people enjoy doing and Doing Something Else because a different, larger group like doing them.

There is nothing wrong with Anime Expo having 50K anime fans enjoying themselves, or ComicCon having >100K enjoying themselves, or for that matter Comiket having something like a quarter-million people as I recall. Why do so many people want the World Science Fiction Convention, which primarily (but not exclusively) celebrates written science fiction and fantasy, not comics, anime, movies, television, ballroom dancing, baseball, trains, regency-style dancing, costuming, or any of a number of different popular activities to die right this second to validate their own personal hobby entertainment preference? Why do they, to quote someone who recently Got It, want to "appropriate the cultural identity of thousands"?

Worldcon is a club. It's a club with between four and five thousand members, but it's a club, and it's run very similarly to how a club of only about two hundred people — the approximate attendance of the first Worldcon — might be run if organized by a group of opinionated know-it-alls who trust nobody but themselves to run things. And the members, on the whole, like it that way. Yes, the club might eventually go out of business when nobody shows up for their meetings, but until then, what is so wrong with the members running their club the way they want to run their club for the benefit of the other members of the club?

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Comiket is not really a convention, it's sort of off to one side of the Venn diagram that encompasses SF conventions, Comicons, media conventions, Dragon*Con etc. Last one I was at in 2008 had a total attendance of 550,000 over three days but most attendees only went for one day (like me). 95% of Comiket is for "circles" (fan groups) to sell doujinshi (amateur manga usually pornographic in nature based around popular commercial mangas and anime series), there are some commercial booths for publishers, game companies and such and there is a cosplay (costume play) area and that's about it. No panels or discussions and definitely no awards ceremonies. Then again entry is free.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the clarification. But the point still stands. I keep hearing people approach this from the point of view of "Only Big Matters," so why not throw the most enormous sort-of-fan-related pop culture event into the mix and say, "See! Your 50K members are puny against the half-million people going here! Get rid of everything and do what they do so you can be Successful!"

Now you did it

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

Hey! Why can't WSFS celebrate trains?
(...grinning, running, and ducking...)

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

The lovely thing about WSFS and Worldcon is that we can celebrate trains. There was one panel at Worldcon this year about trains. I was supposed to be on it, but it overlapped the Business Meeting. There was a single panel at Montréal where Lisa and simply blathered for an hour about the train trips we've taken. But Worldcon isn't the National Rail Historical Society convention, and never will be, nor should the NRHS drop all of their programming and become a science fiction convention, even if they do decide to have a panel on "trains of the fantastic." Everyone should do what their core competency is and not try to become things they are not.

[timill]

Thinking of "trains of the fantastic", you are familiar with Douglas Self's Unusual Locomotives site, of course?

[lindadee.livejournal.com]

What set you off today? You know there are people in this world who aren't happy unless they're complaining.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'm still trying to rationalize all of this. I keep coming back to the Cricket War Robots in one of the Hitchhiker books. When they get outside of their dust cloud they find there's a universe out there and decide it's got to go. I'm feeling like a lot of internet puppies (to coin a phrase :)) got on line, started creating fandom (for the first time obviously) and were really surprised to find there were already people there doing it and had been for a long time and doing it without any regard for the new kids.

The thing is, a physical convention can be a frightening and intimidating place, especially if you don't know many people. No physical event actually owes a duty of care to anybody to be welcoming, even if you could work out what that means. It's fairly scary going into something for the first time when you don't know people and imposing yourself on a bunch of new people. In the old days you'd probably do your first conventions with a college or university or local SF group and avoid that. If your only access to fandom is online then turning up at a smaller convention where there's a much lower probability of even vaguely knowing people is going to be potentially terrifying.

Still, the thing is, in my experience of social and work events, the probability of a successful event goes up with smaller events. I'm not sure large events are a panacea, unless it's purely as a way to ensure you can go with people you know.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I agree that it can be daunting. I knew nobody and nothing when I went to my first convention, the 1984 Worldcon. The Big-is-Everything crowd can scoff, but 8000 people was huge in 1984. I was fortunate in a sense because my "anchor" was to deliver a sketch that a friend of mine had drawn for the Pinis (of Elfquest; the reason I even went was for the "End of the Quest Party" they were holding there to celebrate the release of the final issue of the original series). Even more helpful was that the person in line behind me to pay for a membership was a friend of that friend. So before I'd even bought my membership, I had made an acquaintance and that helped.

OTOH, something that doesn't help is if a clot of, say, ten people go to a Monster Huge Convention and never talk to anyone else and just huddle together gawping at everything around them.

The kinds of conventions I enjoy are not in general a place for what might be called "tourists." I expect everyone to be part of the act. That's why I use the Fandom as a Pot-Luck Dinner metaphor. That model doesn't work well for 100,000-person pop culture fests, but I think it's still plausible for Worldcons up to the approximately 10,000-person size, at which point the convention would be a lot less expensive per person to organize because I don't think we'd outgrow our current size of convention facilities.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I was rather lucky that my first conventions involved going with my local, extremely well-connected, SF group. I rather assumed that conventions involved sitting in the bar with famous people wandering over to say hello... but that's why I can find myself in the lift with @neilhimself and chat about our last meeting and get gawped at by the awestruck masses around us.

I do wonder what interactions people actually have the mega-conventions. The stories I've heard of ComicCon mostly seem to revolve around waiting to get into thing, being in huge talks with the famous people at the front, or standing outside premium events you're not invited to.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Part of the attraction of the megacons is the dealers space. Pre-LargeRiverCorp it was difficult to locate and purchase esoterica and conventions were a convenient weekend opportunity to hunt down books, movies, props, pictures, costumes etc. For quite a few first-time congoers the social aspects of the convention came second to the access to hucksters and their wares. I helped out a games dealer at the one Dragon*Con I attended (1995, the NaSFiC) and the hall he was located in (only one of them) was enormous, easily three or four times the size of any Worldcon dealer's room I've ever seen. He cut a cheque for his next year's dealer's space before he packed up as he didn't want to miss the cut-off before all the spaces for the following year were sold out.

Didn't one of the Glasgow Worldcons offer a dealer's-room-only day membership? I have vague recollections it could be upconverted to a full day membership.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

As I'm normally flying to remote cons I typically don't buy much these days. Not to mention, it's easy to buy online....

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

And that's a vital point. These days I'm far more likely to browse and ask for a card with a website address than buy big at cons. This is for several reasons; I want to take time to review and compare, I need to plan big purchases to fit into the budget, and the hassle of buying things and then having either haul them around all day or keep doing back to the room/car to drop things off.

[timill]

Not in '05, as a Dealer's Room Only membership would have been my responsibility. I think it was discussed for '95, but I don't think it was done.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Eight thousand people is plenty big enough.

Suppose ten percent of the attendees do or know things interesting too you; that's 800 people; over a three day con you can squeeze in no more than 40 hours of human interaction - so if there are 800 interesting people you only have three minutes per person!

Size is not the best metric for judging conventions. There's a place for the Humugous Fannish Extravaganza, but such things are the frosting not the cake.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I do have to say that my first couple of conventions (all local in Chicago) were a bit intimidating exactly because I didn't know anybody in fandom. Now that I do (which I did in part by getting on programming) they are fun.

Slightly off-topic - some cons are more club-like than others. I attended Minicon and was consistently introduced as "the guest." It felt at times like I was showing up at a family reunion.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Even before the stroke I had sworn never to set foot in the mega-events like Dragon*Con and SDCC. For the simple reason that they really seem to be passive events where much of you time is spent waiting to be possibly seated st one of the hot events. I had a friend who went to SDCC this year specifically to see the Metallica panel about Through The Never, their new film. He waited seven hours in line, had crap seats, then found that the line for Metallica's show that even had already been closed off. Now, having some pretty severe mobility and balance issues, I'm not voluntarily going into crush like that.

[solarbird]

Should I talk about the difference between "gate" and "membership" attendance numbers?

Meh.

Really, I think it mostly comes down to an implicit assertion that "you can't call yourself worldcon if you aren't biggest."

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

Something like that. The obvious counter-example is the baseball World Series, but rational arguments don't seem to be particularly relevant in this kind of discussion.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I know about the gate/warm body distinction. (Worldcons count you once and only once regardless of whether you're there all five days or for five minutes.) I am unsure how other events count their numbers.

By the "unless you're the biggest," measure, then no US-based event "wins." But that doubtless would make the "big is all that matters" crowd's heads go all 'splody, so they'd find a way around it.

[solarbird]

Most convention-centre events (and I know this to be true for PAX and Sakuracon) count valid issued passes per day. So if someone had a four-day pass for PAX, that would be four, regardless of who used it, or even if they used it. This is standard for gate-style events; I just point that out because some membership-style people go "That's cheating!" and no, it's just a different count method.

For PAX in particular, they specifically do not care if you hand off your badge or trade it around. They're just fine with it. So some passes almost certainly do mean multiple people per day. I doubt that's a very large number, but that's just by guessing, not knowing.

Anyway, it's relevant, because Norwecon's "membership" is around 3,300/year, but our "gate" - if we counted one, which we don't, so this is unofficial - would be around 10,000ish? Maybe more.

Using gate - even an estimated gate - makes a meaningful difference in conversation and like it or not, increases interest overall - at least, in my experience. This is because the most common frame of reference for people not already in organised F&SF fandom is gate, not "membership," and they have no idea what "membership" means here. So they see 3,300 and think "tiny," and were that our gate for a four-day, they'd be right. (3300/4 = 825. We'd rattle around in that hotel and it'd be like a ghost town.)

So a 4,000-member "Worldcon" across five days to them means the crowd you would think of when somebody says "800 members." Smallish. Rattling around.

I do genuinely wonder whether Worldcon would suddenly look a lot more attractive if it announced "gate" numbers. To oversimplify, 4,000*5 = 20,000, and suddenly, Worldcon stops looking like a pretender in these eyes.

eta: For example, Worldcon could announce membership as "20,000 at gate, with 4,000 members." It does make it sound like two groups, which some would say is deceptive. But what it's communicating is more accurate, not less, to all the people who only know event sizes by gate counts.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. I'll bring it to the attention of the committee that keeps track of the Long List numbers and see if we can reach any sort of consensus on what sort of formula we could use to calculate "gate." It's clearly wrong to multiply full attending members * 5, but similarly assuming that attending members only attend for one day is wrong, too. The truth is somewhere in between.

[solarbird]

It's clearly wrong to multiply full attending members * 5
Except that's the standard for gate.

You don't have to like the standard, but that is the standard, at least, as I've encountered it in use. These large events don't try to count bodies actually present, except for fire code compliance. They count paid-per-day-to-attend.

If you want to compromise on it a bit (it'll make you look smaller against the standard, but this is fandom, after all), then you could count starting at badge pickup. Someone with a five day who shows up on day three would count as three (Days 3, 4, 5.)

Many of these large events don't have badge pickup - they're posted off in advance - so they can't do that kind of check. But Worldcon could. So start with badge pickup (the one solid piece of data you have), include that day, and all days to end of convention (for full memberships), then add in all the one-days as one each.