Author: GNiko (---.huvilinna.com)
Date: 04-24-2004 19:14
(yes, this is a bit late, but I only now happened to stumble upon it)
"Finnish roleplaying conventions differ greatly from American ones. While American conventions are mainly forums for people to play, Finnish conventions feature lectures, panel discussions, dance classes, boffer sword tournaments and art comptetitions, in addition to the games. There is a historical reason for this. Ten years ago, when the first Ropecon was being created, the organizers had only a faint idea what a roleplaying convention should look like. However, many of them also interacted with sci-fi fan circles, and the largest Finnish sci-fi con, Finncon, had been operating for years. The first Ropecon was not modelled on other roleplaing conventions but instead on Finncon, which in turn had copied its format from sci-fi cons in the U.K. and the U.S."
There's not much that is correct about this paragraph. The first program for the first Ropecon was actually pretty much written with a copy of the program for previous year's GenCon in the other hand. Finncon had (iirc) happened only once by the time Ropecon was "designed" (and I use that word rather loosely), so not much experience could be culled/copied from it. I definitely hadn't attended more than one Finncon by the time Ropecon started to take shape.
So Ropecon was originally created as a copy of GenCon (granted, I had never been to GenCon, but I had been reading articles about it for years). It actually evolved away from the American-type conventions later, and all by itself. I think differences in the gaming community might be to blame for the direction conventions in different countries have taken.
However, having a large emphasis on the non-gaming part of the hobby was a concious choise, as roleplaying was very much "in the closet" in Finland even as late as -94 So I deemed it important to develop the general knowledge of players, instead of just focusing on the gaming. That was perhaps the most important cornerstone of (at least) the first Ropecon: The development of gaming in Finland at large, rather than just "having a laff with other gamers", which, IMHO, is pretty much what a "pure" gaming convention tends to provide.
In case you're wondering how I can have such a good view of the inside of the heads of the organisers of Ropecon: There weren't "organisers", plural, in the first Ropecon. There was just me. :)
(and yes, there was a large number of people involved in the actual execution of the convention, who deserve the main portion of the credit for the success of the 'con, but there was only one who actually held all the strings)
GNiko
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