Last weekend, at DorkStock, which is a mini-gaming convention inside Gamehole Con, I played a Looney Labs game called Choose One. In Choose One, the current player picks a card and one of the two answers, and the other players try to guess which answer you picked. Depending on the players, some are more straightforward than others such as pancakes vs. waffles or baseball vs. football. Others were harder, like cauliflower vs. broccoli. (I like both.) And some we didn’t even want to play because they were deemed too obvious. Follow the crowd vs. Buck the trend was one of those; everybody at the table would pick buck the trend.
It occurred to me since then that occasionally, following the crowd can turn out well. At least, if it’s the right crowd. Once upon a time at DragonCon, I crowded around a booth in the dealer’s hall with my friends. I don’t recall who decided to stop there, but we were wandering as a group, so we all stopped and looked at a comic book that was being sold. I don’t recall really noting what it was about at the time, it was a #1, and the author/artist was signing them. I think we had just tried the board game there, a cute little game called Bosworth, which adds an element of luck to chess. Since I’m terrible at chess, I liked adding luck to it. And the characters in the game were from the comic. It wasn’t until I got home and read the first issue of Dork Tower that I was hooked.
I had an advantage my friends didn’t… the genius behind Dork Tower lives a state away from me, so I’m more likely to bump into him at conventions in the area. Like at a Wizard World ComicCon the following year. And I joined some online groups related to the comic and started chatting with other fans. Then I found out he drew other games and started buying those.
Eventually, this lead to some of us suggesting hosting a convention related to his work and that of the other artists that published under Dork Storm Press, such as Aaron Williams, creator of Nodwick. We realized that would be a significant amount of work, and determined that it would be better to hold a mini-convention within a convention that John Kovalic was already attending. This worked so well, we held it repeatedly at one convention for several years, along with two DorkStock UKs and a DorkStock West. (I didn’t get to go to those.)
Real life interfered for a couple years, but now DorkStock is back, two years in a row, at a new convention in Madison, Wisconsin. Several people are already planning their Igor Bar contributions for next year. And my involvement is all because I followed the crowd that year at DragonCon.