This past weekend Levering Hall played host to JohnCon 2014, adding yet another installation to the long history of the annual gaming convention. In response to the reductions in content and participation in recent years, the JohnCon organizers sought to turn the event around by increasing sponsorship, publicity and diversity of activities.
JohnCon initially began as an event of the Hopkins Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (HopSFA); however, about a decade ago, the convention organizers opted for a different arrangement in which the HopSFA loosely persisted as the parent group of their event while JohnCon itself became a separately run organization.
According to President of the JohnCon Board Yevgeniy Rudoy, the organizational independence of the convention has its benefits. Chief among these benefits is the freedom that allows the organizers to draw upon the assistance of other University clubs, such as Hopkins Pen and Paper Gaming (HPPG) and the Animation Club (JHAC).
“We end up drawing on other campus groups as well because the only way to make a good event is to have everyone chip in,” Rudoy said.
Rudoy went on to point out, however, that the independent nature of JohnCon makes the convention’s leadership more difficult to replace once they graduate. The absence of a full-bodied board has had negative repercussions for recent installations of the convention.
“In the last couple of years, it has been getting smaller and smaller, and I was hoping to at least somewhat reverse that trend and get a wider audience and not just draw on Hopkins people this year,” Rudoy said.
However, increasing the attendance of people not affiliated with any of the participating Hopkins clubs, or even of non-Hopkins students, was no small task. Rudoy ceded that it was difficult to generate interest in people unfamiliar with the convention and its activities.
Emily Forster, the convention’s public relations coordinator, explained that she and the other organizers have sought to reach out to people beyond the Hopkins campus. Such endeavours involved securing publicity and funding for JohnCon 2014 through sponsorship deals with local businesses related to the activities of the convention.
“There are lots of people in the area that want to work with us and essentially promote themselves and also promote the convention. It’s a win-win situation,” Forster said.
“It wasn’t done the last few years,” Rudoy said, referring to the convention’s efforts to draw an audience outside of Hopkins. “That’s in a large sense responsible for why we haven’t seen a lot of people coming in from the rest of Baltimore.”
On a more general level, Rudoy elaborated that the goals of the JohnCon organizers for the convention were less activity-driven and more communal.
“I don’t think it’s right to think of the convention as something that we’re putting on, so much as an event where we provide people with the opportunity to get together and do something they all enjoy,” Rudoy said.
The convention held events ranging from Warhammer 40,000 (a popular, tabletop strategy game) tournaments to expert panels, a staple of such conventions.
Some of the events also spoke to the organizers’ desire for increased interactions beyond the Hopkins campus. One example was the role-playing games (RPGs) hosted at the convention, some of which were organized by non-Hopkins groups for students and non-students alike.
JohnCon 2014 also hosted a number of comedy shows performed by the New Jersey-based group, +2 Comedy. Performers Will Liam and Noah Houlihan described their generally positive experience at the convention.
“It’s one of our smaller [conventions],” Houlihan said. “Very open, very friendly; our audiences had great energy.”
At the same time, both Liam and Houlihan recognized that they had to tailor their performances to the relatively small size and limited turnout of the convention. Moreover, the comedians explained that their audiences at such conventions are not always familiar with live comedy performances. Therefore, they frequently interact with the performers in unexpected ways, a phenomenon which is always more likely with small audiences, such as those at JohnCon 2014.
“Some people don’t always understand the performer-audience break,” Liam said. “There’s that weird disconnect at conventions.”
Houlihan agreed.
“You kind of have to teach [convention audiences] how to act at a comedy show,” he said.
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