Thread by @rdonoghue, Ok, so Metatopia was virtual this year. I skipped virtual Gencon, but [...]

Ok, so Metatopia was virtual this year. I skipped virtual Gencon, but Metatopia is SUPER important to me, so I made sure i would attend this one, even though I did not know what to expect.

The first thing to call out was that it was easy to imagine how many things could have gone wrong with a virtual con, which made it really amazing how smoothly everything went. The logistics were handled amazingly well.

Structurally, the centerpiece was a dedicated discord server, where people could chat and organize. Another discord was used for actually recording panels, which were then broadcast live via Twitch. Whole process worked SUPER well.

It did require a lot of hands on attention, though, so Playtests were a bit more ad hoc - the con helped organize and publicize them, but playtesters chose how they would do the logistics themselves.

That probably sounds worse than it is, because it means playtesters could use the tools they were comfortable with (For my Lean Coffees, we used Zoom & Miro), and they were happy to help people who didn't already know how to run remote sessions.

There were a lot of upshots to the format. The two big ones were
1) All panels are recorded, and are eventually going to be available.
2) Allowed people to attend from, quite literally, around the world.

I will say, *giving* a panel in this format was weird. Lack of direct audience feedback was definitely a point of friction for me, but far from an insurmountable one.

I think there were also some lessons to be learned about best practices. It was very easy for panels to slide back to the basics, but for good reasons (lots of new people), and without immediate feedback, there was no way to read the room.

I *do* wish that the "boardrooms" we'd used had also had dedicated voice chat rooms on the discord server, to better enable post-panel conversation. Folks tried it ad hoc, but it was hard to do.

I also want to figure out an easier way for us to go from "Here is an interesting person" and "Here is there stuff". There was a self promotion channel, but it was an unsorted cascade. Took work to follow up in someone's stuff from a panel.

But these are, honestly, very minor process issues. As a whole, it went very well, and more than a few people remarked that they liked this format *more* than live panels, for a host of reasons (Easier to follow, easier to drop-in/out, quality fo recordings etc)

The catch is that panels are probably the easiest of the three legs of a conventions to move to remote. The other tow legs - play and networking - were trickier.

I mostly heard about the playtests secondhand. Despite them being my favorite part of metatopia, I was just not up to navigating the calendar because I was still kind of daunted by the newness.

My sense is that when they happened, they went well, but there were definitely challenges that could largely be traced back to this being a new way of doing things. But I definitely only saw the edges.

So that's one strong win, and one technical. The third was the trickiest - networking. Whether in the professional or personal sense, a lot of the value of the con is going and *seeing* people. And since that's impossible to do, how goes the substitute?

I can't say it was perfect, but it was also a LOT better than I expected.

Now, first caveat - I am a Slack guy, not a Discord guy, so it was a slightly weird environment for me, even setting aside my resistance to impromptu video. This likely impacted some of my impressions

The weirdest thing about a virtual con is the negative space. Or, rather, the absence of negative space.

In a real con, you cannot help but be aware of things going on around you (which you may not be a part of). This is kind of foundational to emergent interactions.

(Which is a really pretentious way of saying "running into people in crowds")

I genuinely could not tell you how "big" Metatopia was. Beyond things like time shifting, the simple reality is that it was never bigger (for me) than the number of people active in a channel at any given moment. Once they went silent, they were GONE.

I don't know if that's a bad thing! But it definitely *felt* weird at times. The presence of people doing things gives implicit permission to do things too. It's harder to speak or act into silence.

But the only time I think it was a genuine problem was that it made Panels a bit odd, because it could be indistinguishable from speaking to an empty room in some cases. Which is not a huge problem, and is even a bonus for some, but it was a thing.

Now, to counterbalance all this, there was some really strong discord channel use. In my experience some of the channels were just useful, but the ones which mirrored Metatopia geography (the con suite and the couch) were probably the most robust "locations" at the con.

And, critically, they went a huge way towards making it *feel* like Metatopia, rather than just some con that happened to be online.

But I'm biased in this regard because they were familiar touchpoints for me. I got the sense they were also a good resource for the many new folks, but I'm a poor judge of that.

I talked earlier about my own challenges with coming to terms with drop-in video conversation, and in final assessment, I was seriously shooting myself in the foot with that. If I had leveraged those earlier, it would have greatly reshaped the con for me.

But what I don't know is how well they served the attendees in general. My sense is that it was much harder to get that random conversation with a designer or publisher, and that's a bummer.

Though, to toot my own horn a bit, I felt like the Lean Coffees were very successful, and each one provided a lot of really good, rolling conversation. Their sole weakness was that I should have moved them around in time, to allow different time zone access.

In the end, it probably fell short in the Networking sense, but it's kind of miraculous that it's even a question. It should have gotten a big old goose egg for this, but I'm really just settling for sadface.

Which is to say, all and all, the score was fantastic. It was good enough and DIFFERENT enough to feel like its own valuable experience, not just a shadow of some beloved memory.

My understanding is that the goal is to carry some of these digital practices along, even when Metatopia returns to the physical world. The accessibility that it offers is just too awesome to pass up, and that's a really cool outcome.

Tellingly, by the end, my emotional state was:
- Wishing I could talk to everyone more
- Regretting every conversation I didn't have

Which is the way you can tell that this was a REAL Metatopia.

PS: For those of you paying attention to my personal journey, I successfully hopped on a few more ad hoc video channels over the course of the day, and am really committed to doing this more. Calling it a win.

PPS - I don't think I emphasized enough that this was a DELIBERATE success that came at the result of a ton of thoughtful, passionate work by the Double Exposure crew. This was weapons-grade organizational chops paired with ninja level empathy and humanity. Hell of a thing.

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