Way back before I was building community in the gaming world, I was doing the same thing in the convention circuit – anime conventions to be exact. As I prepare this week to come back to a convention that I considered a part of home for nearly a decade, I began to muse about my experience as a convention staffer. In doing so, I came to the same conclusion I did when I left that little circle.
Convention staffing is masochism. You don’t have the whips and the chains, you may not have the purely physical pain, but it is, for many poor, slightly insane, people a form of hurt that does bring with it some pleasure and enjoyment.
At least in the anime convention circuit, the majority of staff members are unpaid volunteers. The fact that people willingly give of themselves and their time, sometimes years in advance, for something that they ultimately do not make a dime off of is perhaps enough. But throw in the fact that you deal with the usual trials and tribulations of interpersonal communication and hours and sleepless nights trying to work with guests, hotel staff, and attendees and you have a recipe of pain that can break down even the most mentally stable individual. The kinds of things you’re used to seeing in a day job or for pay are magnified working volunteer, when the only motivation for some people to stay is usually driven by personal values.
The equation of convention staff to a job is made even more painful by the fact that the centerpiece of it all is the event, and as you all know, sometimes events and plans don’t quite come together smoothly. In the decade or so worth of anime cons I staffed, I’ve seen everything happen onsite, from all kinds of property damage, to last minute staff changes, to the very unusual and disturbing occurrences that happen at 2am in the morning. Let me tell you that once you deal with a drunken Final Fantasy Black Mage costumer or caught two people doing what shouldn’t need to be done in a hotel stairway, you’ve just about dealt with…well, perhaps one-third of what you could potentially deal with at a con. The mental anguish of having to sometimes take responsibility for people who can’t be responsible is like having your delicate, soft body parts put through a vise. Ah, memories.
Geez. I got so carried away that I almost forgot to explain the good part of all this. This is an optimist’s blog after all.
Anyway, despite all of that pain and suffering, good convention staffers go through it to put on a great event for attendees. They work long hours with little sleep and on a diet of Mountain Dew, potato chips, and Snickers bars to get satisfaction from seeing people have a good time. They want to look at an event they put blood, sweat, and tears into and say “I helped build that community. I helped put that together for people to enjoy their pasttime”. The moments where this happens sometimes seem to be very far away and may only seldom happen in brief flashes. But that feeling of doing good, of creating something that will last, is enough for most convention staffers to keep going, year after year.
I hope that if you attend a geek-related convention, whether it’s for anime, for gaming, for tech, or something else in the geek arts, that you find a tired convention staffer at some point and give them a hug, or at the very least, a cookie. They deserve every bit of it for their part in creating microcosms of awesome community for a few days.