So the elephant in the room is that the Tilt Expo, a mash-up of video gaming, table gaming, electronic music, and a celebration of the culture that surrounds it, is in a rebuilding stage.
I use that term thoughtfully. As someone who has followed the Triangle gaming scene from a startup perspective, I’ve always wanted to see gaming succeed here, from both a business and cultural standpoint. But as someone who has spent the last four years trying to get a handle on the local business and culture, I’ve been flummoxed as to why a community that is so welcoming on the inside has had such a problem integrating with the rest of the Triangle scene.
There is untapped strength here. You’ll never find a nicer, more helpful, more we’re-in-this-together bunch of folks.
So I can conclude that the gamers who went all-in to this past weekend’s rebooted and Triangle Game Initiative-led Tilt Expo at the Durham Convention Center had an excellent experience. The problem is, and you could tell as soon as you stepped in to the Convention Center, this year’s version was definitely a work in progress, especially in comparison to the wildly popular Escapist Expo it replaced.
“Man, Escapist was just better at getting the word out,” one anonymous indie developer told me. “The organizers just couldn’t get as many people out this year.”
Oh. I don’t have any evidence of this, but scheduling the Expo the same weekend as the Hopscotch Music Festival, the Triangle’s single biggest crowd draw outside of the state fair, likely didn’t help.
These insights should come as a surprise to exactly no one. So with that out of the way, I can also tell you that while the marketing may have missed the mark, the solid programming I saw throughout the Expo means there’s hope.
One area where I believe gaming has always fallen down is in leaving the door cracked for new gamers. Casual mobile gaming blew the doors off this problem, but the result is a fragmented base playing one-hit wonders.
Angry Birds, Farmville, Candy Crush – these are not your hardcore gamers.
There are essentially two ways to bring new gamers into the fold: Be welcoming to non-gamers and be kid-friendly. Tilt Expo was surprisingly good at both of these things.
Taking on the latter first, I brought all my three kids to Tilt. My youngest (the boy) is on his way to becoming a hardcore gamer. I used to give him my controller when I got stuck somewhere in a game, to let him mess around while I took some time away before coming back to figure out the boss battle or puzzle or whatever confronted me. Now, at seven years old, I give him the controller and pretty much expect he’ll beat the boss.
It’s both a proud and sad milestone.
Tilt was not only kid-friendly, but everyone there welcomed the kids. Sure, there was the occasional disemboweling in some demo somewhere, but it was out of the way enough for me to quickly point them in another direction. They were hands on the entire time I was there, they didn’t want to leave, and they wanted to come back the next weekend (I had to explain the concept of “annual” conference).
There was also a junior category for the cosplay costume contest, and the winner was an adorable toddler. On the flip side, there were only three junior entrants, and I counted maybe 20 kids under the age of 16 during my entire half-day at the Expo on Saturday.
The highlight for the under-12 crowd came from FunCom, who showed off a playable beta of their Lego Minifigure MMO and gave out minifigures in a raffle — of which, in full disclosure, one of my girls was winner. She got the policeman.
The demo wound up attracting gamers of all ages, which is what good video games are supposed to do. Gray Hogan, the community manager, delivered the pitch to young and old with equal skill, at one point challenging me to try to “break” the chat by inserting something offensive into it. I couldn’t, and if you know me, you know that’s no small feat.
For the generalists, there were demos, how-tos, open table gaming, and gaming-related merchandise. Again, with the size of the venue, it seemed a bit cavernous, but those who were there got to play everything from the latest XBox One and PS4 titles, to pre-release demos of indie games, to about half-a-dozen table games.
The Expo sessions included “My First Indie Game” and “Hosting a Weekly Game Night,” topics that catered to the gaming-curious.
And last, but most certainly not least, the Expo went out of its way to welcome women. If you’re not familiar with gaming conventions, this is a big deal, especially lately, where even the larger conventions have been marked by harassment and objectification of women to an intolerable end.
The outreach extended from a highly visible harassment policy on the website to sessions like “Women in Video Games,” one of several that spoke directly to women.
Anecdotally, I’d say the attendance was at least 30% women. That, for any tech or gaming event, is decent.
I spoke to several indie developers who had different impressions of the Expo.
Prisma’s programmer Kyle Bolton and lead artist Hank Silman came up from the Savannah College of Art and Design on a last-minute heads-up from a friend of theirs. Currently searching for funding and four months in development with a team of eight, they came to the Expo as part of their roadshow, but didn’t know much about the Triangle as a gaming city.
“It’s pretty much all still the West Coast,” said Bolton. “There’s also Vancouver, and Atlanta, where we’re from, is slowly gaining a reputation.”
But not so much the Triangle. They knew Epic, but everybody knows Epic.
On the other end of the spectrum, Relevant Games, who have been around the Triangle for a year, were showing off Fat Chicken, a game about responsible farming and the second in their series of advocacy games that carry a message but don’t necessarily hit you over the head.
Their senior creative director, Randy Greenback, was up on both the Triangle and the Expo.
“The scene is growing,” Greenback said. “I was in triple-A gaming for 20 years and left Insomniac to start Relevant. The better indies have thrived while the others have either gone away and restarted or the developers have moved to the bigger companies.”
Overall, the Tilt Expo was a positive experience. The marketing can be fixed, can be built over time, and will always be easier if there’s good content to be marketed.
You can tell that content is there, with the exclamation point added when my 7-year-old looked up at me from the Fat Chicken demo and shouted, unsolicited, “This is awesome!”
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Editor’s note: Joe Procopio is a serial entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. He is VP of Product at Automated Insights and the founder of startup network and news resource ExitEvent. Follow him at @jproco or read him at http://joeprocopio.com
