This was taken back in 1988 or 1989. I am in the lower right corner. Since then I told my barber to shear the hair off the top of my head.
Friday, July 16, 2010
From the Attic: IUP Gaming Society.
Back in the late 80s I was one of the founders of the IUP Gaming Society. Our bread and butter for fundraising was running Battletech tournaments. The main advantage of the society was reserving rooms in the Student Union building which was easy for organizations not so easy for individuals. I believe most of our funds went into prizes for tourneys. I am not sure if we tried building a game library. There are some real impractical issues with maintaining a communal stock of games.
This was taken back in 1988 or 1989. I am in the lower right corner. Since then I told my barber to shear the hair off the top of my head.
This was taken back in 1988 or 1989. I am in the lower right corner. Since then I told my barber to shear the hair off the top of my head.
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4 comments:
Great pic, Rob.
The old-school black & white reminds me of this picture of Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak from way back.
Just a really cool vibe.
Great pic!
Around 87-89 my high school friends and I had a gaming group that met regularly at the local library in De Kalb, IL. Battletech being the main game that we played, but we also ran Champions, D&D, Traveller and Marvel Superheroes. It was a great time!
Did your gaming group have the growing pains that TARGA had?
No but we had some exceptional circumstances. Basically I was very experienced in student run organization having been involved in the student government of IUP for a number of years.
And while I have opinions and preferences I am a no-drama, the more the merrier type of leader when it comes to running gaming stuff. (LARPS, clubs, cons, etc).
All and all the gaming club was a pretty positive experience and did it's two primary goals pretty well which was rent rooms for games in the student union and run tournaments for stuff like Battletech.
Hey, Rob! (It's taking me a while to catch up to your prolific blogging!)
I recall that what eventually ended the gaming society was lack of participation by the membership. We ran Battletech tournaments because the volunteers who were willing to run a tournament were most-expert in that game. At one latter point, members complained "You only ever do Battletech," to which we'd replied "If someone is willing to run something else, we'll do a tournament in it. Any volunteers?" There weren't any, unfortunately. What bugged me was that members always seemed to look to the officers to come up with something for them to do. What they failed to realize was that our job as officers was to obtain and organize resources for our members' activities - not to develop and conduct all the activities ourselves. Most members regularly ran or played in a lot of RPG groups, but no one seemed to want to offer those human resources to develop a tournament in anything.
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