Would anyone be interested in a Protospiel in the NorthEast/New England Area?

Well, actually I'd be mainly interested in Protospiel being also held in Europe.

Do they have a website? I would like to see what they are doing.

Edit> I did find out a little. It's for showing off you games to publishers which would be great to do with Prostospiel if publishers were interested in that format. As it is we have a hard time just getting more than two to show up mosy years

here's where to register, i believe: http://perlhuhn.de/termine.html

(under the Spieleautorentreffen in Göttingen heading)

I think it's just a matter of personal preference more than anything else. Part of it is the same reason I'll go to a weekly game night at a friend's house for a couple of hours but will probably never set foot in a game convention if I can at all avoid it. But having attended Pow Wow once and having hosted and attended Spielbany for the last 6 years, it's just been my experience that the small gatherings -- eg 4-5 designers -- work better than the big gatherings for really digging down into designs and getting constructive feedback.

If I had to guess why that was the case, I'd say there are a couple of reasons. The first is reciprocity; there's a higher level of implied reciprocity when the same 4 designers test all 4 of the games -- you gave me feedback on my game so I'm going to give you quality feedback on yours. The attitude of "that's nice, now what are we playing next?" that sometimes pops up is inherently suppressed with a smaller group. There's less concern with time-meshing: eg, "the four other tables are done with their games and they're waiting for us to finish so we need to rush through our endgame and curtail the comments so we can shuffle up the tables again."

The biggest one is probably this, and it goes to a bigger issue I've found in my years designing games: game designers are shameless self-promoters. Nothing surprising about that, you almost have to promote yourself to get your game noticed. My problem is simply that I find self-promotion tedious and irritating, and I hate having to do it myself (even though I probably do). But here's the thing: at big get-togethers, the most assertive people get the most table-time. I don't enjoy sitting around having my games not get played because I'm too unwilling to "stoop" to the level of self-promotion that these big events require.

I think it just boils down to this: I never used to understand the comments people would make about gaming being more about social interaction than playing games, but now I really do. Not that I play games exclusively for social interaction, but that I really only enjoy gaming when it's in a good social climate. For whatever reason, four friends sitting around a table at someone's house playing a game just feels more "authentic" than 25 people who barely know each other hanging out at a rented room at the VFW. It just feels more like genuine adult social interaction. I can't put my finger on why that is, but there you have it.

-Jeff

Last year we had a record crowd over 40 people including our guests making it at times crowded and noisy. Mostly just Saturday afternoon but it was otherwise manageable. This year I am hoping we will at least have that level of participation so I have booked a room more than twice the size to help elevate the problem.

Last year was also out first year to experiment with time sheets to help keep things fair. I find that people are generally fair minded but are often not keeping track of how much of other people’s time they use. Our time sheets have columns to keep track of how much time you donate and how many man hours you use. This is not mandatory but there as an awareness tool. Everyone I spoke to was happy with the amount of table time they had. We also allow people to attend as testers, people that are not testing their own games. This too increased the table time for everyone.

With little changes each year i strive to keep the benefits of the small Protospiel of years past and still facilitate as many designers as possible. I think even with the significant growth over the last 2 years we still have a casual friendly atmosphere. If that were to change I would certainly rethink the steps that got us there.

I live in Boston, so if it were close enough I'd definitely be interested.