DragonCon Is Too Damn Big

That headline isn’t an inflammatory statement – OK, not just an inflammatory statement. It is the considered opinion of many DragonCon 2014 attendees I talked to, with longer attendance track records than I have, at a whopping two years.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media was loaded on Monday and Tuesday with people talking about how their DragonCon experience was less fun than before. While many of those complaints can be ascribed to personal issues, and therefore not relevant to my contention, quite a few criticized the increasing number of attendees and the resulting overcrowding.

How many attendees made it to DragonCon this year? According to DragonCon, 62,000 filled up the four five (I forgot the Westin – RHB) host hotels Labor Day weekend, up from last year’s 57,000. But that number is based on badge sales, and that doesn’t reflect the total number of attendees, as I know of at least one photographer who got a room but no badge, and a cosplayer who did the same. The cosplayer was in costume most of the con, and attended both the large DC and Marvel group shoots – all without a badge. So the number of people at the con was likely closer to 63,000-65,000.

Before I spell out why I made that statement in the headline, let me say that once again, I had an absolute blast at DragonCon. I will be there next year come Hell or high water. But if attendance keeps growing on pace, and DragonCon has 70,000 next year, someone’s going to get seriously hurt.

Stomped by the Dragon
Two incidences show just how unwieldy DragonCon has become, and they both happened on the Atrium level of the Marriott Marquis – the middle hotel in the main block of three hotels devoted to DragonCon (the Sheraton, a couple of blocks away, is also an official DragonCon event and host hotel, but it gets much less traffic than the main three). The Marriott Atrium floor is where most people come to meet and mingle because it has quite a bit of open space, and a bar in the middle of the open floor.

After the very busy and crowded Saturday, at around 2 a.m. Sunday morning, some individual or group of people thought it would be a good idea to drop glass beer bottles from one of the much higher floors down onto the Atrium. I wasn’t there to witness this, but I have confirmed the many reports I saw on social media with one person who was there. Lucky for her friend who wound up with shards of glass embedded in her leg, this person was a nurse and was able to treat her on the spot. Imagine if her friend had not been a few feet away from where the bottle hit, but right beneath it. Unconfirmed reports state that the idiots who dropped the bottles were arrested.

Thank God this didn’t happen before midnight, when the Atrium floor was so crowded there is almost no chance the bottle wouldn’t have hit a person. Check out the effect one of the bottles had on a brass railing.

Then on Sunday night, the Atrium floor was just as crowded, and made even more so by the appearance of a group of amazing dancing robots who created a circle around them of people taking photos and video. That drove people to actually cut through the seats outside the Atrium Ballroom that were reserved for people with disabilities waiting for access to events in the room. While all this was happening, Yaya Han made an appearance on the Atrium floor in her enormous and stunningly beautiful Banshee Queen Enira from Lineage 2. That caused a second bubble of clear space, further pushing the swirling crowds into less space.

According to Yaya’s own Facebook post, someone reported that a “well-known Cosplayer on stilts” caused her disabled husband to be pushed out of the way, causing him a great deal of pain. That person posted on Yaya’s apology thread, confirming it was him and accepting her apology, so the individual issue has been resolved.

But the larger issue it brings up remains.

There is no way that the Marriott Atrium, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, didn’t exceed whatever its maximum occupancy level was supposed to be, but there wasn’t a fire marshal to be had. God forbid someone on the Atrium floor had a medical emergency and had to be removed via gurney. While I am sure the crowds would part as fast as they could to allow EMTs access, every second of delay is a greater risk to a victim’s chance of recovery.

Welcome to GrabHandsCon!
Add to that the now frequent complaint of sexual harassment made more convenient for the harassers by the anonymity of crowds, and you have a situation that begs for some relief. To bring home the harassment point, I talked to a cosplayer wearing next to nothing, who said that she had been dressed up as Cammy the day before, and counted about two dozen stealth ass grabs during the day. Oddly enough, in the much more revealing outfit she had none – perhaps grabbing bare skin seems too much like a crime to these harassers.

The one logical method to relieve this overcrowding is the one that will never happen – restricting the number of badges sold. And even if DragonCon did restrict badge sales, it wouldn’t stop people from getting a room and attending all events they could that are not official DragonCon events.

Expanding the facilities DragonCon uses is another option, but there aren’t any other hotels attached to the main three. And it still doesn’t solve the problem that is created by the Atrium floor and its open Pulse bar. Maybe the bar gets closed for the four days of DragonCon, making the Atrium level a less attractive spot.

But I am just spitballing ideas here – what first needs to happen is DragonCon officials need to accept the reality that its marvelous event has become too large to be handled the way it is now. Nobody wants to see DragonCon go away as a result of some scandal involving serious injury or death.