By Carlos Munoz
It’s a bright and brisk early Thursday morning for several convention attendees in the city of Anaheim. The culmination of a year’s worth of planning, passion and anticipation ends at the start of the Blizzcon ID badge pickup line a day before the opening ceremony on Nov. 2.
Since 2005, Irvine-based Blizzard Entertainment’s gaming convention, Blizzcon, has been gathering masses of loyal gamers, passionate portrayals of iconic characters by “cosplayers,” ever-growing social media personalities and video game industry professionals at the doorsteps of the Anaheim Convention Center.
Harnessing this overwhelming popularity to do good, a benefit dinner for CHOC Children’s Hospitals is held before the convention and 12.7 million dollars were raised and donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation in the early part of 2018. With record breaking attendance of 35,000 fans in 2017 with 10,000 online viewers tuning in via the Blizzcon Virtual Ticket, attendee numbers are favored to surpass this year’s sold out event.
Blizzcon excitedly announces the soon-to-be released projects of longstanding franchises like World of Warcraft, in its current Battle for Azeroth expansion, the immersion of lore in Heroes of the Storm and the latest mobile iteration of the action roleplaying favorite, Diablo, with Diablo Immortal.
Beyond the announcements, you casually attend panels with developers, animators, voice actors and artists. You can interact with live installations like the Dark Moon Fair and its curious creatures. The highlight of the two-day event is trying out all the fresh content before anyone else, months to even a year before intended release.
So how did Blizzard achieve these great feats, one might ask? True, making and selling games is the conventional factor, as is for any monolith gaming studio. However, Blizzard achieved their current grace and irresistible charm by always embracing and emphasizing the backbone of their player base: the human connection. The joy of ending your day with friends and your favorite game is enhanced by the commonality you have with the vivid depictions of characters in these games. Siding with a hero fighting for what they think is right or understanding how a villain lost hope for the better enforces the idea that everyone comes from different ways of life and those are stories to be understood and appreciated. That is that electric dynamic you feel at Blizzcon.
In reality, Blizzard has improved in leaps and bounds to include diverse rosters of characters in their games, not as a gimmick, but to steer away from a commonly homogenized industry, where characters in storylines are often portrayed two-dimensionally as minorities, having embellished accents or mannerisms or are plainly the butt of short-sighted jokes. This extends to the strong efforts to negate online bullying and toxicity in online game-based communities. This organic inclusion of diverse personas and their “play nice, play fair” mentality reinforces how Blizzard and Blizzcon are safe havens to all gamers.
With the addition of the Inclusion Nexus, a major upgrade to last year’s Diversity Meet-Up location, you can see that same thoughtful dedication put into Blizzard games be put into company culture and Blizzcon itself. The Inclusion Nexus was housed in its own conference space this year containing the Blizzard Military Veterans, Women at Blizzard and Blizzard LGBT+ meet and greet tables. Once there, you were free to talk to current Blizzard employees about how they came to be part of the company, trials they have personally faced and the appreciation they have for the representation being given to them, a powerful and endearing experience to be part of.
Amongst the event-filled days, the casual interactions you don’t plan or would never imagine is what makes each con so authentic and meaningful. Be it bumping into your favorite YouTube personality while waiting in line, asking for feedback for your artist portfolio from headhunters, meeting online friends in the demo areas, bringing your other half all the way from Connecticut to their first Blizzcon after meeting by chance in a game, or Deb Leslie—from upstate New York—sharing why she and her son attend in a decade-long tradition because he got her “hooked on WoW.”
These are the reasons people come back to Blizzcon…they come back home.
