Somewhere upward of 20,000 fans descend on Atlanta for this event every year, filling three massive hotels to share everything from their comic-book collections and home-brewed Lord of the Rings fan fiction to gigantic Transformer costumes they've spent months creating for the Masquerade Ball contest.
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Elonka Dunin, a game designer at Simutronics, invited fans to demo the company's latest MMORPG, Hero's Journey, in her hotel room. A monster-fighting quest set in a lush, expansive fantasy world of vulnerable villages and devious conspiracies, the game is perfectly targeted for the DragonCon crowd. "This isn't just hack-and-slash," Dunin said as she set up her avatar to cast a spell. "There are creative ways to deal with combat, and a lot of chances to create stories for your characters."

Nice article about the Dragon*Con scene from Annalee Newitz, who along with being a writer and editor for Wired, is also a policy analyst at the EFF.

As for my own Dragon*Con experiences, I had a blast this year. I'm still a bit sleep-deprived, having just gotten back to St. Louis from the 10-hour Atlanta drive, around 1 a.m. last night. I was *really* busy this year, speaking at or participating in about eight different panels, and also giving private demos of my company's upcoming game "Hero's Journey" out of my hotel room. Dragon*Con is *so* huge though -- though I was in one of the convention hotels, it was still a half-mile walk from my hotel to the Electronics track! And I was going back and forth multiple times per day to do all the demos. But in between panels and demos I also found plenty of time to visit various parties, and I met a lot of really fun and interesting people, as well as getting to hang out with friends from previous conventions. I especially enjoyed the Hacking panels this year, hanging out with various representatives of the yak.net and Memestreams communities, getting to talk cryptography into the wee hours of the night, and many other conversations I had with really fascinating people. And of course since I was a speaker, I also got to hang out in the "Green Room" and rub elbows with assorted authors and movie and TV stars, such as several members of the Star Trek cast (I never knew that Max Grodenchik, who plays the Ferengi "Rom" on Deep Space Nine, is a very talented singer!). I also really enjoy the Dragon*Con nightly drum circle, with all the creative percussion instruments that people bring, and all the dancers in the middle, ranging in clothing from T-shirts to belly-dancer outfits, to costumes for which the word "skimpy" wouldn't even come close to describing how little was there!

Great fun!

Update: I heard from a D*Con staffer, that it was the biggest convention ever. Over 26,000 attendees, and the charity drives raised over $100,000 for the Katrina relief effort!

Dragon*Con Review