[quote name=\'mmb5\' date=\'Jun 30 2004, 03:14 AM\'] You guys are going to have to get over yourselves. Steve Beverly did not name it. The man who did name it, Paul Bailey, is one of the nicest people you would ever meet and had no prior knowledge of a-t-gs.
Believe it or not, there were game show fans who didn't use Usenet. [/quote]
There's very little about GS Congress 1 left on the Internet, so I have only your word to take for it that Paul Bailey was involved at Congress 1. As I recall, Congress 1 had very little apart from Prof. Beverly and a trivia tournament; Paul Bailey seems to be involved from the trivia side of things, so I'm just prepared to believe he might have been involved with the selection of the name.
That said, any collection of game show fans worth their assembly-organisation salt ought to have at least one person with knowledge of at least one of (a) USENET, (b) a number of sister game show fandom game show mailing lists, © the existence of GSC tapes on the tape trading circuit, (d) our appearance on GSN, (e) Brad Francini's web pages on the subject, (f) other attendees' pages on the subject, (g) our long-established interaction with the likes of one F. Wostbrock, not to mention one R. West of this parish and so on and so on. Due diligence and informed fan status must surely preclude ignorance of all of the above.
Our GSC tradition is not a footnote; it is a vital part of game show fandom, such as it is. I might accept that Paul Bailey might not know, but whoever else might have spoken up and said "no, that's a bad name, the abbreviation has already been taken" but didn't do so is just as much to blame. Given that much of the publicity of the first event was on Prof. Beverly's site, I am quite convinced he was fully involved from the start, particularly with the first event in the series, and it would seem most unlikely to me that he could not have at least pointed out the initial clash.
We have had discussions on the past about the importance of the online fandom on the game show world at large. I fully accept that our membership, which can be reasonably estimated at three figures, does not nearly have the clout to impact scheduling decisions and we have done well for something of our rat's-gluteus-maximus size to get mention on Club AM and Extreme Gong.
However, we are already at a size where we can have a marked effect on attendance at game show gatherings, and we are surely the ideal demographic for such gatherings. Heck, we are considerably more interesting and relevant than most attendees. While it's unreasonable to assume that we are the target market for GSN, we are a target market for any putative game show assembly and our existence - heck, our dollars - should be respected. I would hate us to be marginalised to a talk at a fourth such congress, "The history of game show fandom on the Internet and predecessor commercial online systems, 1992 to 2003" - we're worth more than that. (That said, I imagine that any of the usual suspects could deliver such a talk and make it rock harder than a two-karat diamond.) Each of the three congresses could probably have got another, realistically, 20 or 25 grateful attendees, of the sort who would have likely volunteered to assist with the administration, produced interesting new programming and given the event a positive buzz, had there been a deliberate attempt to get the support of the established online game show fandom - which would, doubtlessly, have pointed out the prior existence of GSC-branded events and produced a more acceptable name.
Don't even get me started on the lifting of the Home Game Tournament tradition as well as everything else.
I recognise that my mouth is becoming uncomfortably frothy, so I shall have myself checked for rabies before further posts from the UK on this topic.
