Magic and Might: A new approach to NerdMeet

Working for TechARX opens up a lot of interesting avenues of interaction with the community. But the most interesting one is undoubtedly, NerdMeet. Starting out with the sole idea of uniting every fandom and it’s community under one banner, NerdMeet is ambitious and a daunting task at it.

This year, our plan for NerdMeet is a bit different. The team came to a decision that to properly expand beyond gaming and tech and involve more of the current nerd culture, we need to attract people. With that idea in mind, we moved forward with the plan of doing a series of smaller events, each focusing on different themes of the nerd culture such as Game of Thrones and Harry Potter.

So, just like our first pre-gig, Convergence, Magic and Might was to be a thematic event. And with it being organized so close to Halloween, we couldn’t think of anything else for our theme. The idea was to do something different, something no one has tried yet. And the solution was an unconventional one, even for our rag-tag team. With the help of our sponsors namely NVIDIA a, Cooler Master, MD Computers and Xrig and venue partner, BogglinGames, we were going to try just that.

Our idea for Magic and Might was introducing people to board games based on popular fandoms such as Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons and Game of Thrones. But to keep the Halloween charm alive, we added in horror games for our PC gaming brethren and as an added bonus, we had Virtual Reality horror games. If you think games aren’t scary, you should’ve heard their screams. The cosplays (we had some serious cosplayers turning up), The decor, the lights, the smoke effect with dry ice which dissipated pretty quickly all added to the fun and ambiance. It was chaotic but it was a controlled chaos. And having the awesome Kolkata crowd backing us up, it was an enjoyable chaos.

Doing something like NerdMeet isn’t the easiest thing when you have so many things working against you. And certainly the naysayers and the forces working behind the scenes to see us fail don’t help our cause either. But having a team like ours, you can’t really fail like that. Next up, NerdMeet 2.0 . Till then, here are a few mighty magical moments we managed to capture: