There are lowest common denominator questions on both side of the equation, but the fundamental question here is "Are the current event type categories the best way to divide up events? Do some of the categories end up just too big to be really useful or meaningful?" and if the answer to the latter is "yes," you have to come up with some way to carve things up.
Further, since part of the point of the event types is communication, "catering" to just about everyone we can is probably a good idea, yeah :) We want to make things as simple, clear, and useful as we can.
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Derek Guder
Event Manager
Gen Con LLC
Agreed about communication.
But when communicating, trying to cater to someone who won't read what you're communicating isn't a good idea.
I was just commenting on the general notion of escalation I was seeing. RPG vs LARP. But also Western RPG vs Space RPG vs Urban RPG vs Fantasy RPG vs etc. But also Western Living RPG vs Western One-Off RPG. But also Western Living RPGA RPG vs Western Living Other Company RPG.
So we have
Western Living RPGA RPG
Western Living Other Company A RPG
Western Living Other Company B RPG
.
.
.
Western One-Off RPGA RPG
Western One-Off Other Company A RPG
Western One-Off Other Company B RPG
.
.
.
Space Living RPGA RPG
and etc.
And we haven't even left RPGs yet, the same would be in store for LARPs.
I'm not saying anyone is suggesting exactly that. But the usefulness of categories is that they have multiple members. Categories are ideally useful when they find the balance of largest size categories and least confusion when browsing a single category.
Simply snowballing the number of categories won't lead to a more useful system. The end of the slippery slope, which you wouldn't reach in reality but highlights the point, is a category for every single event. Whatever-Thousand categories. Of course that's hyperbole. But categories get more useless as we approach that end without the need to approach it.
I know you know that, I get the project here as speculative. I'm just throwing in this point about essentially an Occam's Razor of event logistics: never multiply event categories unnecessarily. :)