Especially for someone with social anxiety, new experiences involving large crowds of people can be absolutely terrifying; especially when your entire reason for being somewhere is to interact with people.
As the weekend progressed, I spent allot of time down with the Indy developers; doing allot of observing and a little bit of talking to people, trying to find my own way so to speak. I wanted to start small so I started with booths that only had one or two people at them when I was walking by.
One thing I observed was that the Wobbl3 Entertainment’s booth was ALWAYS crowded and full of people. Being an avid lover of EDM in general; the Dubstep music reverberating all the way around the booth and through parts of the Indy section was enough to tell me why before I ever even got close enough to see what was going on.
This is part of the reason it took me most of the weekend to work my way to the booth to set up an interview of sorts despite my early interest in what was happening. The first thing I noticed (after dragging my eyes away from the screen where all the pretty lights and sounds were coming from) was that the entire team was super laid back and easy to talk to as well as just being super open.
I actually spoke with James first, who started out as a student intern with Wobb3. Having the interest in Dubstep like I do and recognizing some of the sounds to an extent, I inquired as to whether they had worked with any known artists and he proceeded to write down the entire list of every artist they had worked with on DubWars; which was the game that they were there demoing. This included the Indy as well as the more known artists. (There’s a review coming up soon so I’m not going to spoil any of the names now.)
Then I met Jonathan Whitley, who is Wobbl3’s Director of Marketing. I explained what I was doing there, that it was my “trial by fire” as Kevin Wallace had put it and he just laughed at me and answered the couple questions that I still needed have answered.
When you tell people that you help with a charity that helps vets, they usually get excited and tell you how amazing that is. I never expected Jonathan to be so physically supportive of our cause. (Pun intended.) Of course, he had seen the Stack-Up booth and so he had a few questions about us that I answered for him.
The last thing I expected was for him to actually come do push-ups for us when I teasingly asked him if he had been over to do it yet, but sure enough, next thing I know, he is walking over with me to sign up. Of course, he disappeared and I had a laugh and didn’t actually expect him to come back. However; the laugh was on me and my only regret was that I did not catch pictures of him supporting us when I found out just how far he was willing to go. Alas, that is not my story to tell, but stay tuned!