In our 19 year history, Digital Gaming has provided a LAN Center style environment within the greater Dragon*Con convention overall.  With each passing year, we've grown larger and larger, attracting a greater core audience of convention attendees who attend Dragon*Con purely for the LAN tournaments we offer for cash and prizes.

This year is our biggest year yet in terms of available space and scale of activities.  We have 18 tournaments planned spanning both the PC and XBOX 360 platforms.  Our tournaments include classic events such as Starcraft: Broodwars and Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries as well as more modern tournaments such as Counterstrike: Source, Halo Wars, and CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars.  We also have several marquis game publishers coming in to do demonstrations of their latest games as well as hardware manufacturers coming in to display their latest in Cutting Edge technology.

Our participation over the last few years has been superb with over 5,000 unique visitors (that physical humans, not web hits) to our area and over 400 people participating in tournaments.  We expect to increase that number by 50% this year with the help of some marquis sponsors such as AMD, Alienware, Sumolounge, and many many others contributing prizes for some of the great tournaments we're offering on hand this year.

Another big change is space.  This year we have over twice the space in the Digital Gaming area that we had last year enabling us to provide more exhibitions, larger and grander tournaments and a much more frenetic pace to the activities overall as we enable gamers to act like gamers without the pressures of a small space next to other exhibits. 

Our network capacity has greatly increased as well.  Last year we had a fractional line that severely limited bandwidth and hampered our ability to run events as planned.  An unscheduled 700Mb patch for World of Warcraft made WoW almost unplayable.  This year we'll have a full DS-3 connection at our disposal allowing for blazing download speeds and a great overall Internet experience.

We look forward to seeing you at the convention this year.

-Don Stauffer

 Director, Digital Games

 Dragon*Con