Minecraft Mum: Insomnia 57

Yesterday I took S and E to their first ever Gaming Convention. Insomnia 57 at the NEC in Birmingham.

My hilight of the day was the live role play with Sam Gladiator, Grian and Taurtis. It was amazing to watch the puppeteer's hands make the slightest of moves on the keyboards beamed up on the giant screen whilst the same people ad libbed the dialogue to a 30 minute show that was a sort of a parody send up of their characters visiting a gaming convention that had been built inside Minecraft.......

I guess that sounds a little confusing if you are not fans of their YouTube channel and don't regularly tune in for Tokyo Soul and Yandere High but basically these three really talented guys, supported by a whole team of other actors (no, they are not MVPs!) perform and act shows that could be TV soap operas or cartoons but use the platform of Minecraft to bridge the fact they all live in very different geographical locations. Changing skins instead of costumes for example and building the sets in Minecraft.

The role play, Sleep Deprivation 58, was excellent with several subversive humour references to the typing errors in the players and channel names on the Insomnia website.

And, just like the immersive projects, like tractors, Moshi Monsters, Doctor Who and American Girl dolls that have featured on this blog before Minecraft, Minecraft Servers and YouTubers who utilise Minecraft is where we are at now. It was Sam Gladiator who led us to Insomnia and a first gallivanters road trip for E (S and I made two trips to Cardiff connected to Doctor Who last year and one to Nottingham to visit Game Over)

We drove up to Birmingham on Thursday through hideous bank Holiday traffic stopping in halfway at long term friends of mine and TDs (who have also become online Skype Minecraft buddies of S's) for a break and, after near 7 hours of travelling, stayed in a nearby to the NEC Travelodge which was excellent value as it included car parking and we were right by the airport runway so had a great view too.

E was awake at 4am on the day........Hype! Is what we used to called excitement......

We read on the website that the meet and greets had been cancelled due to their popularity (sounds odd I know!) and so I had primed S and E that we might not meet anyone they were hoping too. Undeterred, and with tips from Wizard Keen, S carried her giant You Tube play button around the whole day and didn't ask me to carry it once!

In the queue at the start when I was reflecting on how wise it had been not to bring O - S and E spotted Sam Gladiator - E was excellent and he called out "Sam! Sam!" At this point I was thinking this might literally be the only time we see them so encouraged S and E to ask for autographs and Sam walked off (accidentally) with S's pen!!

Our first request was the Hypixel stand where my twitter friend Noxy said he had some badges for us :) E is an MVP+ on the server and whilst there we started chatting animatedly to MooTV about Super Smash Heroes (a game on the server) which lead to talking about Skywars and glitches and Hackers and one of those great moments when you see E in his element talking to some one who gets his specific specialist knowledge. We were lucky to catch them right at the start. E was thrilled to hear the "unlimited power" voice behind one of his best characters in Super Smash Heroes too

Then we saw Sam, Grian and Taurtis again. Twice! S loves Grian's server Wynncraft and is a VIP on there and on the way home we concluded that not having meet and greets had worked pretty well for the people we had hoped to meet but we mostly chatted about the role play and how amazing it was.

S spotted 5 other YouTubers she likes Okami Artist, (who seemed genuinely touched to have been recognised) Sir Cutie Yuki, The Orion Sound, Power Dragon and Sea Pee Kay

We watched the live build battle show with DanTDM but thought Grian should have won - He'd even been training Fame over substance :) E was thrilled to see the competition was introduced by MooTV who we had chatted to on the Hypixel stand earlier.

An excellent day that exceeded expectations and made the 3 hours in the car home fly by :)

In the early days of blogging about home education and child led life learning I often used to say that 5 minute wonders where okay and that you could have a lot of fun in 5 minutes but the Minecraft theme has been running for over 2 years now! It was June last year when I started the Minecraft Mum blog

There was a lot more than Minecraft at Insomnia though - the age ratings for commercial games were advertised - E was keen to look at Halo 5 but it was rated 16 and one age 18 game was behind a black curtain! There was a big League of Legends area too but E doesn't like that anymore.

There were many people in cosplay at Insomnia - S just wore her sailor collar from Kagmine Rin and Japan Day deciding she wanted pockets and comfort also