Well, the weekend is over, the Discord server spun down, and we’re pleased to announce that Go Play NW 2021 Online was a success! Thanks so much to everyone who registered for the event! We literally would not exist without your participation, and we also greatly appreciate your willingness to give an online version of the Go Play NW experience a chance to succeed. It was great to see a lot of old friends and make some new ones as well, and we hope you’ll all join us again at future events.

We (the Go Play NW executive board) want to give a shout-out to the volunteer staff who put in a lot of hard work to make the online event possible: E.T., our volunteer coordinator, donut moderator, and all-purpose meeting manager and organizer; Star, our Discord wizard who tested several different options for online hosting and tools before we settled on Discord, and built or modified several Discord bots to automate as many of the processes as possible; Jerry, who’s stepped in as our webmaster and helped us get both our website and email in working order and prepared for future development and improvement; and Angela, who served as our safety team for the weekend and is providing valuable consulting to help us better provide a safe and welcoming environment to a broader diversity of attendees. We also want to thank everyone who participated in our two pilots to test out our Discord server and procedures, and the Go Play NW friends (and former attendees) who volunteered to help us discuss and organize an online event and whose willingness to participate in meetings in 2020 for that purpose helped us keep the concept alive and prepared us for this year.

While we’re shutting down the Discord server we used for the Go Play NW 2021 event, we do have another ongoing Discord server for general Go Play NW discussion, which also has some channels set up for online gaming. Join us there at https://discord.gg/KFnYFmUR2m. Also keep an eye out there or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GoPlayNW for news as we discuss our plans for future events, including possibly hosting another online event in the near future—now that we have proved the feasibility and have the Discord set up, we know we can do more with little additional effort—and whether we’ll be returning to an in-person event in 2022 as we hope to do. We’re looking forward to seeing you next time!