Creative Loafing is spreading the word about a tweak to Dragon*Con‘s badge policy this year. Basically, if you don’t have a badge, you can’t get into the host hotels, not even into the public areas where, in past years, you could hang out, have a drink and watch the crowd.

There’s a huge argument brewing in the Creative Loafing comments between two distinct camps: the people who are angry that they can’t hang out at the con without a badge, and the people who think people who are hanging out at the con without a badge are freeloading riffraff.

This will be my eighth (I think) Dragon*Con, and based on my experiences in the last few years, limiting entry to the hotels to only people who have convention badges is a good move. It’s not because it makes the convention more exclusive. It’s not because it weeds out onlookers and nongeeks. And it’s not about the convention trying to turn a profit. It’s because the number of spectators has swelled to the point that cramming them all into the hotels at once has become dangerous. The convention can plan crowd control, fire safety and the like based on the number of badges sold — but a massive influx of observers who don’t have badges throws that plan out the window. I remember paramedics struggling through an immobile mob of people a couple of years back to get to someone who had collapsed. It wasn’t that people were deliberately getting in their way — it’s because there was just nowhere to go.

This conclusion also comes directly from just having returned from a weekend at PAX in Seattle. Both PAX and PAX East have nearly twice as many attendees as Dragon*Con. But I never felt like I was in a building with 59,999 other people at either event. I think convention staffing and logistics get part of the credit for that — but so does the capacity of the convention centers that host PAX, and the relatively low number of non-attendee spectators. In PAX’s case, it’s not because spectators aren’t allowed in public areas, but because the draw for spectators is a lot smaller. There are more people playing games and fewer people in costumes, so there are fewer people showing up to watch the show.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing how Dragon*Con’s new policy affects crowd control during the convention — especially during the evening hours when the horde tends to turn into a throng.

You can follow FanStuff on Twitter at @FanStuff, and you can keep up with us on the FanStuff Facebook page.