Reply To: Is Wargaming Dying in the US?

[irishserb]

A lot of interesting points made above, and it would take pages of post to respond to all of them.  I won’t do that to you, but will offer  the grossly abbreviated (and still too wordy) thoughts below.

I became critical of the “greying of the hobby” fears some years ago.  I was involved in running a number of conventions over a 17 year span, working most often as convention director or event coordinator, sometimes for my HMGS chapter, sometimes not, sometimes funding the cons out of my pocket, sometimes not.  During that entire 17 years I was warned of (and for the most part believed) the concerns about the greying of the hobby.  I recorded a lot of data at those cons including hourly attendance numbers, hourly fill rate of events, which periods/ rules/ scale/ etc were well received, etc.  I also recorded estimated aged of the majority of the attendees for most of those cons (ranging from 140 to 350 attendees).  What I found is that all of the convention populations were made up by at least 60 percent of what I qualified as “older guys”.  There was a total of about an 8 percent range of variation in this number through those years.  In time I became convinced that whatever the year, the greying guys always were concerned with the greying of the hobby, but that nothing was really changing much.  Maybe that is no longer true, but I haven’t been able to see it yet.

I don’t travel to game nearly as much as I used to, as the economic downturn of a few years back hit me hard, so I spend my gaming dollars on figs , rather than gas, meals, and hotels.  Additionally, things that I used to have to go to conventions to experience, I can now do at home.  Maybe I am the problem.

The comments about Denver gamers seem to me to be true of those in Ohio and generally those in the eastern portion of the US.  I eventually became frustrated with it during my time working for HMGS.  My experience has been that generally, the more public the group is, the harder it is to actually work with.

I would argue to some extent that the location of manufacturers may not be an indicator of health of the hobby, but that is very much from my personal purchases and those of my gaming groups over the years.  I (and we) have always bought more rules and figs from UK sources, than from US.  Over the last 17 years, the internet has increased my non-US purchases.  I would guess that isn’t uncommon, but a sampling of one or a few doesn’t make a good survey.

US magazines?  I’ve bought maybe seven of them in 40 years.  UK and French publications, more like 150.  Why?  Mostly color photos and real publication schedules.  I realize that there were US exceptions to this, but given my experience working in the hobby business, I’m pretty sure that others shared my view regarding some of them.  Though there are exceptions, most magazines articles just don’t offer good return for the money, and to me, a good photo is usually worth more than four pages of written inspiration.  So UK over US was usually a given.

While the American gaming community may be something less than a community, in the last ten years, my opportunities to game with other groups and at shops have been far more numerous than in any other ten year period back to the mid 1970s.  In my area, informal groups are everywhere, and there are a fair number of shops with gaming.  My job and income limit me, but the hobby doesn’t.  My experience is simply different from what Mike shares above.

And, I’ve met John/Winston.  In person, I think you’d find him to be good people.