Period popularity

[Phil Dutré]

I counted all the articles that were published in WI 1-259 (1987-2009) by period. This produced some interested results … (full numbers on http://snv-ttm.blogspot.be/2016/01/wargames-illustrated-period-popularity.html).

 

 

[Mike]

Interesting indeed, did not expect that to be in number one place.

That must have taken a while?

 

[Don Glewwe]

That certainly explains why I have such trouble corralling interest/feedback on my WW1 aircombat game…

[Guy Farrish]

Interesting.

Still not sure  I can believe the first category!

Are the sub genres (eg Vietnam) already included in the main category total (Modern?) or should they be added together to get an overall figure for, in this example, moderns?

Oh – and how did ‘fantasy’ become a ‘historical’ period?

I am surprised that during that period WWI emerges as high as it did (even more so than the winner).

[Fredd Bloggs]

WW2 has 210 articles in total, splitting it as land, sea and air I could see, but some of the divisions are… odd.

 

Interesting though.

[Not Connard Sage]

Too much granularity in places, the TMP disease 😉

 

Examples:

Wars of the Roses fits into medieval. Napoleonic is…Napoleonic, whatever the theatre. WW2 and WW2 Market Garden, why single out one campaign? I’ll stop there

 

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Guy Farrish]

Okay, having been prompted by actual figures – re WWII

WWII                        104

WWII Eastfront        50

WWII Naval               21

WWII D Day              20

WWII Pacific             19

WWII Africa              17

WWII Air                   12

WWII Mkt Garden     7

Total                         250

So I guess that answers the question are the sub periods/genres part of the total WWII figure – no as they add up to more. But as NCS says, why split along these lines? All WW2 together would put it way ahead of medieval for example – even adding the Asian subdivision. A more likely #1

[Not Connard Sage]

I should have written ‘one operation in a campaign’.

 

Even Homer nods 😉

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Phil Dutré]

The numbers are exclusive. Every article is only counted once and not in multiple categories. So, Vietnam is seperate from Modern.

As for classifications being questionable, I refer to my blogpost:

Of course, I might have mislabeled some, and sometimes I subdivided (or did not!) a period into several subgenres for no good reason except my own illogical judgement.

It is not a scientific experiment. It’s just a nice little byproduct of my effort of indexing my whole collection of Wargames Illustrated …

[Guy Farrish]

Yes and I apologise if I seemed critical.

I refer to my very first comment : ‘Interesting’ – a genuine use of the word, in no way ironic or sarcastic.

Just a bit of a harmless numbers game on my part. No doubt as was yours

Prompted largely by my disbelief that Medieval could trounce Ancients, Napoleonics and WWII!

 

[Phil Dutré]

Not Connard Sage wrote:

Wars of the Roses fits into medieval. Napoleonic is…Napoleonic, whatever the theatre. WW2 and WW2 Market Garden, why single out one campaign?

Yeah, well. Typing in the complete index took me roughly 3 months, adding a few issues every day. I (sub)divided in categories as I went along. If I would start anew, I would probably redefine some of the subdivisions, but life is too short …

 

[Guy Farrish]

Don’t worry, if it were down to me the divisions would probably be:

Wargaming.

Other

So you are way ahead of me!

[Phil Dutré]

Guy Farrish wrote:

Yes and I apologise if I seemed critical.

No offence taken 🙂

The numbers are not an endorsement of any sort to proof that period x or y is the most “popular”. It’s just the raw data as I typed it in. Everyone should interpret any way they see fit … 😉

I full agree you have to take the numbers with a grain of salt. Although they do reflect the entries in the database, there are some things you might want to take into account when doing a more detailed analysis:

• multi-part articles in subsequent issues are only counted as one. Some “articles” ran for 5 issues or even longer;
• weighing the numbers by page-count would reflect “popularity” perhaps better, but I am not going to count all the pages in all these issues!

[Guy Farrish]

You would only end with some twit turning round and saying -‘Ah but what about the pictures in xxxx? You need to do a word count to be accurate!’

(and yes it would probably be me!) so I would happily endorse your decision to stick while you are ahead.

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