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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 1891104" data-attributes="member: 19893">Well, I don't see it as my duty to bring the data I've seen to you on a silver platter, but I will point you in the right direction. There have been a number of reports about the state of gaming and gaming trends (everything from marketing reports to essays) about the hobby.All agree that in the mid to late nineties two simultaneous phenomena occured:1. many many people who were playing RPGs stopped.2. there were way way less younger teens starting to play.Those two circumstances led to a crisis we are still facing today in gaming.Now, there are different people who argue different things about the cause of this decline. Many of those who support story-based gaming would like to claim that it was the CCG craze, not their takeover of the RPG industry, that caused this flight. "It was magic cards!".. ..which is a bit like saying that no one dies of AIDS, just of AIDS-related pneumonia. Had the RPG industry been strong, and been producing products that younger teens and old-time gamers enjoyed and wanted to pay for, the RPG industry would have been far more ready to weather the CCG fad. But instead, the intellectual bankruptcy of most gaming companies (especially WW) and their lack of vision in following trendy models of game design that seemed successful but were really only ever successful in ONE case (Vampire), and there only because it was specifically oriented to PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T GAMERS AND WOULDN'T LIKELY PLAY ANYTHING ELSE EVER, led to a crippling weakness in the RPG market that made a minor problem (CCGs) into a disaster.so:pretentious academic plague = Bad game design = weak gaming industrybut only IF people allow the pseudointellectuals out there to take over and push their bad design over what works.Hopefully Wizards won't get to that same point of weakness TSR was at.. nevertheless, one must be vigilant.Nisarg</blockquote>

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