Golden Ages of Gaming

[GrimCo]

On the individual level, Golden age is one where you have stable group and enough free time. My personal golden age was 2003-2011. HS and Uni years. 2 stable groups, regular weekly games (sometimes even 2x week), 6-8 hour long Saturday sessions.

Generally, i would say that last decade was probably Golden age in general. TTRPGs broke into mainstream, got positive portray in media, became part of pop culture. Yt channels with actual plays, BBT, Stranger Things, celebs "coming out" as gamers. With internet and modern communications software and VTT, ttrpg shifted from IRL only to online play, which made finding groups and games easier than ever before, even for some more niche games. Availability of gamin materials is also big thing. DriveTrough, free SRDs, direct downloads from publishers, DMs Guild, Amazon for physical books. It also made creating and publishing games and game supplements easier, cheaper and more available, with Kickstarter and Gofundme as legit forms of financing. Last but not least, information about games. It's much easier to find what is out there than ever before.

 

[overgeeked]

I always took "golden age" to be a period of extremely high prosperity. Following that logic, the "golden age" of RPGs would be the periods with the highest amount of sales, growth, and income.

Based on what I've read from Ben Rigg's numbers that would be a first golden age of somewhere around 1980-84, and a second golden age of approximately 2018-2023. It should not be a surprise that these approximately match up with the cartoon and HAT movie.

I look at it more from a broadly healthy perspective. That WotC and 5E 3PP are making money is great for them, but 5E is effectively strangling the life out of the rest of the hobby / industry, so it's not a particularly healthy time for the whole despite a few making money. In other words, it's Wall Street vs Main Street. It's great for Wall Street that Wall Street is doing well, but unless Main Street is also doing well (which it isn't), then it's not really that healthy of an economy.

 

[Umbran]

To me, the Golden Age of gaming is whenever I manage to have lots of time to play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I look at it more from a broadly healthy perspective. That WotC and 5E 3PP are making money is great for them, but 5E is effectively strangling the life out of the rest of the hobby / industry, so it's not a particularly healthy time for the whole despite a few making money. In other words, it's Wall Street vs Main Street. It's great for Wall Street that Wall Street is doing well, but unless Main Street is also doing well (which it isn't), then it's not really that healthy of an economy.

I feel I can't agree with this until you define what Main Street needs to do to "do well" in your estimation. Make as much money as WotC? IMO that's an impossible standard unless WotC takes a major hit in popularly/sales. There are plenty of successful non-WotC games out there right now, they just don't exist on the same financial plane as WotC 5.5. Do they need to? Does everything and everyone in the hobby and the industry need to be compared to "the world's greatest RPG"?

 

[DragonLancer]

It depends how you see it. For me, the Golden Age of gaming was the 1980's into the early 90s. D&D predominantly ruled the roost but other RPGs that are iconic came out at this time. It was an era where I feel gaming was at it's height. The 90's saw a change in how RPGs manifested. White Wolf and their World of Darkness games took role-playing into a different direction and led to a decade (almost) of more player driven games. But I never found the decade did as well as the 80s did.

The silver age was the 2000's. 3rd edition D&D drew so many people into the hobby although they also brought their MMO playing mindsets with them, which IME led to player/group conflicts especially online. The 2000s also saw fantasy and science fiction becoming in chic in the public eye. I consider this the silver age because it reinvigorated the hobby. The 90's saw more women playing, rather than just men, which was good, but the 2000s seemed to draw ever more in. The hobby was not in it's Golden Age hay day but it burst back onto the scene.

Where we are now is what I might consider the Bronze Age. The hobby has seen a public resurgence thanks to the like of BBT, Stranger Things and celebrities coming out as gamers. But it doesn't feel the same as it did decades ago and I'm not sure why.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I largely agree with Greylord- unless you're going to do this is in a completely subjective way (the golden age for me was when I had the most time and played the most games, therefore...) it's best to model it after the Comic Books model.

With that in mind-

Golden Age 1979-84
From the Egbert Explosion to the ET Collapse (heh... little Atari reference for ya). In other words, the explosion of D&D into mass popularity (and fad status) that followed the media coverage of James Dallas Egbert III that lead to the mainstreaming of D&D (and other RPGs) in the fall of 1979, all the way through the over-expansion and pulling back in 1984 at TSR (which .... happened to mirror the similar over-expansion and collapse of the Atari 2600 and related video game consoles... maybe there's an essay in that somewhere).

Silver Age 2000-07
The release of 3e, the release of the OGL, the "return" of D&D as well as the incredible rise of people who were disaffected and started branching out to create new & different ways to game- either by seeking a return to the past (the creation of the OSR / retroclone movement) or mapping out different ways to game (the Forge and numerous new ways to indie game). The starting point of the silver age is easy- 2000 (release of 3e and the OGL). The ending point is ... harder. Is it ... 2003 (the release of 3.5e)? Naw.
2004? Castles & Crusades .... naw. Not OSR enough.
2006? When certain quotes appeared on the Forge? Mmm... closer. We also have OSRIC released on that date as well as BFRPG. Also also? Dread!
2007? The announcement of 4e (which lead to PF, etc.)? Maybe.
2010? Apocalypse World (PbTA)? Seems a little late and would bleed into the Bronze Age.

I'll peg it at 2007. We already have a lot of the underlying intellectual foment in terms of open licenses, new types of games, and OSR that will continue to be developed, and the 4e announcement (along with no open license) effectively gives it rocket fuel- but sticks a stake in the D&D part of it, effectively bifurcating the market ... for now.

Bronze Age 2016-23(?)
Finally, there is the bronze age. I thought about this a lot. I can't put it at the release of the PHB. But in 2016, we have the release of the OGL. The first season of Stranger Things aired on Netflix. Critical Role was beginning to gain momentum (although it wasn't what we think of it yet). 5e was back to being ... A THING. And we saw the publication of really popular materials for 5e- Curse of Strahd, VGTM. In addition, the indie market was beginning to hit on all cylinders- you had Blades in the Dark had early access availability in 2016 (with physical product in 2017) and storytelling games like Ten Candles were also becoming more mainstream.

So I'm going with 2016, although that's an inexact science.

Picking an end date? A lot harder. Some might argue we are still in the Bronze Age. I ... I am not so sure. It feels different. Less ... ebullient. Almost like there was a crescendo during the COVID time that took a little while to recede, and yet ... it did. I am putting it in 2023, with the announcement of 5.5e. Since then, it feels like there have just been interminable battles that mostly involve gamers ripping each other apart, arguments over licenses and "Which Corporation is Corporating Worse Than Other Corporations*" .... not to mention sharp battlelines between people who think 5.5e is just "more of the same" and those who view 5.5e as "fundamentally breaking 5e."

While we had a number of amazing iterations and revolutions in the gaming space occur in the indie gaming sphere (both earlier, and during the bronze age), it seems that there just isn't much ... truly new in the last two years, and people are arguing about implementation and artwork and the incorporation of retread rules into mass-market products.

IMO, YMMV.


*Parasocial relationships are a helluva drug.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I feel I can't agree with this until you define what Main Street needs to do to "do well" in your estimation. Make as much money as WotC? IMO that's an impossible standard unless WotC takes a major hit in popularly/sales. There are plenty of successful non-WotC games out there right now, they just don't exist on the same financial plane as WotC 5.5. Do they need to? Does everything and everyone in the hobby and the industry need to be compared to "the world's greatest RPG"?

I think its more a case of visibility.

Its hard for me to precisely explain what I mean here, but I can't help but think there were lot of other games that, even though they weren't really competing with D&D even then, were still playing at least vaguely the same playing field in visibility (at least once you got away from the "books in Toys R Us" level) in the 80's. I'm not at all sure that's true in the current environment; D&D's visibility has far exceeded most of the rest of the hobby, and that has an impact on the network element.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think its more a case of visibility.

Its hard for me to precisely explain what I mean here, but I can't help but think there were lot of other games that, even though they weren't really competing with D&D even then, were still playing at least vaguely the same playing field in visibility (at least once you got away from the "books in Toys R Us" level) in the 80's. I'm not at all sure that's true in the current environment; D&D's visibility has far exceeded most of the rest of the hobby, and that has an impact on the network element.

But they also have all the connections and all the marketing money. No one can compete with them, so maybe it's better just to discount WotC and D&D entirely beyond their inspirational role.