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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5246024" data-attributes="member: 22779">I honestly don't understand the idea that "The hobby is just fine in its current size."  Well, ok, I do kinda understand - people have stable groups and don't really care otherwise.  Fair enough I suppose.But, the benefits of massive growth, in my mind anyway, outweight any downsides.  Current estimates of gamers is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5 million (might be more or less, I'm picking 5 cos it's an easy number.)  Imagine for a second that we lived in a world where that jumped up to 50 million regular gamers worldwide.  Increase the current gamer population by ten times.Where's the downside?  Gaming becomes a totally socially acceptable past time, same as baseball or Euchre.  Instead of one company and a bunch of little ones supporting your hobby, you get hundreds of companies all competing for your dollar.Imagine opening up an RPG book with gaming fiction written by Stephen King, including a CD with a sountrack by Santana and artwork by fifteen different top of the line artists and an editing staff of dozens.All you have to do is look at the difference in video games to see what going truly mainstream does.  Compare any video game of the 80's to one of today.  Never mind the differences in technology, but also the writing, voice acting from leading actors, you name it.I mean, Halo gets Greg Bear to write fiction for it.  We're talking one of the top talents in SF writing game fiction.Is most of the stuff produced going to be crap?  Oh of course.  Sturgeon's Law always applies.  But, the fact that there's a thousand times more stuff out there to take advantage of means that that remaining 10% is going to be freaking GOLD.So, at the end of the day, I have no idea why people would want gaming to stay where it is.  I want the gaming population to be 50% female.  I want gaming to grow out of the suburbs and into every area.  I want to turn on the TV and see Magic the Gathering tournaments being played.  (Ok, that I wouldn't watch, but, I'd still LOVE to see it)</blockquote>

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