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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 1893657" data-attributes="member: 18017">Okay, my son's in bed now! Here was the seminar & its panelists as scheduled:However, there were several more of us up there than listed here; definitely Kenneth Hite and James Ernst, and maybe some others I'm not remembering - it was a crowded panel!The overall impression I expect people got from the panel was that the hobby game industry was going the way of wargaming or model railroading: something that was well past its peak in popularity, that continued to appeal to many devoted fans, but wasn't gaining new ones fast enough to replace those that drifted away, so that the core audience was graying and dwindling.The unarguable point was that there is no holy writ that there must be a roleplaying/board game/CCG industry, and that there are many forms of entertainment and genres of art which once flourished but now As for where panelists got their numbers: no PowerPoint presentations from suits of any kind. Kenneth Hite has shown his work in estimating the size of the RPG business in his yearly <a href="http://gamingreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=96" target="_blank">State of the Industry</a> columns, but I didn't hear any hard facts to support the contention that younger fans aren't getting into gaming like they used to (and this wasn't as obviously true at SoCal as it was at Indy; see below).Some interesting observations:- The three great waves of new players were linked to D&D, West End Games' d6 Star Wars RPG, and Vampire. (It was noted that two out of the three of these were unplayable as written - perhaps the drive to figure it out & create your own workable game out of a fascinating-but-incoherent mess was part of the appeal?) But each of these new waves was smaller than the first, and the gloomy forecast was that there would never again be a year like 1981, when every college dorm and nuclear submarine had a D&D campaign to call its own.- The best-selling RPG of all time is believed to be Pokemon Jr., a RPG designed for 6-to-8 year olds which sold relatively poorly in normal channels but went like hotcakes when it was discounted at WalMart. Word has it that this was part of WotC's plan to grow the industry by developing a series of RPGs designed for successively older kids, released on a schedule so that there'd always be a new game with a popular license designed to not only appeal to that age group but to match their cognitive development. However, the plug was pulled on this long-term plan after Pokemon Jr. performed below expectations.- Peter Adkinson definitely focused on bringing younger gamers to Gen Con So Cal: they sponsored field trips for several elementary, middle, and high-school classes, and there were quite a few pre-teens and families with children on the exhibition hall. I ran a demo game for a pair of ten-year-old boys who remi nded me of me when I was their age, and my inner child was deeply gratified when they were impressed enough to buy the minotaur book!- Some of the blame (self-accusation?) was placed on designers: that we're interested only in making the kind of games we ourselves like, so that we're becoming increasingly insular and have less to offer younger players.In response to this last, I pointed out that many of the graying members of the "greatest generation" of D&D were reaching the age where we were having kids of our own; being in this situation myself, I've been very interested the threads I'd seen here at EN World about people who had run their first game for their children. This led to a call for all gamers to have more children for the good of the hobby! Less ironically, though, I do think this will force us to think about what the essential genius of roleplaying is, how to transmit it to the next generation, and that this alone might be enough to spark a renaissance that keeps our hobby vital and growing.The future is our children; it's also a place in which we ourselves will get inexorably older and where everyone who's gone before has wound up dead. True as these things are, they'll get a gypsy fortune-teller nowhere, so in my next post I'll focus on the wild blue-sky ideas!</blockquote>

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