Marketing and passing D&D down to kids

[CarlZog]

I grew up hooked on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tolkien. When D&D came around it was a natural.

I'm not in the industry, but marketing RPGs to little kids seems precarious business to me. Not because of the old satan worship crap, but because you risk alienating your adult audience.

When younger kids started swarming to D&D in the early '80s, TSR responded with a flood of products aimed at the younger market: Action figures, Saturday morning cartoons, dumbed down rulebooks and kiddy boardgames. For a little while, you couldn't turn around without seeing that logo or theme plastered on some new, stupid piece of marketing-driven junk.

For those of us in our late teens and early 20s at the time, it was a huge turnoff. Nobody at that age wants to be associated with "kiddy stuff." At the time, I was really mad at TSR for "selling out." I quit buying TSR stuff.

Maybe times are different now, and certainly TSR wasn't the brightest bunch of businessmen ever assembled; But it still seems to me that it's difficult to take a brand or a franchise and create parallel lines of products for different age groups without turning off one group or the other.

I do agree that kids introduced to gaming (and to fantasy and sci-fi) at an early age will carry those traits to adulthood, and it's certainly in the industry's best interest to cultivate new generations of customers.

To the extent that there were any kids (say, under the age of 15) at GenCon this year, they were all playing CCGs and Clix games. It seems to me that the key to creating a new generation of RPG players is to create a means for the YuGiOh kids to come to D&D. Instead however, a lot of companies I saw in Indy seemed to be racing against each other to create more sophisticated adult-themed card and clix games so they could hang on to their kids into adulthood.

That leaves it up to players of RPGs to foster the next generation. No doubt everyone here is teaching their own kids (if you've got 'em), but share the joy: Organize games at your kid's schools, church groups, summer camps, community centers etc. It's great way for kids and parents to get an introduction to the game in a comfortable environment.

CZ

 

[Zander]

I've been interested in knights, dragons etc since about the age of 7. My earliest memory of a film is watching Jack the Giant Slayer on a black & white TV. But I didn't get really hooked on fantasy/D&D until my early teens.

I don't know where my penchant for fantasy comes from, but I'm pretty sure it's not from my family; no one but me is, or has been, even remotely interested in the stuff. I remain the only member of my family to have read the LotR or to have watched the movies. I doubt either of my parents know who Conan is. And I'm sure the name Gary Gygax means nothing to them (sorry, Col. P.).

Make of that what you will.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

Worse yet, we have a HUGE potential market in the Harry Potter fans, but there is no follow-up, no attempt to woo them. If Hasbro/WotC was smart they'd come up with a very, very simple rpg, one that would appeal to grade school kids and prepare them for later, more complex games.

Just my 2 coppers...

Actually WotC/Hasbero had the license to do a Harry Potter RPG (not sure if it was gonna be d20 or not) but Rowling put a stop to it once she realized that it ment that other people would be speaking for her characters.
She refused to let that happen.

 

[Rel]

I saw a ton of kids at the DnD movie why was there no tie in between the game and the movie.

All things considered, I think this may have been for the best. A better tack for Hasbro with regard to the DnD Movie would be to disavow all knowledge and insist that it never existed.

Killing all the actors involved couldn't hurt either.

As far as the topic, my 2 year old will get exposed to fantasy and rpg's to some degree whether she likes it or not because both my wife and I play. But I have no intentions of trying to force it on her if she doesn't take to it naturally.

 

[Emiricol]

This thread has been brought up before, but I was watching PBS with my 2 year old this morning and saw an AOL commercial. It always surprised me how companies market to kids:

McDonalds: Clown
Nestle Quick: Rabbit
On Nogin, I jst saw an add for Dove shampoo for kids, Dish Network (a dancing satellite dish!), Kleenex, Nestle Drumsticks, and a couple other things that surprisingly enough didn't have to do with 'moms.'
etc.

I just finished reading "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser and he goes over how 'tastes' are determined by age 4 and then cravings are determined for the rest of our lives. It's not just CN VII (Facial), CN IX (Glossopharyngeal) and CN X (Vagus), but includes psychological cravings as well.

Kids that are exposed to things like the Ren fest, castles, dragons, unicorns, knights, D&D, LotR, gaming fellowship, etc. at an early age will continue to associate with those early memories for the rest of their lives.

Strangely enough, you don't see much of this marketing for D&D. Worse, game conventions used to have lots of kids running around and they've regressed back to middle-aged people again.

Is D&D cyclical with fads or does it actually get passed down to kids? Was it passed down to you? Or were you 'sold'?

Em

..

First, just for the audience's benefit, let me clarify that this isn't an Alt ID for me In case my friends were wondering.

On the topic at hand, I was "sold". Well, really I liked to read from a very early age, and when I saw the OD&D boxed set in my aunt's closed I nagged her and nagged her to play it with me until she just flat out gave it to me to shut me up. All downhill from there

 

[CarlZog]

All things considered, I think this may have been for the best. A better tack for Hasbro with regard to the DnD Movie would be to disavow all knowledge and insist that it never existed.

Killing all the actors involved couldn't hurt either.

I'll second that (except for Arneson; don't kill Dave.) The DnD movie was a perfect example of how efforts to capitalize on the game in other media have gone miserably awry.

Novels and computer games seem to be the only places beyond RPG's where D&D has thrived. (I'm sure I'll get slammed for that generalization...)

 

[der_kluge]

I don't have any recollection of any exposure to fantasy elements before I was 5. I don't remember much from my early childhood, actually. I remember I liked to wear blue jeans and cowboy boots, and climb up this metal porch support and pretend I was a telephone repairman. Now I work for a phone company. Coincidence????


At any rate, my oldest sister purchased the Red Boxed set at KayBee Toy Stores (I think, or maybe Toys-R-Us) and had it for a long time, but couldn't really figure out what to do with it. She gave it to me to see if I could figure it out, but I couldn't. At best, I could just read it, admire the pictures, and play the solo game (that damned Rust Monster always killed me!). In 6th grade, I went to a birthday party, and we played a game, but I don't remember much about it. I still didn't really make the leap from reading the books to actually playing the game. I even invited some friends of mine over, and we were going to try to figure it out, but we never did really realize that someone needed to be a dungeon master.

It wasn't until I was in 10th grade and was invited to play with some people who were playing 1E that I finally figured it all out. I don't know, maybe I was just stupid. *shrug* I like to think otherwise.

I find that D&D appeals to people who are social outcasts. Now, before you slam me, I'm not saying that people who play D&D are social outcasts, I'm saying that a large chunk of social outcasts do play role-playing games in general. It's a form of escapism, and a chance to role-play a hero and make a difference, even if your regular life is crap. Look at the average people at a game convention. Oh sure, most are brilliantly smart, but a large chunk of them are virgins, too. These people don't fit in, so role-playing games appeal to them the same way games like Everquest do. Being exposed to that kind of stuff before age 4 doesn't have anything to do with it. Having a need to escape our boring lives does.

 

[Emirikol]

Re: Re: Marketing and passing D&D down to kids

Expand on this a bit - I don't agree with your statement that kids exposed at an early age continue to like those things later in life. Honestly, I think there are many other factors involved- from personality type to peers.... I see what you're getting at - there's no early mainstream media advertising targeted at kids specific to D&D - but would you really expect there to be? Parents don't generally encourage young kids to play games like D&D.

--*Rob

It's marketing research. Like it or not, my 2 year old has never eaten at a McDonalds, but say's 'McDonalds' everytime we drive by one. Hmmm. Ask me if that pisses me off

Obviously there's a lot of factors, but the marketers have a lot of stuff figured out. Early exposure greatly increases future craving/familiarity. If you're not exposed, chances are your best buddy was and he'll pressure you into it.

As for D&D not doing marketing to kids, they're simply not practicing good business. They HAD pokemon. What do they have now? Nothing. That helps predict another dry streak of players sometime in the future.

Jay

 

[Emirikol]

I think one of the reason WotC/Hasbro stays away from kid marketing is because they're gun shy. D&D had a mighty bad rep in the 80s, and look at all the unfavorable media coverage on video games and kids. After all, D&D is a game that is fundamentally about gaining personal power by killing other beings and taking their stuff.
-z

D&D has little to be feeling guilty about of course, however perhaps 'older-gamer-types' that are currently in charge of much of the production of the D&D product may be inherently more 'self-loathing' than people who haven't experienced such things.

You also can't stop those ads on TV. Parents don't care anymore. They've got their hands full with other stuff.

They should do it anyway, just to smart the hypocracy of the computer gaming juggernaut (I'm investing in EA games stock and making a killing). RPG's can pretty easily hide behind computer games and simply have the response: "We are just like computer games..go attack them."

Jh

 

[nsruf]

Actually WotC/Hasbero had the license to do a Harry Potter RPG (not sure if it was gonna be d20 or not) but Rowling put a stop to it once she realized that it ment that other people would be speaking for her characters.
She refused to let that happen.

What I heard she is merely unwilling to give advance information on the rest of the story - or even be forced to decide prematurely on key plot elements - which would probably be required to create a consistent game. That's her prerogative as an author, but I hope there will be a Harry Potter RPG once all books are done.