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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4861199" data-attributes="member: 14159">Exactly.One of my major hobbies is the "dressing up and swinging swords at dudes" (as you described it) larping.  (NERO is the larp I play in, in case you care to know, heck there was even an article about it in Dragon Magazine back in September '91, when Dragon was more than just a solely D&D magazine)It's still going strong.  Now, there are less people than there were 10 or 15 years ago, but there are still plenty of people, and certainly enough for the games to keep going.  We don't sit at home playing WoW (or EverQuest before that, or Ultima Online before that. . .) all weekend, we dress up in costume and get out big padded swords and run around a campground that has been made up to look like a fantasy world.  Why?  Because we like to actually socialize and interact and not just online.  Because we like to physically play out our fantasy adventures instead of doing them from a keyboard (or even a tabletop).  Because we like immersion and getting in costume and being in character for a day or two at a time is good for that in a way that online gaming will never be.  Until you can build a full-on Holodeck right out of Star Trek there are so many things that you can't emulate on a computer that are out there in the real world (and frankly that would be a whole new style of larping).With tabletop gaming, the social aspect of going over to a friends house, hanging out, ordering pizza and sharing food, while gaming will never be replaced no matter how good your online game is.  People still play real poker instead of online poker, people still play real chess instead of online chess, and people still play real monopoly instead of online monopoly, because a roleplaying game (larp, tabletop, whatever) is more than simply an exercise in mathematical simulation of a fantasy environment coupled with visual/audio descriptors of that simulation, it is a social activity.In a similar vein, about a decade ago, when I was in college, I had an acquaintance in our gaming club that was certain he'd be the next internet millionaire.  His idea was a subscription-based daily webcomic (back when webcomics were brand new), the idea that people would pay a few dollars per month to subscribe to his webcomic and that as he put it "the era of free content online is coming to an end".  I don't know if he ever launched the service, but I know it never succeeded.</blockquote>

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