Saving Board Games from the Gamers (Part 2)
May 13th, 2007 by Edward Pollard
Previously I outlined a deep concern I had with the state of modern board games: that the industry is being driven by an unreasonably hardcore fan community. This is not a premise supported by any objective, measurable phenomenon. Instead I draw this out of my distilled experience with the BoardGameGeek site, and drew some specific examples of it in action from The Dice Tower, a board game podcast. It is a subjective opinion, a feeling, a hunch, something that cannot be proven true or false. What I wanted to do was talk about it, get it out in the open, because regardless of its accuracy or fairness I felt it was important to do so - and I’ve always been one who thought the act of communicating was more important than the validity of being right.
Some would say that I have immersed myself into a subculture only to have the audacity to turn around and complain about its dominant players. This is absolutely correct.
I participate via website forums, podcasts, and the occasional email correspondence with a wide assortment of total board game fanatics. I watch the games that they are finding interesting, I gobble up their session reports, and I turn to them for guidance in making purchasing decisions (my first stop for reviews is ALWAYS Tom Vasel). I look forward to reports from Essen, especially any news on the latest Alea release as that is my own particular brand of board game fetishism. I giggle over Scott Nicholson’s unapologetic enthusiasm for instructing board games, and I got really excited about the Talisman reprint. Really really excited.
But I could never be what I’ll term here an extremophile gamer. I can’t purchase games with the alarming regularity I see some doing. I can’t plan my vacations around gaming conventions - especially multi-thousand dollar Essen affairs - as I have commitments to my non-gaming life. I can’t play games to the point where they are understood to the degree of mechanical playing like all those people who ruined online Puerto Rico for me have. But you’ll notice two distinct threads to this paragraph: A limit on my time, and a limit on my money. There are people out there without those limits, or who choose to prioritize things in a way that makes their limits different than mine. Are they making wise decisions? It is not my place to judge. The essential reality is they all make choices I can’t or won’t, and that isn’t something I intended to criticize explicitly. I need - and the gaming scene needs - those people to exist. The fandom requires what I will lovingly call that degree of lunacy to keep momentum. It is integral to the gravity that sucked so many of us in and a small niche like modern board games cannot exist without it.
I just don’t think modern board games should be a small niche.
The problem that I am perceiving is that the modern board game industry is no longer treating such extremists as the exception and are instead working to milk this incredibly small audience for all they are worth. Aspirations of reaching out to the average American family have fallen by the wayside, and instead there is a desire to crank out as many games as possible to fuel income by selling large quantities of extremely similar games to an audience that will accept anything and everything. The industry has turned in on itself instead of looking outward at opportunities for growth. Again, this is intuition talking - I don’t have a codex of statistics on game sales, audience size, and relative similarity of the 2006-2007 crop of modern games. I invite anyone with a background in marketing modern games to embarrass/educate me.
What is important to note is that the major impetus behind this complaint is my inability to find a comfortable niche within the gaming subculture. I find myself alienated by those whose dedication to board games vastly exceeds my capabilities, regardless of whatever choices I’d make. And not only does industry attention seem to be dominated by servicing a small and insular community, the online gaming scene I have found is also dominated by individuals dedicated to perpetuating it. Those two groups - the publishers, and the die-hard gamers together, are basically the entire modern gaming scene and I see neither interested in growing the community, reducing barriers to entry, and actively proselytizing and advocating gaming to the average person. I don’t find a large audience of moderate games within which to immerse myself, and I don’t think that is representative of where gaming should be. I stumbled quite by accident into board games via some old role playing game ties that have existed since high school. How is your average soccer mom supposed to find out about them?
Is this market I feel is awaiting discovery fictitious? I don’t think so. The world around us is loaded with families craving solid, entertaining, and wholesome group activities. And a few titles have penetrated with something resembling substance: Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan are at the front of that line. More than that, the success modern board games have found outside of the North American market seems to mirror what I am calling for, a wider, family-based gaming movement. The recurring sales of Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit indicate the American zeitgeist is at least compatibile with the idea of the board game. My intuition is that there is untapped potential here.
I’m not saying I want orphans playing Arkham Horror. There are a number of games I enjoy considerably that belong on the niche, enjoyed by the dedicated and unapproachable by the masses. But again these should be the fringes of the industry, not its central offering.
What I want to see, and don’t know where to find, is a network of moderate gamers. I might have my nerdier game nights, but at the core I am a person who wants to see copies of Ingenious replacing Rummy, or Mystery of the Abbey replacing Clue. I don’t think the extreme gamers and the atmosphere they cultivate is at all compatible with introducing these games to the audience that I think is just around the corner. We need an advocacy network of moderate gamers to cultivate an atmosphere in schools, churches, community centers and coffee shops that accepts these games. The moderate gamer, somehow, needs to step to the front of the line both in the gaming community and in the industry perspective. The face of gaming in North America needs to be redeemed, saved from the extreme gamers, and introduced to the masses.
I never intended to pick on anyone with these commentaries, and if any hard feelings remain I blame my shortcomings as a communicator. My perception is that the extremophile gamers are very happy and I don’t begrudge them that or suggest that they should not be. I just think the industry and the fandom is catering too much towards the way that they play games, and that way is incompatible with the way that the mainstream audience would play, with the way I would play. Which is where we run into the place where my observations run out and my confusion sets in: I can only see change happening once a critical mass of moderate gaming is achieved, and I think we are far from that scenario. So the specifics of how we move towards it is not something I fell comfortable in addressing. I just want to put it before everyone who loves ‘meeples’ and has ‘wood for sheep’ that change is necessary for our hobby to achieve its true potential.
“I only can see change happening once a critical mass of moderate gaming is achieved, and I think we are far from that scenario. So the specifics of how we move towards it is not something I fell comfortable in answering. I just want to put it before everyone who loves ‘meeples’ and has ‘wood for sheep’ that change is necessary for our hobby to achieve its true potential.”
This being the crux of your writings, I would agree with you. However, you said some other things in your original post about shows like the Dice Tower being bad for the hobby. Something like that I cannot agree with at all, and it seems well nigh contradictory (though not completely) to this post here. In this post you come very close to endearing shows like the Dice Tower, because you enjoy them (as you also stated in part one). The Dice Tower and its counterparts are to function in what I would call (for lack of a better term) a propaganda machine. We, in my opinion, are the clarion call of the hobby. Mostly intended for those who are in the hobby, but also to draw attention to the hobby for those outside of it. Let me give you an example…the soldier gameday at Camp Casey here in Korea in which Tom and I are involved. The ONLY (my personal religious beliefs aside) thing that got us into that door was the popularity of The Dice Tower, at least as far as I know. We started with just a few (4-5…including Tom and I) , and have grown to 10-15 in just a few short months…that’s a tripling in size. I say all that to say this…I cannot see how one can think that boardgame podcasts are bad for the hobby. We (collectively) show the excitement and involvement that our hobby offers. I recall a post on the thread on BGG about the college student who went an entire semester with a group of gamers without knowing they were gamers. I’m just shooting in the dark here, but had that college student been a boardgame podcaster, a new campus gaming group may have been started!
Change is somewhat inevitable in situations like ours for advancement to occur. But to start shooting at our soldiers on the front lines isn’t the way to exact that change. I am not offended at all, and I don’t believe Tom is either. Your viewpoint is valid to a degree, and has, at least, sparked meaningful debate on the topic.
Until Next Time…Sam.
Then now, at the end of things, let me respin that earlier implication: It is a bad thing for gaming that The Dice Tower, and the level of entrenchment inside gaming it represents, is the biggest name in board game podcasts. Its great for you, me, Mary, Tom, and all the uber-board-game nerds. But as stated I think the game industry spends too much of its attention on that level of gaming and not enough on getting new people in the front door. The Dice Tower can get some people in the front door, but not the numbers needed to create that critical mass of gaming.
I never meant to say it in a way that could be taken such that if The Dice Tower fell off the face of the planet tomorrow gaming would be a better place. Thats just not true.
You are taking a cue from the wrong rebels, and your dissatisfaction is directed at the wrong culprits. If in fact they are culprits at all.
Sites like BGG and podcasts like the Dice Tower are not directed at the casual gamer. Almost by definition, the “casual” gamer has no interest, inclination, or desire to visit a website or podcast to be exposed to games they’ve never heard of. They are casual.
Casual gamers will only be exposed to these games by the activities of folks they eoncounter who are also passionate, evangelistic gamers. Be it in someone’s home, in the park, at school, or at work. And it just so happens, that many of these folks find sites like BGG and podcasts like the Dice Tower to be very informative and helpful in their personal quests to have more friends with whom to play games.
It’s just that sort of infectious excitement, like the Dice Tower folks emit, that is necessary to get casual gamers and non-gamers to be willing to try out something new like your typical eurogame. This is called word of mouth. And it’s just about the only way that people outside the niche will ever hear about anything new. If the new stuff appeals to enough people, then it will eventually become mainstream.
In the meantime, publishers necessarily produce games for the markets that exist so that they can sell games and make money for their shareholders/owners.
But to fault the infectious and excited people for being infectious and excited (enough to contribute to BGG or to produce a podcast) is ironic, not to mention intellectually lazy and, ultimately, self-defeating, if in fact your desire is to expand the universe of gamers.