Sunday Sermon: Does the industry do enough?

I'm helping fill in for Von...

I've recently had to step into the breach over at House of Paincakes with one of their organisers over there Lauby. We've both had to fill in for Von, one of their regular writers, who is currently mid house move, and thus doesn't have the time to churn out articles right now. To be brutally honest I'm not too sure either Lauby or myself were quite as well prepared for 'filling in' for Von as we could've been. But, what this has meant is that what we have done is create an interesting discussion around a topic that has got me thinking quite deeply, so as I say it has at least been interesting to me. Hopefully what it has sparked within me you will find interesting too. I've often spoken about our hobby's need for evangelists, and I still think that we as gamers have a duty to evangelise and recruit for the hobby. After all we too have a vested interest in keeping our hobby going and thriving, it's in our own interests to grow our local communities. However, my conversations with Lauby over at House of Paincakes have focused on the industry's role in all of this, in short are they taking the piss? Do they do enough themselves or are they far too reliant on us gamers to do the hard work for them? In the first conversation we touched on whether the hobby is producing the sort of gateway products that are required to help successfully rope new gamers into the hobby.

The impressive St Louis Gateway Arch

It's a difficult topic to define, and a difficult task for the companies themselves to broach. It's not easy for a company to produce a single successful game, let alone an extra separate product to suck people to that game as a gateway. But firstly let me define what I believe a gateway product is. In my second conversation with Lauby I think I did a good job of defining what I view as a gateway product. In that article I mentioned what I consider to be the holy trinity of wargaming, collecting miniatures (including painting), playing the games and reading the back story. These three things will have different levels of importance to us all individually, but all are intrinsic to what we call 'the hobby'. Without one of those facets I think it's clear to see that what is presented or served up to us is somewhat diminished. Pre-painted miniature games aren't 'the hobby', and painting without the games is something entirely different also, both 'hobbies' have their merits, but they're not 'the hobby'. Also a number of companies who have started selling a game without a strong backstory have rapidly learned of such elements relative importance to the sale of their product as a whole. As Mantic are just now discovering with Kings of War, and look to be addressing now by building a strong background with the announcement that the 3rd edition of Kings of War is getting a proper rulebook release... complete with full Mantica background!
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