When I got introduced to gaming, it was through a club. Most of the clubs were run by the university, and everyone in them were affiliated with the university in some way, or knew someone who was. If you were a longtime local that liked games, it was a very long and tough thing to get introduced to strategic or tabletop games in anyway. At the time I started, there weren't really anything even close to "game stores". There was a comic book store that "sold" games, but it was halfhearted at best, and you had to special order, and you certainly couldn't PLAY there.
Even going to the comic shops was a whole lot different. While comics were definitely "geeky", being a gamer got you labeled "weird", "nerdy" or "a dweeb". There was a definite stigma to being "one of those guys" in those stores.
Ordering books was a whole different animal, too. Most of the time, you had to put an order in and wait for the guy to get together enough orders for free shipping. Sometimes, that was a few days and other times it was weeks.
Being in a club was an interesting affair. Dues and funds were used to put on shows, much like the ones we see across the pond these days. Members had specific talents, and shared them with each other to better the status of the hobby. Often, the shows were giant episodes of "show and tell", with members and friends enjoying each other's handiwork and growing the hobby together.
Today, things are different. FLGS are more and more common, with places like Titan Games as giant playgrounds for the geeky kind. D&D and Settlers of Cataan are featured prominently on popular TV shows like Big Bang Theory. The nerds are no longer irrelevant, and are power players in the economy of past times.
That's what has happened in the US. I don't know enough about the UK to say if their situation will change or be different, but I'd love to learn.
I'd really like to do an interactive series, talking about the state of affairs in the UK and how clubs impact the hobby scene. I'd also like to see what might be possible for the development of FLGS and other nerdy places that way. Please chime in with thoughts, ideas, and questions, and I'll see what I can bring about in conversation.
4 comments:
Great topic. I've wondered this myself for sometime. I like the concept of club play. It seems odd we would depend on stores to provide us a public place to play.
But a public location is necessary to grow the hobby because:
Opening up their homes to strangers is not appealing to some established gamers.
Or
Interested parties who don't know any gamers won't have a public venue where they can"discover" the hobby.
I think clubs are more of a thing in the UK than in the US, and shop-based gaming something less of a thing once you're out of the GW 'hobby centre' paradigm. A lot of the pokey little hobby shoppes don't seem to have the space for actual gameplay, which may be part of it, and I think the 'blokes in sheds' tradition of game development naturally feeds into larger gatherings of blokes in larger sheds.
I say 'I think' 'cause it's not like I've been everywhere. And I have regularly played in a few shops as well as a few clubs in hired rooms, so I don't want it to sound like things are diametrically opposed on opposite sides of the pond or anything. I just think we might have more clubs where you can't buy things and more shops where you can't play games.
I'm not a big fan of gaming in the gamestore.
Can't curse, or drink adult beverages, or smoke.
Seriously, seriously BORING.
Gaming with the Ultimate Rival in the garage gets a lil' hot in summer and a lil' cold in winter. A 'club' would be heaven.
What Von said.
I've played at around 16 different gaming clubs over about 25 years of gaming, plus a handful of GWs, across the Midlands (Nottingham, Mansfield) and Northern England (Manchester, Hull, Sheffield) and, until the last couple of years, it's always been in places that were clubs, not stores.
The clubs have ranged from six guys in a basement, to groups meeting in function rooms of pubs, to groups with permanent facilities rented solely for the purpose of gaming.
Thinking about it though, those recent stores with permanent tables set up for gaming are primarily card games and comics, with wargames being a sideline. (The exception to that being Maelstrom Games, with permanent wargames tables in a wargames store.)
Non-GW wargames shops as far as I've seen seem to be smallish places with games and models crammed into every space they can get them. For instance, Sheffield's Wargames Emporium, Burton's Spirit Games and Orc's Nest down in London all follow this pattern.
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