Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426434This is reasonable on its face--the followup survey could have deliberately selected a higher proportion of game players than in the general population, and then statistical methods could be used to re-weigh and extrapolate. I would be wary of saying much about the non-gaming population using the followup survey, but that wouldn't be something you'd do anyway.

However, sample sizes in the hundreds might still be too low for reliable cluster analyss, depending on the number of variables.

I suspect the 6% figure was arrived at from the initial postcard survey, not from the follow-up survey, as the data needed to arrive at the 6% figure was part of the data needed for the screening process as described... and you appear to be right about the sample sizes in theory, but I suspect the sample is large enough (if say 200 people) to provide interesting/useful conclusions even if not ultra-reliable, assuming the right questions are asked

BTW is there any hard data on what proportion of the population still plays TRPGs/LARPs/specifically boffer-LARPs on a regular basis? Is there any firm evidence that it has declined dramatically as Dancey appears to suggest?

Quote from: Benoist;426446Maybe I could have been clearer, but I wasn't talking about the logic of people migrating from one medium to the other. It is what it is (assuming the data is correct in the first place, of course). I was thinking of the analysis of the data, what RPG designers chose to do with it. How TRPG design evolved from there. Read my post again.

My bad.

And yeah, I agree.  I'd much rather play Final Fantasy Tactics or run a border skirmish in EVE than run straight through a series of 4e encounters -- the encounter rules for 4e are not the reason that I play D&D.  The logic of applying MMO design to TRPGs is borked, when the creative and flexible aspects of TTRPGs are what should be promoted.  An example being the Gamma World game we played last night, where our GM let us re-skin our weapons to be whatever we wanted them to be, since the weapon rules are so simple.  While there's no mechanical benefit to making something different, the immediate validation you get from others going "Yeah, that's cool, let's roll with that" is what makes TT fun, IMO.  MMOs and video-games can't provide that sort of shared imagination that everyone gets in on.

It's why I like story-games.  BUT, also why my next campaign of D&D is going to be OD&D/S&W.

Quote from: Omnifray;426443One conclusion we draw from this data is that people who play electronic
games still find time to play TRPGs; it appears that these two pursuits are
ìcomplementaryî or ìnoncompetitiveî outside the scope of the macroeconomic
ìdisposable incomeî competition.

If that logic still holds true, WoW won't be stealing gamers.

Computer RPGs and MMOs are two entirely different beasts.  One is a solitary experience (i.e. no network externality), the other is a social experience.  Also, the MMO overlaps with the 8 Core Values very strongly, whereas many CRPGs did not.

The MMO was too embryonic for us to study it in 1999.  I wish I had the money to repeat the survey today though...

RyanD

Quote from: Omnifray;426443Well, I dunno. I know plenty of people who play WoW and LARP, and plenty who play TRPGs and LARP, and plenty who do all three.

This is a well known bias in polling and market research.  "Everyone you know" are selected by demographic, geographic, and other criteria and are more likely to be similar to you than different from you.  This is why it is impossible to use anecdotal evidence to generate high-confidence market research conclusions.

Quote from: RSDancey;426450Computer RPGs and MMOs are two entirely different beasts.  One is a solitary experience (i.e. no network externality), the other is a social experience.  Also, the MMO overlaps with the 8 Core Values very strongly, whereas many CRPGs did not.

The MMO was too embryonic for us to study it in 1999.  I wish I had the money to repeat the survey today though...

RyanD

Maybe it's the Internet which gives me the power to hunt out gaming experiences. Maybe it's my car. Maybe it's the fact that I'm an adult with disposable income. Maybe it's that I live in a conurbation with 5 times the population of the conurbation where I lived as a child.

Whatever it is, I find it far easier to find roleplayers now than I did as a child, or even 5 years ago. And there's a strong (very strong I'd say) immersionist contingent among them. Plus, when people finally "get" (grok?) immersion, they tend to prefer it to what I will disrespectfully call shallower forms of play such as how you describe the Powergamer and Thinker styles of play.

So, I suspect your survey would not produce as pessimistic results as you believe, if you repeated it now. I certainly don't see MMOs sucking the life out of Character Actor TRPGing any time soon, and DEFINITELY not out of LARP, which has a stronger hold on the participants' psychologies IMHO. I guess the difference between us is that you care about the commerciality of RPGs, and I care about being able to find a LARP I can turn up to and join in with, and a tabletop group I can game with. I am in a better position now than 5 years ago in both those regards, and better than 15 years ago too. And I suspect I'm not alone. But I do meet TRPGers through LARP and conventions, and the ones I game with regularly I either meet through LARP or have known for ages. I wouldn't really bother seeking out new blood other than through LARPs.

Did your survey questions get at the essence of immersion?

Quote from: RSDancey;426450The MMO was too embryonic for us to study it in 1999.  I wish I had the money to repeat the survey today though...

This was the key bit of information I was hoping to see. Thanks.

(Edited my previous post quite a bit.)

As I say the majority of roleplayers that I know, I know through LARP groups, partly because LARP groups tend to be large; 12 would be piddly, 70 is kind of reasonable, and 200 is quite feasible, and 1,000+ is not unknown. I LARP for the sake of LARPing, but it also provides me with more random encounters with TRPGers than I would ever have through other means except TRPG conventions or TRPG clubs. Having said which, actually, I'm popping along to a TRPG club soon. A regular club with 12-18 people turning up, which serves basically a small part of the city where I live, with maybe a population of 20,000 people (based on a 2001 census) in the immediate target area. Quite a large student population nearby and I imagine they or recent graduates supply a fair proportion of club members. I don't think TRPGing can be desperately unhealthy.

But there might be a slowdown in sales if people are using old products, freely downloaded stuff, etc.

Quote from: Benoist;426288I think that is what you are talking about, from this post and that thread prior to it.

bingo! Thanks Ben...

Quote from: skofflox;426458bingo! Thanks Ben...

From Benoist's link:-

Despite the popularity of spinoff role-playing games, including such hits as the "World of Warcraft" computer game ... the original D&D paper-and-pencil game — created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974 — has retained a sizable following. This is largely thanks to the open-ended freedom offered to players in the imaginary game, according to class facilitator Dave Burbank, a Takoma Park library specialist.

"A lot of kids nowadays don't get an opportunity to express their creativity; they spend a lot of time on the console playing games with their thumbs, but the limits of those games are as created by the game creators," he said.  ... [Dungeons & Dragons] at its base is playing ‘let's pretend.'"

Will WoW / online games replace this "creative" element? Is this what Dancey is saying may happen by 2020 for the Storyteller crowd?

Quote from: Omnifray;426437No it's 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 22% (of TRPGers) + 12% = 100% (of TRPGers)

While that makes much more sense than what I thought Ryan was saying, the fact that this adds up to 100% makes me somewhat suspicious of the results. There were no gamers surveyed who did not clearly fall into one of these five clusters? Possible, but it seems a bit unlikely.

Quote from: Omnifray;426460Will WoW / online games replace this "creative" element?

In my mind, it's like asking if television will soon have better pictures than radio.

Quote from: RSDancey;426415This is a huge problem, but not on the quality level.  Quality is on the client side, and even average game rigs in the 2010s will be able to support this level of detail for 100s of avatars.  The problem is the N^2 interprocess communication problems that stress the servers and the network connections.  But those are also problems that are being solved by Moore's law and by faster broadband rollouts.

Yeah, I was talking about the client side thing. I no longer play games on my PC, preferring the console, so sounds like I'm out of touch in terms of what's possible client side in terms of detailed figures.

QuoteWe now live in an era where there are between 1 and 2 million "MMO Hobbyists" - people with allegiance to no game, but to the genre.  They switch from AAA to AAA MMO as they ship (virtually all of which are Theme Parks), burn through the content faster than the developers thought possible, and then quit with complaints that the game is "boring" or "too short".  This creates an "s-curve" of player participation which is actually really bad for MMOs - they have variable costs that scale with the size of the player base (servers, bandwidth, customer service, GMs, billing, etc.), but they take much longer to ramp up and ramp down than the length of the initial spike.  

Star Trek, Conan, Warhammer, and Aion all suffered from this problem spectacularly.

One of the things the next generation of MMOs is going to address is finding ways to moderate this effect.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking about when I was talking about bad launches. The S-Curve effect is so bad right now that it's hard to see how anyone can have a successful launch.

QuoteOn the other hand, there are games that are doing quite well.  Runescape has 5 million players (1 million paying $5/mo).  Aion still has about 200K Western full price subscribers, and a much much larger business in Asia.  Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons online have had a huge renewal once they went to a hybrid free-to-play/microtransaction model.  The next AAA MMO likely to ship will be Star Wars: The Old Republic (but it is barely an MMO in my opinion and should probably be classified into its own special category).

The market for subscription based Western MMOs is between 5 and 10 million people (its very hard to narrow that down because many people play more than one MMO at a time).  The market for some kind of F2P/MTX model is probably 50 million.  So there is a lot of upside yet to come from this space - it's barely been tapped in some ways.

Interesting stuff. F2P (in its current form) doesn't appeal to me but it's certainly having some success. I admit, I do have a tendency to forget about the F2P games in the marketplace.

Everyone I know who plays MMOs these days is playing WoW, unsurprisingly.

Quote from: Lorrraine;426326Speaking as someone who probably would fall in the character actor segment, I have trouble buying that this segment has MMOs beating out RPGs. The best computer interface can not compare to face to face interaction. Yes people who have not tried TRPGs or who do not have a group available can get something out of the computer based interactions. That does not make the MMOs crack cocaine. Just the opposite.

Metal miniatures, character portaits, and even avatars matter a lot less than the chance to inhabit the character and play it as directly as possible. MMOs have not gotten there yet. Give me a virtual reality where I can see everything my character sees and I can interact with the virtual world with a minimal interface and yeah that would tempt me. Watching things on a screen and typing commands does not work for me.

I agree with this. I'm not sure whether it means we're mis-segmenting ourselves or if Ryan is misunderstanding what attracts Character Actors to TRPGs.

I can certainly accept that the people who do IC play on MMOs (and I know they exist) would possibly approach a TRPG the same way as me. But for whatever reason I (and all the other TRPG "character actor" style players I know) haven't been sucked in this aspect of things. I think for me it's the fact that the MMOs I've played have been more on the Theme Park end of things, and so you're always just trying to RP in very incongrous circumstances, and you can't actually pursue character goals in any meaningful ways.

I mean, sure, if I was to meet up with the people from my old EQ guild, they would be a bit surprised that the guy behind the keyboard isn't quite the same as Grymbok acted. But it was a thin layer of RP on top of 95% OOC speech...

Quote from: Omnifray;426460From Benoist's link:-

Despite the popularity of spinoff role-playing games, including such hits as the "World of Warcraft" computer game ... the original D&D paper-and-pencil game — created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974 — has retained a sizable following. This is largely thanks to the open-ended freedom offered to players in the imaginary game, according to class facilitator Dave Burbank, a Takoma Park library specialist.

"A lot of kids nowadays don't get an opportunity to express their creativity; they spend a lot of time on the console playing games with their thumbs, but the limits of those games are as created by the game creators," he said.  ... [Dungeons & Dragons] at its base is playing 'let's pretend.'"

Will WoW / online games replace this "creative" element? Is this what Dancey is saying may happen by 2020 for the Storyteller crowd?

:hmm: no way for WoW/online games to replace the free flow creativity of face to face TRPG play. If the people who "left the hobby for good" are not into this aspect of the hobby ie. just playing to kill stuff and level up while filling their heads with rules to gain advantage and basically just killing time (which in turn kills us all) then I say good ridence and have fun with your thumbs...

Seems obvious to me that the direction the D&D namebrand has taken is a dead end for those who game for (primarily) creative (dare I say artistic?!) reasons.
MORE RULES/SETTING MATERIALS DO NOT SUPPORT IMMERSIVE FLOW OF PLAY.
Sure the creative element is still there though it is obfuscated by "rules bloat" which only hinders creativity and flexibility at the table. Someone relayed that a DM they saw had like 20 books at the table...pathetic...

The inclusion of daily/encounter powers is a sad attempt to please the MMO/Console crowd especialy when tied to such a slow resolution mechanic...if D&D goes the way of the dodo it is because it was killed through ignorance as opposed to natural circumstance.