Anyone else noticed this?
I went to Gencon this year for the first time in a decade. I noticed a couple of things:
(1) There was still plenty of young blood walking those convention hallways.
(2) The average age increased by at least 5 years (possibly 10) the instant you walked into the RPG rooms.
Right now, boardgames and CCGs are just flat-out better at attracting new blood than RPGs.
CCGs and boardgames are memetically viral in all the ways that RPGs used to be but no longer are: No long-term commitment, variable group composition, minimal learning curves*, and easy pick-up play. They are inherently
open tables the way that RPGs were open tables in the '70s and early '80s.
(*Even a more complicated boardgame like
Twilight Imperium still has a rulebook that's a fraction of the size of a typical RPG.)
Why did wargames die? Because they went from games that featured all the advantages of boardgames to a specialized entertainment that required long-term commitments, static group composition, steep learning curves, and a complicated set-up that prohibited pick-up play. They stopped being memetically viral.
RPGs have followed the same path: The industry is dominated by specialized games that are built around a long-term commitment to a multi-session campaign; a static group made up of the people playing in that campaign (and expected/required to attend every session); steep learning curves in which even creating a character can require reading a 300 page rulebook; and a requirement for complicated, time-consuming prep work.