Slitherine

Well it is likely you have seen we lost a wargamer recently. I refer to Roy aka Critter known on a few well known sites.

The guy was only 53. Well we like to say it as 'only 53' and considering I am pushing 51 I try not to think of it as 'old'.

But life happened to him, and he is lost to us now. I didn't know him, but I knew the forum identity.

It brings home a truth some of us like to laugh off, but it gets harder and harder as the years pass. Maybe the 'hobby' isn't dying, but, WE are. No one lives forever eh.

The last few years have been good for selling wargames (well as good as it ever gets I suppose). But, one has to wonder, what were our numbers like in our youth, and what are they like now? I had no problem playing board game wargames as a 15 year old. Good luck getting a 15 year old to play one now without a lot of effort. It's a hobby of OUR generation, and our generation won't be forever.

We see the term here Home of Wargaming. I wonder long before it is better called Seniors Home of Wargaming.

Young people are NOT entering this hobby of ours. No don't disagree with me, I have 40 years of watching the numbers. We have gone from teens playing them, to college kids playing them, to young adults playing them, to married guys playing them. And now we are increasingly old buggers playing them, who sadly are beginning to leave us in a permanent fashion too sadly. One has to wonder how many of us 'depart' and don't have the benefit of family that has the inspiration to realize we had an existence online in our wargaming haunts where people would miss us.

How many of us have merely gotten too old to have the drive and the energy to play like we once did? I know I can't any more. It's not a lack of a room or space or a table, it is a lack of vitality. It's not easy indulging our monster board game wargames like it once was.

I do occasionally worry about the future of the hobby. I often wonder if we are headed for an eventual sudden stop where it won't matter where wargaming is going as no one will be present to care. Yeah I can hope for another 30 years of life. My father put in 80 years in his, and he likely trimmed 10 off from smoking. But he wasn't working on his trains for the last 10 of them. He mostly was just lucky to be able to stay awake most days for more than an hour.

What have we really done to make the hobby the same as it was in 1975?
Are we fighting a battle that really can't be won?
Will I be in a position to ponder this on my 60th birthday?
How many of us will be around to answer my questions on my 60th birthday?

Kids today are really only interested in playing Call of Duty like experiences. Nothing wrong with those games, aside from the fact they aren't wargames any more than any of the arcade games of my youth were.

Bye Critter where ever you is. The hobby misses ya.

And is this only happening with wargames, or can't we extend to the rest of our cultural activities?
This is the sign of the times. People and specially the young generation, don't want to spend their time playing a game which you need to think and use your own imagination.
They want the thrilling of the instant action.
Would it be different with us, if we had access to the same things they have now? Probably not. But the world was different. We had to imagine it, because we had only access to it, through the books, a couple of movies and TV. Not like nowadays in a globalization era, with instant communication.

I think if we were to move backward the arrival of modern electronic forms of entertainment, it would have had the same impact actually.

If we had moved forward the forms of elctronic entertainment, I DO think the youths of the time would be still indulging the means of entertainment present.

Which brings me to a notion I had this morning.

I wonder, is entertainment as a whole heading for a cliff? Or merely waiting for the next great major advance in method of entertainment?

Think of this, 200 years ago, what was available as 'entertainment'. Girls might have a hand made doll. Boys, not sure what boy did 200 years ago other than work on the farm or off learning to use a rifle hunting. You didn't have Barbie dolls, you didn't have toy trucks (machines had not been invented yet). Mass market paperbacks were not around and if you read it was likely the Bible if you could read at all. Movies, not here. Music not present in the absence of a real band. There's a reason a hanging was so popular.
No games I can think of as even board games were hardly sufficient in numbers to matter enough to be a 'category'.
No bikes and precious few places to use one for that matter.
Most girls likely spent their time practicing to become mothers.

Plastic models nope. And most of the things we make models of didn't exist either.

I wonder if so much of today's youth troubles are more about how our race has simply gotten too much spare time, too little need of being busy doing something more responsible (like working).

And now, it almost seems like too much of our too much entertainment has become too much of too little in the way of anything really new.

Let's face it Case Blue looks like a great game. Yawn so what, I already have several 'great games' recreating the attack into the Soviet Union from tactical to grand strategy and all points in between.
The kids are being fed a steady diet of yet another game recreating the same action, hack and slash or hack and shoot or hack and slash and shoot. Fantasy is no longer distinguishable from science fiction to boot. Monsters is just monsters.

I have soooo many movies in my collection yet I know that hundreds exist I have never heard of.
I like anime and I know that there are countless shows I will never even hear about let alone see any of.
Too much to do too little time.

But, all of this maze of entertainment, is to a large extent contained within my lifetime. An amazing sum of forms of entertainment don't predate me much if at all.

I wonder what will be next?
Will we somehow surpass the limits of organic limitations and finally create a world we can enter that is truly 'real' feeling to the senses? And what will that do to us?
Porn, being able to actually enter a pseudo reality and engage in any form of activity knowing none of it is read aside from our own minds and experiences.
Visit alien worlds as if they were real.
Live alternate lives and never need to do more than accomodate our actual organics needs in about the same fashion as we do with life support in a hospital.

Can you imagine actually being able to actually go and fight in a recreation of WW2 as if it was really happening, in actual real time, the real real time, 1 second being actually 1 second of experience, and being possibly able to actually change the course of the war in some manner and live through the actual results.

The computational needs only sound staggering till you recall what a computer was like in 1990. My first was a 386 IBM PS1 with a whopping 100 meg hard drive and a cool fast 33mhz processor and I was able to actually go online with a sportster fax modem. Granted there wasn't much of an internet to experience then. Now my devices are all incredibly powerful in comparison. Even junk can hold several gigs of data for a few bucks. I wonder what they would think of my Nintendo DSi XL in 1990 let alone 1970 just 20 years earlier.

When I was a kid, a bike and a toy dump truck were everything a kid could ask for. I spent my time inside a book mostly. And that is only 40 years ago.

In 20 years, will kids even be able to relate to a time when there wasn't tech?