I'm Struggling with this Hobby, Y'all

i think the ever rising tide of games and industry crap has driven most of the romanticism from the hobby that most of us held at one point. And there is an emotional backlash against this. The small comprehensible niche hobby is gone. Boardgaming now, if not in sales exactly but in terms of product output, resembles a mass media entity or a large consumer market. Talking about the interesting games of the year becomes futile because there are so many and no one has played most of them. Talking about anything specific in the hobby (which is what i guess we do on this forum) gets harder because everyone is drowning in so much information overload.

I am with VonTush in terms of my spending habits. I know what I like and i know where to put my cash. I tend to only buy a game every few months and trade perhaps one or two more. My tastes in games are now pretty well defined so in terms of reading reviews i ignore 90% of what is out there. Still, I've only been in 'the hobby' since around 2010 but even in that short time it has changed to something i can no longer really comprehend.

I don't have a regular gaming group, and the reliable, more public, groups I've found are mostly comprised of Optimization Isolationists. This means that "taking control of my hobby" probably means selling off my copies of Spartacus and Cosmic Encounter, because I'll never get to play them more than once in a year. That's pretty sad. I bought quite a few games (after some research on each) because I left all my stuff back in England, so I've been trying to get a small collection together. Most games were initially ones I thought my wife might be OK with playing, then later, what I felt would be fun, that I could convince people to give a chance in the public group.

I was able to sell off a few at a recent gaming weekend, though I still kind of regret it, even for the games I probably wouldn't play again realistically.

I do spend more time reading about or watching videos about board games than playing them. More and more, I find this calms down any sense of needing to buy them. I can "see" how they play, and that satisfies that curiosity. I'm also probably done with Kickstarter too. I jumped on a handful of smaller games (plus one big one) earlier this year, but as almost all of them have yet to land, I'm paying much more attention to things like expected delivery dates. So now I see something interesting, but it says July 2015, and I know it'll probably be September, and that I might not even be interested any more by then.

I don't really need to echo what everyone else has put so well. You're in control of what you're getting.

I'm not sure if this will resonate with everyone else here, but I find that feeling overwhelmed by "the hobby" (whatever that means, exactly) is a result of a wacked-out ratio of games played to games talked about. If that ratio is too low, you start feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff that's out there. If you're playing a ton of games, you'll probably want to talk about whatever the new hotness is less, probably want to buy a new game less.

So go play more games!


Edit: As I wrote this, JEM posted about reading about games helping him stay away from buying. I hadn't really thought of that as an option, but maybe it's because I like to buy shit too much.

Mr White,

I've been struggling with the hobby, too. I've purged my collection of a lot of 'great' games which were never getting played... the number one reason to get rid of them, as well as get some money back... I have NEVER missed them. Boo-hoo Here I Stand? Nope.

The difficulty is not getting sucked back in by newer hype.

Over 40, I am thinking of buying one of those new cruiser skateboards just so I can skate next to my 6 year old boy (I rollerblade now). I want to learn how to snowboard. I am planning a bike vacation with my family next summer. Buy a few games, sure, but sell more to pay for them. Take our favourites along to play. Watch fewer review vids.

And fuck the hobby otherwise. Fuck XCom and Hyperborea and Dungeonquest 3rd revised and what other crap I don't need. I got dudes on a map, I have clash of cultures, I have this stuff... already. So until someone reinvents the paradigm big time, I'm fucking this hobby; I'm tired of it fucking me (my wallet, anyhow).

I guess an additional part of it has a lot to do with what many have said. Boardgaming being picked up by the modern nerd set (I mean the nerds that are into consuming all nerd crap, not real nerds that are designing rockets and apps and such) has really impacted the hobby. It's no longer so niche or romantic as has been mentioned, and there's a large drive to consume.

"Back in the day" going to the game store meant a dusty place, where the owner was smoking, and the scene was bit off color and had a sense of being outcasts to it. Maybe that was just my experience with the (few) stores in my area.

Now, I actively _don't_ take my kids into game stores because the stores are flooded with other crap as well, comics, movies, posters, shirts, etc that most stores are also peddling. It's this hyper level of consumption that has become associated with it, that I don't want my kids to have anything to do with nor do I want to support.

When he wants a new Pokemon booster. We go to Target and only after we picked up the other stuff we were after. I'm really hesitant about dropping him into the game stores. It's totally not that I don't want to say 'no' (Do that all the time), but it's a culture of spending that I'm not comfortable I want the kids thinking is ok.

Again, it's the whole consumption angle that is choking me out and how boardgames are really part of that system now. Why does that parent need to buy Ticket To Ride? They _just_ got Settlers.

Maybe I'm a big old dick though.

EDIT: Ultimately, I understand that it doesn't matter what other folks do nor can I bend the hobby to my wishes. I'm just venting at the state of things.

EDIT, EDIT: Removed the bit about the FF. Not relevant to the topic at all.

Mr. White wrote: Why does that parent need to buy Ticket To Ride?

My answer: I don't fucking care and you shouldn't either.

The romance is gone from many things. So what? The romance didn't draw me to the hobby.

I agree, there are a lot if games and an exceptionally high percentage of them are not worth playing, much less publishing. It's about knowing your tastes and controlling your blinders. Even then, you don't have to pick up everything you're interested in, and there's always trading.

That aside it sounds more like you viewed board gaming as a haven from mass consumerism, which I agree it isn't now. It may fall back out of favour, but it's just picking up steam at the moment. You need to look at what the hobby meant to you and if you are still interested in what it's become. If you're not you should totally disconnect from things like bgg, which is as much a database as it is a marketing platform. Maybe you should consider steering your family game time more toward RPGs, which reward creativity much more than board gaming, are not as cool, and are as DIY as gaming can get. I'm guessing you're here because you like gaming, so wrestle that beast down and make it work for you.

People have been substituting expertise with buying new equipment for quite a long time. There's an old story about Hemingway asking Ansel Adams what kinds of camera he uses to get such good photographs, and then Ansel says "Why, what kind of pencils do you use to write so well?"

As for not wanting to help indoctrinate your kids into the consumer culture which is gripping America now: I think that I learned just as much from seeing how my parents acted when we WERE in that kind of game-store-buy-everything-in-sight environment. I mean hell, you're playing a 30 year-old game in that store that's also peddling the new schlock...that's leading by example.

VonTush wrote:

Mr. White wrote: Why does that parent need to buy Ticket To Ride?

My answer: I don't fucking care and you shouldn't either.

Because it's a damn good game that families enjoy playing. Don't let people on the Internet talk you out of the plain truth. If a Mom asks for games she'll enjoy after Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride is the obvious choice. It has millions of copies sold in the last ten years proving that it's a tried and true title with the general public. This is one adult asking another for a bit of wisdom on a topic she's not familiar with. Throw her a bone for goodness sake.

Drop the hipster shit. That's the real step 1 on ending the struggle. Play what you like and let the fucking weirdos analyze why and figure out whether you're "in" or not.

S.

Ha! Hipster? Wha...

I think y'all are right though, disengaging from sectors that aren't part of my hobby is probably the best way to go.