Rogues' Gallery

[Stu]

I think we need a page like this one, from a store in Mass.
http://phoenixgamestore.com/aboutus.php#reg

[Rorschach]

That's pretty cool...a Page like that for the Haven would be awesome!

Except they seem to have a LOT of females, and we have so few female regulars. :-(

[SgtBrowncoat]

Dale is right, that one is a fake! A dirty fake I tell you!


In unrelated news, I am moving to Sunderland, MA, or as I call it "The Promised Land" tonight. Ciao

[Stu]

??
What?!

[SgtBrowncoat]

Ah, never mind. Just goofing around. Seriously though, I think the suggestion is decent.

[Stu]

Don't do it, man--I think that one girls is a dude!

Oh--shoo. I see what you're saying . . . :)

Every now and then, I google flgs(s) to see: a) what they're playing in the store, b) what their sites look like, c) how they use their fora, and d) if thee's somewhere so colossally cool I would actually go there. So far there hasn't been.

But doing that a while, you notice some patterns and can make some inferrences. In regards to this particular shop, which seems so typical in other ways, having so many female regulars, I note the following:
--It's a Little College Shop. Like the one in Lawrence, KS I used to go to. It may as well be an annex of the student center.
--One of the core regulars clearly leads an alternative lifestyle. He clearly brought in a certain segment of the ladies.
--A lot of the girls were there to hang out, rather than game. Like a gamers' widows' club. The shop sponsored movie nights and other not strictly gaming activities.
--Somehow, the shop seemed to become friendly to the anime/cosplay/gamer grrl crowd, as evidenced by what seemed to be a rousing(?) game of strip Magic.
--Their forum has been inactive for almost a year. Maybe they just switched to a different forum and are alive and well, but it could also indicate that the shop may have had a pretty short run. They may have developed an atmosphere there that alienated more people than it welcomed.

I don't know. Bless their hearts, it looked like thay had a little gamer mecca there for a while, didn't it? Girls--right there in the shop--in public! I've never seen anything like that before.

I think one thing that made their business easy to develop but hard to grow was that their shop was one big clique. whatever they did together, they called it a store event, took pictures, and documented the fun. Documenting fun is a sensational strategy for drawing people to your business. People like it when they think they can walk into a place and have fun. But the flip side is that when it looks like their having wierd fun that probably wouldn't include you, you back off.

The shops in town are too cliquey as it is. I mean--that's OK with me, because I don't want to hang out with those gamer freaks--but it's to the point where it might be damaging business.

Look at it this way . . .
The Haven has maybe five or six rpers looking forward to playing Unhallowed Metropolis. It's an odd little game--never will have the players that D&D or Vampire will. Compleat may have three or four more. Even Gathering might have one. Among all these people, we might could put together one game on one evening that everyone could make. We could all try to call each other and try to meet in someon's basement, and we may or may not be able to coordinate that once or twice, and that would be it. Great. The game company would have sold 3-4 books, probably what they expected, the shops would have taken their cut, and on to the next thing. That's pretty much how we do business now.

But--what if the cliques in town were less dominant? Our five Unhallowed Metropolis guys set up a game and don't feel awkward asking the other guys to play at the shop. Some can make it; some can't--so there's another game set up at Compleat, or wherever. We don't feel awkward going there. And now--not only have we increased play among the people we know want to play, but we've also done two demos for two groups of bystanders This is the best advertising for games, for now there are more people that want to play. Maybe not many, but if three or four other people want that book, we've doubled business for the company. That's huge.

Now--my non-educated, non-businessman opinion is that all these players will go back to their clique shop to buy their book. And players who aren't into that are going to get the first copy they see. Or they're going to get it off the net. So as long as a shop is confortable hosting these kinds of events, they will keep their old business and maybe get some new business. So I don't think there's a problem for the shops being more open with each other. But I don't know. There way be sneaky things they could do. And since my entire social circle are Havenistos, I don't really get much exposure to other shops, so I don't know how different their cultures are. I've definately seen some shops try some aggravating things.

Anyhoo--this goes back to my "open games are fun--let's do more of that" soapbox. So--pulling this kicking and screaming back to the topic--the thing to do with a shop's site/forum is to get people to want to come in. Some of the Haven clique I've known for 16-17 years--and they're all right. I've always thought the greatest strength of this shop is that there are more people hanging out here with whom I want to play than there are people with whom I don't. So--if that's a strength--go with it.

People can find games they want to play on the net in a thousand places. But there's no consistent, long-standing place to meet other players online, because that is simply a crappy place to meet people. Apologies to those who met their lovely Russian wives there. A page here would simply be a sort of ice-breaker. Might make people want to drop in. Who knows . . .

[Jason]

Good idea. Now let’s add some flavor in to the mix. Not only tell what the people are @ how they got there. How they help the store For example. Jason M, Dale help run tournaments’ for War hammer. Charlie’s runs the L5R tournaments. Stu runs RPG game. There is some one that helps with Warmachine/Horde. So people know who they are and what they do to help the store.

[Pilgrim]

Good idea.

Of course I also liked your idea of Updating my Public profile with a picture of myself... so people would know who I was if they ran into me in the Wild!

[Stu]

Sneaky son-of-a-gun. I fell for it.

Zombies creep me out, man.

[lambobolt]

actually, this is similar to an idea that Jason/Dale kicked around with me a while back, creating the mentor legion binder that had a short bio of each person, the games and armies they play, their experience level, that sort of thing. i think it is a great idea personally, especially if you include that info, so when a new person shows up and he wants to get into tomb kings/necrons, he would know who else plays and could contact them.
later