
So I spent Easter at GothCon. Which is not a convention dedicated to a certain black-clad subculture, but a gaming convention in Gothenburg. If they'd started today they might have chosen a different name, but they started way back in the 1970s, before the goth culture existed.
As usual, I spent my time in the Roleplaying Bar. Which is an idea that I had back in 1995, that Emma then pestered me into implementing at SydCon and LinCon in 1996 and Gunnar has been keeping alive ever since. The basic idea is that groups of players come to us, they chose three random concepts (either by themselves or by rolling on a table we provide), whereafter one of us improvises a scenario featuring those concepts and GM it for the players. As long as you get reasonably mature players, it's usually fun. If you get a creative bunch of players, it can be a lot of fun. Which is why we've been doing it for all these years, of course.
Anyway, I started out by stating my intent to be very lazy and work as little as possible, so I only GMed four sessions. In the last one I got a pair of players that I've never encountered before: a man who'd last been to GothCon some twenty years ago and his late-teenaged daughter. Which nicely demonstrated the demography shift that seems to be going on in the hobby, and moving quite rapidly too. Ten years ago or thereabouts we started getting noticeable numbers of female gamers, and today we get maybe 20-25% women at the conventions. A couple of years ago I saw a very noticeably pregnant gamer at a con for the first time. And this year there was a whole bunch of people carrying babies around, and the odd few oldtimers bringing children old enough to actually game on their own. The majority is still mid-teen boys, of course, but the gamer population base is definitely broadening, and quite rapidly. Which is a very good thing, IMAO. It'll be interesting to see where it heads in the next few years.