3 thoughts on “1-2017-06-06_0-13-03

  1. What women in war gaming? Where?

    I seem to remember the best estimate in another article from around the same time (late 1970s/early 1980s) was that 250,000 people in total were war gamers, in the entire country or about 1% of the general population. Of that it was estimated that 1% were women, or 2,500.
    Since that time (late 1970s or early 1980s) the total number of war gamers has dropped dramatically, while the percentage of war gamers that are women may have improved a little. The problem, in my observation, is that the only time I have ever seen a women involved in any war gaming is because some other man (usually a father/boyfriend/husband) invited (begged?) them to participate in a war game, otherwise they would not have bothered.

    Are there any women war game designers? As far as I know, there are zero.

    Why are things like this? My explanation, most women simply do not want to play war games. They are not interested in the subject matters, have little interest in history, economics, politics or military affairs or campaigns, and certainly do not want to spend any time learning a war game that involves those subjects.

    No one is preventing women from buying a copy of the latest war game or going to a store and getting one of the classics.

    The simple fact is that most women just are not interested and after decades of observations and data, it looks like that is just the way things are. It is not good or bad, it just is.

    1. Not sure i agree with much of that. There are three female vloggers. In addition i know at least 3 others . Ive played with some of the vloggers. They dig wargames for wargames. Found hobby themselves. I dont know that the population of gamers was 250k i do know that the market and number of players under 45 is growing.

  2. While there may be some year over year growth at times, the overall general trend over the decades has been decline for the war game market.

    Back in the day (late 1970s/early 1980s) the typical initial production decision at SPI was whether to print 5,000 copies or 10,000 on a first print run of a war game. Now companies like GMT typically only do 3,000 copies on a first print run and there are some companies that are making print runs of as little as 250 copies. Not exactly the trends of a growing market.

    Games like Avalon Hill’s Squad Leader sold over 100K+ copies in the late 1970s. I think Panzer Blitz and Panzer Leader sold several tens of thousands of copies each. Today, no war game would ever reach those numbers. The war gaming industry and market is a shadow of its former self.

    Today, it is something of a miracle if a war game sells 10,000 copies and even that would take a while.

    I am sure there are some women that war game, although I know of zero women that would want to play any of the old Avalon Hill or SPI classics today. The article makes it sound like the reason there are zero women around me that would want to play a war game, is because somehow I am doing something to discourage any women from wanting me as an opponent. The truth of the matter is that all of the women that I have run across over the years, only two played any war game ever. One played because her father wanted an opponent for a game of Avalon Hill’s Victory in the Pacific and the other woman because her husband bough a copy of a TSR war game and asked her to play it.

    Somehow, articles like this seem to make it sound like the reason women are not in war gaming is because somehow they are not being allowed to play by men, not because women simply do not want to take part.

    I did look up the author of the article and she was listed as working at SPI and ‘contributing to the production’ of a few war games. Apparently she never designed any war game. And that was in spite of her working at one of the most important war game publishers of the time, with Jim Dunnigan and Redmond Simons plus others available to develop and play test anything she would have designed.

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