So, one of the most unexpected but welcome bits of news I came across at the end of this year came in a piece about how well D&D is doing. The game is not just surviving but thriving --in fact so much so that Hasbro announced that 2019, the most recent year for which they have a complete record, was D&D's best year ever:
https://screenrant.com/dungeons-dragons-best-year-sales-ever-wizards-coast/
What started as an odd hobby that scared televangelists and censor-ready scapegoaters grew into something as accepted as having a poker night or weekly bowling: all it took is for the kids who loved the game to grow into adults.*
The best news within this good news comes in one of the pie-charts embedded in the article. The first breaks down D&D gamers by age group:
ages 8 to 12: 12%
ages 13 to 17: 13%
ages 18 to 24: 15%
ages 25 to 29: 15%
ages 30 to 34: 19%
ages 35 to 39: 15%
ages 40 to 45: 11%
--although I must note dismay at finding I'm too old to even rank an age category like "and up".
It wd be interesting to compare these percentages with the results of that old DRAGON magazine survey back in the early/mid nineties.
The second comes in the second chart, which breaks down gamers by gender:
male: 61%
female: 39%
other: 1%
--there have always been women who played the game, but their numbers were few in the early days. Even in the nineties I'd estimate it at about 15%. It's been a long time coming, but for that number to now be hovering around 40% shows that, while slow, real progress can come over time.
--John R.
reading: 'The Search for the Gnome Cache' by Garrison Ernst (Gary Gygax)
music: listening to George Harrison's 'What Is Life'; saw the video for the first time tonight.
*Barnes & Noble weekly newsletter of December 20th 2020 features as its lead item an e-book about the livestreaming group CRITICAL ROLE:
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