News : Kevin Schlabach Asks, Why Don't You Play Games Publicly?

Kevin E. Schlabach at Seize Your Turn is pushing a "Play in Public Campaign" to promote awareness of modern games among the U.S. mainstream:

[T]he PiP Campaign is about raising the awareness of games to the point where customers ask their local toy and book stores why they don’t stock games for adults. It’s about bridging the gap between good local adult game stores and their community. It’s about expanding everyone’s inner geek to include gaming at a time when being a geek is a popular. It’s about pulling families away from the TV and back into interacting with each other. It’s about connecting friends together and enabling them to have more fun at home around the dinner table than in an expensive bar scene where only superficial relationships can form.

All very idealistic, yes, but the U.S. has been in this situation previously, something Schlabach overlooks in this paragraph of his post:

[T]he expansion of board gaming seems to be at an all-time high as the ripples continue to spread outwards from the introduction of Settlers of Catan years ago. The question I ponder is whether Catan will simply be another Trivial Pursuit. Trivial Pursuit was a game that triggered a wave of great party games and then the market plateaued. Will it all just be another fad of pop culture? Or can adult gaming finally resonate with the common public and stick around long term?

Thirty years after its debut, Trivial Pursuit is still a force in the game industry, with current owner Hasbro pushing new editions of the game year after year onto a public that identifies TP with boardgaming. If Catan reaches the awareness level of Trivial Pursuit in the U.S. mainstream, that would be a great thing for Klaus Teuber and Mayfair Games. Whether that level of awareness would spread to other mainstream-friendly titles is unclear, although titles like Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne have already made inroads down this path.

In any case, I'm a longtime practitioner of playing games in public – not so much to be an advocate for modern games as that I just like playing games whenever and wherever I can. If I were still in the P.S. (pre-son) era, I'd be playing in bookstores and cafés all the time...