LogFAQs > #951200588

shadowsword87 posted...

I'm willing to bet that you have 'em as well where you are too.

I'd be willing to bet that I don't, if only because literally every store that I knew of that used to sell Magic (and host tournaments and local play) other than Wal-Mart and Target has closed, and I haven't seen any new ones open anywhere (and I do travel a lot locally). That's both the full retail "hobby" type stores as well as the more casual "playspace" type stores where you can tell someone who just wanted to play opened a store to lure in other people (we had a few of those at various times in the past, for both card games and video games).

The same goes for all the stores I used to know that sold comics and RPGs (and hosted Warhammer games, D&D/RP sessions, etc). The combinations of those two mediums going through rough patches economically/popularity-wise and a lot of "nerd-savvy" products moving more and more to online distribution models kind of gutted the brick-and-mortar stores years ago. Definitely in my area. Maybe less so in less densely populated areas where property values aren't as high (and on a related note, I know Forbidden Planet in NYC is supposedly skirting bankruptcy/closure at the moment because they can't afford to pay property fees).

The only store left that I know of that's sort of a nexus for "geek stuff" is a hobby shop that is about as old as I am, but which is also mostly non-geek (they've got a tiny comic section and I think they might still sell Magic cards, but they make most of their money selling art supplies, model trains, puzzles, and other stuff). They used have a HUGE comic section back in the 80s/90s along with a pretty robust RPG section (and they stocked multiple Magic sets at a time when Magic first took off), but all of those mostly got reduced to a tiny after-thought (comics) or outright dropped (RPGs) when the bubbles for those hobbies burst.

Basically, I've spent the last 30 years watching every store that sells things I'm interested in close. It mostly started with bookstores (as all the local bookstores, and then places like B.Dalton/Waldenbooks/Borders in the mall dying off, with only B&N left standing), then it shifted into music stores (all except one local hipster vintage record store I know of), then movie places (like Suncoast), gaming stores, comic stores, etc.

Video game stores are mostly sort of going the same way, too.

It's not a huge tragedy because all of that stuff is mostly just moving online one way or another (or is getting shoved into a corner in Wal-Mart/Target), but it does underline just how much "nerd culture" tends to embrace the Digital Age in more ways than one.



TheSlinja posted...

you kinda need a gamestore to play magic tho, you can read a comic anywhere
unless you playin at someones house a gamest9re is necessary to play paper tcgs

You don't, necessarily. Aside from the fact that Magic is trying to maintain a strong online play presence where the paper CCG aspect is almost obsolete, there are always other ways to run physical tournaments. Conventions and arranged events in secondary locations (like how there's a local tournament in NJ run out of a sports complex, and I've played in Magic tournaments mostly just in the concourse of a local mall) can pick up a lot of the slack.

Though it's worth considering just how many people DO play at someone's house. Or at school. Or can now use Internet resources to arrange informal meet-ups.

Sure, the hobby would have to evolve a bit and change if it ever went entirely digital with no physical anchorpoints, but that's not necessarily a negative. Just because "this is how we've always done things" doesn't mean "this is how we'll always do things".

And games like chess have managed to have massive global communities and tournament-level play without ever having "chess stores" to anchor them, so it's obviously possible to handle things in a different way.
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