I'm going to take a break from these weekly polls. While I have found them useful in getting a better sense of Grognardia's readership demographics, I've found the poll service I've been using somewhat limited in its capabilities. Many of the questions I'd like to ask would require a much more sophisticated set-up and I don't, at present, have access to that. I'll spend the next few weeks researching the matter to see if I can come up with a polling system more suited to what I desire. If you should have any suggestions or recommendations in this regard, I'd be grateful if you make them known to me in the comments.
The poll, "Was Your First Tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons?," yielded the results I more or less expected:
Since its first appearance in 1974, D&D has been the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla of the roleplaying hobby. That remains true even today, despite – or perhaps because of – the proliferation of RPGs. As you can see, the vast majority of my readers started with D&D, as I did too. It's pretty uncommon to meet someone who entered the hobby through another game, though I currently play with at least one person who did so.
The poll, "Where Did You Buy Your First Tabletop RPG?," was a bit of a mess, if I'm honest. It was this poll that made it clear to me I needed a better means of collecting data. Even leaving aside the inadequacies of the poll itself – how did I not include "comic shop" as an option? – there are still some interesting results here.
In my case, my mother came home with a flier printed up on a range paper after seeing a demo of the game at the mall. She asked if this was something I’d be interested in, and I gave an emphatic“Yes,” even though I had only the vaguest (and fairly incorrect) idea about what it was. I think I reread that flier every day for five or so weeks before I got the Moldvay Basic box for Christmas.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that the "gift" responses are all that surprising given how many people said they started playing before they were 16, when "having a job" became a real possibility.
ReplyDeleteThat's a very good point and another reason why I need to find a more robust means to do polling.
DeleteI bought a fair amount of gaming stuff (mostly wargames, particularly the very inexpensive microgames that boomed in the 1970s and early 80s) using my pre-employment allowance money, which may not have been work but it certainly involved a long list of chores. Still had a semi-working farm in those days.
DeleteThat said, while I did get some games as holiday or birthday gifts (Star Fleet Battles and Amoeba Wars spring readily to mind), there was only one occasion where it was something I hadn't very specifically asked for. That sole surprise was the World of Greyhawk folio, which was sold to a clueless grandparent under false pretenses ("absolutely vital for playing D&D, ma'am."). I'm still annoyed about that, in part because I've never played a game in canonical Greyhawk in my life.
My relatives eventually gave up and just started buying gift certificates or giving cash, which saved us all a lot of needless hassle.
Also, gift doesn't necessarily mean that was your introduction to gaming. I'm sure plenty of those who first got a gift had played with friends and then been gifted a gaming book.
DeleteThat accurately describes my situation -- my mother got me my first D&D books because she knew I'd been playing the game at school.
DeleteWell, I didn’t buy my Holmes boxed set with money I earned at 12–I got it from my Dad. Same with my APBA baseball game three years earlier. But it also wasn’t a gift, per se—my parents had no idea what I was buying, just that it was something I was dying for, and I hadn’t asked them for anything for quite a while. I would have said ‘gift’ had a well-meaning relative or older brother/sister bought it for me.
ReplyDeleteI stared at that dragon cover for about four months before I got up the courage to ask my Dad for $10 to purchase it at Hobbytown. And then I had to run back and ask him for fifty cents: I hadn’t figured on tax. That was embarrassing.
Although I would be sad to see these polls go away entirely (I like them a lot), I think I can understand your desire for a poll system that has some more advanced capabilities. For example, right now you cannot correlate results from two different polls: so if someone answered in what year they were first introduced to roleplaying games in one poll, that would not necessarily have an obvious relation to answering how old they were when they first started playing tabletop RPGs in another poll. If you were first introduced to TTRPG's in '2000+' does that mean you were in your teens then and were introduced at a young age, or does that mean you were introduced first at an far older mid-life age ? Currently, you cannot tell.
ReplyDeleteThat's precisely the problem I've run into. I'm not sure there's an easy way to fix it, though, since I'm not very adept at technical matters.
DeleteI do not claim to have any experience on the matter, but it feels like this: I do not think you can do it with the poll method you have used on this blog thus far, and doubt there are any options there that will get you what you want (but I may be wrong there, so please investigate). But it seems to me that you would need to use some way to create a new survey/questionnaire that asks all/multiple questions to the same respondent at the same time / in the same session (so you can keep all the answers made by the same person together), and then query the results in a way that makes it possible to create survey queries like "of all the people that answered 'x' to question '1', how many answered 'y' to question '2' ?". I have not investigated this much, but get the impression that this would require software/websites that is generally used by professional corporations/marketeers and costs a lot of money. So I guess it all comes down to how much time/money/resources you can and are willing to spend on this (or how curious you are), or if you are willing to accept the shortcomings of the current approach (which I still find interesting, and would still like to see continuing in the future, shortcomings and all). Sorry I cannot be of more help.
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