Memories of Game Stores Past (Part III)

I'm old, old enough to remember a time when the local game store was not merely a place to buy things. It was a crossroads, a hub for roleplayers, wargamers, and fans of genre fiction of all stripes. In those days, game stores felt weird in the best possible way: crammed with strange titles, eccentric proprietors, and regulars who treated the place like a second home. They were cluttered, often a bit dingy, and absolutely magical.

I spent countless hours in such stores. I remember walking through their doors and being hit by the smell of old cardboard and newsprint and the sight of wooden shelves bowed under the weight of too many Avalon Hill and SPI boxed wargames. You could browse freely, picking up games you’d never heard of, flipping through rulebooks that transported you to strange new worlds. If you were lucky, someone might be running a game in the back room – and if you hung around long enough, you might even get asked to join.

That’s how I discovered many of the games that shaped my tastes and interests. This was long before carefully curated social media feeds or electronic publisher newsletters, when sheer chance might introduce you to a captivating cover, a staff recommendation, or a game in progress that caught your attention. The old game store was a vehicle for discovery. It introduced me to lots of games I might never have found otherwise.

That kind of store, the kind I knew in my youth, is largely gone.

Certainly, there are still game stores out there, some of them excellent in their own way – but they’re not the same. Most of them survive today by focusing on collectible card games, miniatures wargaming like Warhammer, and modern boardgames. Roleplaying games, if present at all, are often confined to a few shelves of familiar titles from major publishers. The walls of obscure and idiosyncratic RPGs I once browsed for hours have mostly vanished.

The reasons aren’t mysterious. The Internet changed everything. Online retailers offer discounts and immediate availability that physical stores can’t hope to match. Digital publishing has displaced print in many cases. Perhaps most significantly, online play, something I myself participate in weekly, has made many of the accessories that once sustained game stores obsolete. Why buy dice, for example, when a VTT takes care of it?

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, I think it's great that it’s never been easier to find people with whom to play, no matter where you live. As regular readers know, I referee or play in several weekly online campaigns with friends scattered across the world. Likewise, the indie RPG scene is thriving in ways that would been nigh impossible back in the 1980s. Yet, despite all this richness, I can’t shake the feeling that something important has been lost.

Serendipity. That’s what’s missing.

In my experience, the Internet is great at showing us more of what we already like. It’s less good at surprising us. In the absence of physical spaces where different genres, systems, and subcultures once collided, the RPG hobby has become more siloed. It’s entirely possible now to spend years playing RPGs and never stray beyond a handful of familiar games. That wasn’t the case when every trip to the store might reveal something you’d never seen before.

Back then, I had a much more eclectic gaming diet and not just because I was young and had more free time, though that’s certainly part of it. No, the environment encouraged it. Game stores were chaos. They were cluttered with possibilities and they invited you to take risks, to try something new. They were social, too, places where you talked with strangers, traded recommendations, maybe even rolled some dice together.

Today, many of the stores that still exist feel lonelier, at least to me. They’re quieter, more sterile, less open to chance. They sell games, but they rarely feel like places to do anything else.

I don’t say this to complain about change for its own sake. Much as I dislike it, change is inevitable and not all of it is unwelcome. However, I do think we’ve lost something intangible but important. The video rental store analogy fits here. It's true that streaming services offer more movies than any Blockbuster ever did, but no algorithm has ever replicated the joy of stumbling across something unexpected on the shelf or the spontaneous conversation with a fellow customer that convinced you to give it a try.

I miss that. I suspect I’m not alone in doing so. We may well be richer in options than ever before, but in some that I think matter, we are also poorer.