Friday, December 1, 2023

What Will Kill D&D?

I feel everyone in Hollywood, toy manufacturers, comics, and the roleplaying game industry knows this. I know people in education, and you can't tear kids away from their devices. Kids show little interest in any hobby or activity outside the cell phone. The mental development to maintain interest in RPGs is not happening in the younger generation.

They get lost and depressed away from those devices.

For this new generation? A book or a handful of dice cannot replace a phone for them.

Add a two-year developmental lag here - where phones were kids' only window to the world - and you are looking at a drought of interest in movies, comics, toys, and pen-and-paper games. Significant movies fail one after the other, and the demographics that should be there aren't.

And it is not YouTube criticism hurting these movies. This is a generational drought and loss of interest. Older gamers, Gen X, Millennials? They are still there.

Gen Z?

Lost in space.

In the space roughly the size of a phone screen.

The phone plus a two-year social and mental development gap is killing movies and comics. Hollywood is failing to see this, or at least, how they are acting is this strange form of living in the past and hoping the golden years return. D&D is downstream from this phenomenon by about 3-5 years.

And I doubt the generation to replace the "D&D Generation" is even out there.

Even with a VTT, it will not be enough.

The only other thing that could is D&D itself.

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