I've noticed much of the same things many people have just started to realize, regarding the evolution of the gaming industry, as a whole, and not just limited to boardgaming.

The computer has helped and hurt the gaming industry. The monster boardgame (wargame) is no longer in favor because it is too much work doing all the recordkeeping involved. Computers do this faster and allow people to play the game without all the work. This has been good for "wargaming", but the interaction is very lacking. Many people have expressed this as a death to gaming in general (http://www.eden. com/~anvil/nhbg/a2.html) and I tend to agree to some extent. Being in the "computer industry", I'm partially guilty of computerizing games.

Face-to-face boardgaming will not die, in my opinion. It can't die because the computer can't replace the social interaction and the cold, cruel diplomacy, backstabbing and deceit that bring the real enjoyment of most games to life. I will even quote Alan Moon (whose games I do not particularly enjoy, but seems to have become a minor diety in the gaming community), "Gaming isn't about rolling dice and moving your piece around a track. Gaming is about interaction, decisions, and social skills."

The computer has also helped the gaming industry, in a less direct manner. The Internet has allowed many of the smaller game companies to compete on the same footing with Wizards of the Coast/TSR. It has also allowed games to be advertised and the word about new games to be spread around much faster than it ever was before. Take a look at the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.board as an example. I would have never heard about Tikal, as fast as I did, if it were not for this newsgroup. All of this combined, it is allowing a Vast range of games to be marketed and sold that I've never seen before.

I could get away with purchasing a new game every month, without regard to missing something I was interested in, but now I have to purchase a new game once a week just to keep up.

I also think that society is changing. Time is more precious and there is just so little of it left in people's lives, that they cannot commit to an entire weekend to finish a game anymore. You also have to admit that the traditional boardgame was rather cumbersome and required a great deal of thought and was reserved for the die-hard dorks (me included, so no one send me hate mail). This put a very poor face on "gamers" since the majority of gamers were geeks (me included). Gaming is becoming more mainstream and the only way to do this is to market to families and shorten the playing time to include more people's schedules. All in all, gaming is becoming more inclusive, gathering more types of people, and gathering steam, not fading away. This is evident by looking at the types of people shopping in the game shops now (http://www.eden.com/~anvil/nhbg/a7.html) and who is starting to boardgame. Afterall, it takes these types of games to interest people in the monster wargame later :)

If you take a look at the World Wide Web, there are a ton of gaming sites. Greg Schloesser has his Westbank Gamers (http://home.earth link.net/~gschloesser/) and I have the North Houston Boardgamers Group (http://www.eden.com/~anvil/nhbg/) just to mention two (each website has links to many other gaming related websites). Gaming may be evolving, but it is not dying. There will still be monster wargames produced to appease the "Gaming Elders" but there will be a lot of newer games as people stretch the gaming community to newer and broader segments of the population. Gaming has been a part of humanity for millenniums and I hardly think it will disappear for at least another millennium :)