The latest issue of the Strategist had a small piece by Frank Chadwick on the size of the hobby and George's editorial comment on how organizations in the hobby should do a better job of connecting to the total mass I remind you of my involvement in "Operation Contact" about 20-30 years ago, but I have been out of touch from heavy involvement for perhaps 15 years so many of the schemes we dreamed up will have lost validity.

My guess is that there are in excess of 1 million gamers in the English Speaking World. I do not have any basis for estimating those in other areas.

Definitions - someone who buys the product and enjoys the product might consider themselves to be a fan of the product, but there is a definition of fandom in which fans are people who are somehow involved in the organization of fandom... members of clubs, attend cons, volunteer ... a person who just buys the product / service and might talk it up with friends but with no other involvement is not really a fan. There may need to be some other terminology to distinguish someone who is in the hobby but does or does not participate in this or that aspect of it.

Then there is the person who has accumulated a vast library of the stuff, but has not actually purchased much recently, or who freeloads in the collection of someone who does buy it fairly often ... they are not active as a customer but they are active as a user.

I have the philosophy that clubs and cons and commercial interests can help each other as bed fellows with overlapping interests ... others may disagree with me.I plan to do a series of installments following up on my wild claims.

1. Define the Hobby --What kinds of simulation games, proportionally do gamers tend to specialize in? Role playing, miniatures, sports simulations etc.? How much overlap is there?

2. Look at the flow of products. What kind of cash flow is needed for a hobby shop to stay in business? How many such entities are there in any given metropolis. Extrapolate the income needed and profit per product --does this give us any idea of customers per store times number of stores?

3. I have some experience in con organizing . Your typical hobby con organized by a city committee tends to draw primarily from the immediate surrounding area. Attendance is proportional to several factors, including the quality of the con committee , events, reputation, and advertising, not to mention the size of the population base. My proposal is that after excluding the national cons, you take the aggregate attendance times say 0.8 to get rid of the people who go to multiple cons. This gives you a good picture of the total number of gamers who are currently con-goers. If some city does not have a con, can its potential audience be estimated from the attendance at a con in a comparably sized city?

4. Look at internet activity - what proportion of the population is on the internet? There are all kinds of estimates are out there, and it is a moving target? Do 1/3 of US households have a PC? I suspect the gamer population resembles the population of PC owners. The cost of getting into the internet discriminates against low income families more so than the cost of getting into gaming, but the advertising for games tends to exclude ethnic groups that the advertisers do not think will be interested

Visit a web site for any particular game. What is the rate at which postings are made by different people? Do the same people show up on many different site? We cannot count lurkers or people who are into the games and on the internet , but do not come to the site we are studying. By asking what fraction of users on an ISP visit the game-X site, relative to the total number of subscribers to that site, we get the percentage of users on an ISP who are interested in that game. That gets us a rough estimate of the proportion of internet users who are gamers.

5. Now I do a science fiction exercise. I postulate that we have a scheme to reach out to the thousands of hobbyists who have not previously been reached by a particular mix of approaches and then speculate about the viability of this scheme.

6. In a future letter, I will review the basics of Operation Contact and consider how much of it still has applicability today.