The Game Loft is a work in progress. When Patricia and Ray opened their retail adventure gaming store, All About Games, in 1976 they followed the traditional model of other typical hobby shops frequented by gamers. Different sections of the store were devoted to the main areas of role-play products, historical miniatures, board games, trading card games and accessories.
Tables were set up to promote in-store gaming because they liked to play games and also thought it was a tried and true way to promote the product. They were unprepared for the deluge of interest, mostly from younger gamers, who flooded into the store and simply never went home. Over the next year and a half they worked hard at both building their business, moving it to a larger location and catering to the young clientele who had some difficulty understanding that their place to hang-out and play games was also a business.
This experiment did not work. First, the demographics of the area show a population base of 30-40,000 people. It probably takes a base of 250,000 people to supply enough gamer customers to support a specialty store. Yet, the Estabrooks efforts to broaden the base by offering more general and family games were defeated by the entrenched perception that they were not a business but a youth center. The sales of specialty games were not covering the expenses of the business. Finally, the landlords evicted them because of their dissatisfaction with the kids hanging around their property.
Fortunately, another location right in the main retail corridor of downtown Belfast became available and in October 1998 All About Games reopened. The Estabrooks had come to a crossroads. One path was to run a specialty hobby store combined with in-store gaming while the other was to eliminate in-store gaming and focus on running the business. They felt that the first path would inevitably lead to the store turning into a clubhouse and eventually go out of business. This seemed to be the fate of many other adventure gaming stores in Maine. The second option allowed them to tap into the growing tourist trade in Belfast and offer a mainstream of game titles as well as specialty games. This plan was successful and over the next two years they tripled their business.
The Estabrooks still felt a commitment to their gamer population and that was the genesis of the Game Loft. They formed a not for profit, 501(c)3 corporation, Gamers United, and launched The Loft in February 1998. Members were recruited from the original core of gamers and a Board of Directors established. The Board was charged with the responsibility to set policy and govern the Loft. Day to day management was left in the hands of an elected, volunteer Executive Director.
Over the last two years the members have sought together for the appropriate way to manage the Loft, struggled with issues of fundraising and policy making. In November 1999 a group of members traveled to Portsmouth NH to advise other youth revise organizations on how to run a self-governing program. The Loft has received numerous other requests to consult with communities on how to run this kind of a program. The plan now is to put their experience in writing and publish a policy and start-up manual for other organizations interested in setting up a similar program.
The future of the wargame hobby is uncertain. Electronic gaming, rushed schedules, pressures from jobs, family, and other hobbies all erode wargaming. The 'graying' of the field has thinned the ranks of the veteran wargamers. But with the support of elders in the field young people can be trained to be effective commanders and lovers of the hobby. The Game Loft is doing one small part to insure that wargaming lives on.
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