Finding players and Tragedy of the Commons.

Just discovered http://www.tabletoptournaments.net/ today. Great site. Started in Germany (lol I just love reading English written by Germans, in a good way) in 2004-2005, then spread South to other German-speaking countries, then France, the UK and now the US as well. It's well populated in Europe but there's precious little in the US part of the database. But it's a start if you're looking for things that you can't just walk into a local gaming store and get a pick-up game with on a Saturday afternoon.

http://www.tabletoptournaments.net/ 

So what's the problem here?

The problem is we have a bunch of specialist websites and forums. And we have Games Workshop shutting down their forums (for good reasons, imho). And we have a bunch of local gaming stores. All of whom want traffic to *their* website. Advertising revenue, building a customer base, building reputation and exposure. You have lists of players of X, Y and Z games on each website.

All of this results in a bunch of different actors taking a chunk of the players and gamers out there, depleting a common resource (hang with me here, I know it's a bit of a stretch, but you get the point) - people's time, effort and energy in regards to joining and registering on a website and posting what they're looking for, where and when and whatnot.

Not directly relevant.

Hell, we even had a new one launch just a few months ago. What the heck was he thinking, making one more website for gamers to find gamers - that will take how many months or years to get fully populated and actually useful? He was thinking - "I have a good idea and I'm gonna make it happen!"

More power to him. It's good thing that he's giving the other, stagnant but established systems/websites/resources a run for their money. But the community of geeks and gamers have yet to fully embrace anything other than their local group, and Facebook and Twitter (?) and Youtube - the latter three of which are pervasive due to their ubiquitousness outside of the subculture of gaming and geekery. In a few years some of these websites will establish dominancy. Til then we're kind of stuck in a rut. But check them all out and register on a few or all, especially if you're crazy enough to want to play some weird, unsupported Specialist Game like Dark Future - then you'll have your work cut out for you.

SIMPLE SOLUTION(tm) - Spread the word. Research. Register on what you find worthwhile. Tell your friends. Help expand the sites to make them more useful. Write a small blog post about it. BAM - you just made things easier for the next guy. Check back in a few months, maybe things will be useful.