I see Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan on the XBox. I see Purple Pawn's regular "Game Pimping Roundups" which are lists of mainstream articles about hobby games. I see that my readership is up 40% over last year - mostly due to Google searches for specific games. This means that more people are using Google to look for some of these games.
Then I see articles like this. Purple Pawn linked to it on the 8th, and it's been picked up by several other hobby sites (including BGG) as well.
Purple Pawn summarized their reviews as follows:
•Loopit: Grade A. “Loopit is like Scrabble, only for people who don’t want to fight with their relatives over a word choice.”When I read the summaries, I wanted so very badly to believe that the writers over at Purple Pawn were exaggerating. Sadly, they weren't. If anything, these summaries understate some of the original descriptions of the game.
•Clue: the Office: Grade A. “The weapons are all inside jokes for those who watch the show and kept us laughing.”
•WordQuest: Grade B. “Attractive, easy to learn and play.”
•Pandemic: Grade C. “Pandemic is too complicated. Just setting up the board took half an hour the first time, thanks to multiple sets of cards, cubes, tokens and pawns.”
•Pop the Pig: Grade D. “A few minutes of entertainment for smaller children.”
•Incan Gold: Grade F. “Our 16-year-old was writhing on the floor with frustration because after 25 minutes, we still couldn’t figure out how to start the game and play the first round.”
•Ticket to Ride: Grade F. “Unnecessarily complicated. There are no dice or “action” modes.”
I disagree with the vast majority of these grades. Well, on the games with which I am familiar. I don't know Loopit or Pop the Pig.
That said, however, the response from the gaming community has been exactly the sort of response that will keep us a niche hobby. Gamers have responded by attacking the writers, including attacks suggesting that the Goliath Games were rated highly because of writer bias. In fact, it has become the target of a great deal of "Nerd Rage." While some of the comments were genuinely calm and reasonable, many of them were not. And some of the calm posts contained subtle attacks.
Even people who I generally like and respect posted attacks on the reviewers. The most beautiful attack1: "There's a reasonable chance that this is the most misinformed review of anything ever." The rest of the comment is fine - but the attacking opening sentence means that the original writers are unlikely to ever see it.
To grow the hobby, we need to be seen as a welcoming group. Eight pages of (mostly) attack comments and mockery do not make us seem very welcoming.
1 There is a specific reason for this phrasing. If you don't get it, it's not aimed at you.
