Inside Strategic Space

I received an email today from a teacher in Pennsylvania.  He had heard about Strategic Space from a friend of his who runs a small gamer convention that got some donated games from us.  He’s designing an elective course for the private middle school where he works.  He wants the course to introduce teens to games that require no electricity.

I wrote back to him that efforts like his were important, because most game publishers don’t have the ad budgets to reach kids (TV advertising) outside of Hasbro, Fisher Price, and video game publishers.

A lot of kids have discovered the world of strategy board games because of cartoons like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh that have marketed collectable card games.  The stores that carry those kinds of games also carry our kind of games, so some get exposed to them there.

Some kids have shown up at the game fairs I’ve been to, like Chi-Tag and Origins.  Some times teens come by themselves.  A lot of times, kids are brought by their gamer parents.  That’s where the enormity of the market and the huge size of the audience becomes a palpable force for peer pressure.  Game conventions get to be like pilgrimages for some.

I’ll keep working on other ways to reach children.  They really are just as important as adults to me.

Mark Salzwedel