“Glory
is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”
– Napoleon
Bonaparte
All things must pass...and so too with games.
Despite the wonders of the internet helping to produce, disseminate,
and preserve PDF games and a host of websites helping gamers to
obtain those hard-to-find treasures, many games still pass into the
dread territory of “out of print,” becoming difficult if not
impossible to find. Consider the ages of different aspects of the
hobby: miniatures wargames 110 years (by far the oldest, based on
H.G. Wells’
Little Wars); board wargames 71 (based on
Charles S. Roberts’
Tactics); roleplaying games 49;
collectible card games 30; Euro-style board games 28. All relatively
recent as history goes, and most within our lifetimes (okay,
my
long,
increasingly weary lifetime). Some live, legally or otherwise, in PDF
on the internet; but many fade into memory, tossed into the trash or
sold at flea markets, their mark on our gaming culture out of reach
of future generations. Few, if any, archives actively seek to
preserve a record of adventure gaming hobby materials, most notably
the
Strong National Museum of Play; regrettably our nation’s
venerable Library of Congress does not (a subject I’ve wanted to
blog on for years now but just can’t given our volatile political
climate). Each of us enters the adventure gaming hobby at different
points in its history and our own lives. Our interests can wander or
change across genres and forms. So when we discover something “new
to us” that engages our interest, finding it can prove challenging
in our increasingly disposable,
capitalist
society which cultivates a “fear of missing out” (or FOMO) on the
“new hotness” of the moment.
