Social media penetration is similar (~95-97%) across Europe so taking the number of meetup members per million population gives a rough estimate of gamer prevalence.
The stand out difference is that the UK/Ireland have much higher rates that other European countries.
A first question is whether activity levels are in reality similar but are happening off Meetup.com and on other, language localised sites. The similarly flat rates across German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish speaking countries suggests not - it would not be expected to have equally popular local sites in all these different languages.
A second question is whether, as anecdotes suggest, continental board gaming culture does not cross-over to RPGs in the same way as in the UK/Ireland (or indeed America). Discussions with locals in French and German speaking groups suggest that free time is more likely to be spent playing board games as it is easier to round up a group (different family generations playing together was a frequent point) and less prep time is needed compared to RPGs. This is anec-data and thus no stronger than an indicator of what may be going on.
Investigations to continue.
I only recently came across this blog, and have been enjoying reading your statistical analyses of RPG. Thanks for the interesting discussion.
ReplyDeleteIn this case I think there might be a couple of simpler (and sadly less interesting) explanations for the discrepancies you observe.
First, you assume Meetup is geographically representative. That might not be the case. In fact, I would suppose it is unlikely to be true. Relatively small and young internet platforms of US origin tend to overindex substantially to North America and English-speaking countries. I think you need something like Facebook scale to be confident of eliminating regional biases. Your observation that there is underrepresentation of multiple countries does not really establish or suggest geographical representativeness. I also don't think it is fair to describe the non-English-speaking country data as "similarly even". There seems to be quite a divergence among them. I haven't found any data for Meetup's geographical spread, but this issue alone could explain the data.
Second, there could be language effects. "TTRPG" is an English term. Other European languages use abbreviations like "JDR". Even if Meetup is geographically representative, your terminology might not be (though it may be that you made some adjustments for this that I am not aware of).
Welcome! Glad you have enjoyed your reading.
DeleteI agree this is strongly biased towards the Anglo-phone web and I so far failed to find anything better. I find the fact that countries like Sweden, France and Germany who are known to have their own scenes and own-language games like Das Schwarze Auge, Symbaroun and Chroniques Oubliees are showing no difference to other nations tells me that this data is not telling the whole story.
Somewhere out there are franco-phone and other communities and I am sure they are doing fascinating things which I would love to hear about.