As a matter of fact, I just noticed this forum's missing a general off topic forum. Speaking of that, regarding my ethncity thread, lemme give yall the 411 on that. the original concept of it was that I was just curious to see for myself if there were particularly other black Turbo/PCE gamers other than I, since most guys of my race I know only play Halo and NBA Street and dont like old school and Japanese gaming. but the first response gave me a guilty conscience and I turned it into an unrelated thread.
But I guess the lack of a off topic forum works well in PCEFX's favor. Most gaming boards I'm on that have Off Topic forums have been targets of spammers, attention whores, or a majority of the members flame newbies that make threads introducing themselves just to look cool. Ppl like them have you thinking twice about making a simple innocent thread because you don't know what kind of nonsense can derail it within 5-10 posts. Hell sometimes they even f around with the mods and administrators making insulting thread titles directed at them, and then they become household names (Except digital press, they have Zero tolerance against that kind of crap.)
Hey, no problem. Although I wasn't able to join the thread before it was locked, I've always been curious about the folks who frequent this and other forums (speaking of which, my dad is an immigrant from the Ukraine... my mom was born here, but her parents are from Switzerland, Ireland, England, etc.). Anyway, I think you're right, it's not necessarilly a bad thing that PCEFX doesn't have an off-topic board... we'll just have to find an alternative venue. Although it would be interesting if aaron tested out an off-topic area
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Sociological tangent: I've never seen any statistics or research, but it would be interesting to see what the demographics of old-skool / retro gamers. I suspect that it would be 90%+ white, middle-class, males... thought the ages would be spread out (from the folks who grew up with pinball machines to the folks who grew up with NES / 16-bit, depending on how you defined "retrogaming").
I suspect this retro-gaming demographic will continue to diversify over time (i.e. as the PS1 generation ages), although I think the venerable NES had a pretty wide demographic (since it was such a successful console for so long).
Gaming is an expensive hobby: the Atari 2600 (and early computer / gaming hardware, in general) were much more of a "luxury" item back in the day. So, usually, it was the privileged folks with $$$ who could afford gaming (not only to pay for the hardware and software, but to have the "free time" required to play games). Sure, there were always a bunch of gamers with little money, but you can't be a mainstream success by selling to them alone. So, if Apple and Atari were "mainstream" successes, who were the people in this "mainstream" in the early 80's? I think it was much less diverse (in terms of economic class, as well as ethnicity) than the years that followed.
[end of tangent]
Topic: Scheduled chat! (Read 602 times)
