When I was a kid a game store used to be full of socially awkward people who lived their hobbies and appreciated culture that no one else cared for.
There was the girl with a binder full of color pencil drawings of warrior angels from Magic the Gathering; the large-spectacled and frequently unbathed kid with a mullet and fishing vest who quoted Terry Pratchett like his work was gospel; the older working class guys and military veterans who just loved slinging dice and talking about the good old days; the kids in cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts who knew all the music and skits that Dr. Demento played; and then weirdos like me who had things in common with some of these other folks and found the gaming hobby fascinating, magical, and took comfort in finally finding a way to let out all of the dreams and ideas they had bottled up with no place to explore and enjoy them.
Nowadays you mostly have young autistic guys and girls dressed in bad gender-bender cosplay who seriously seem to want you to ask them about which identity costume they're wearing this week, kids who live on Twitch and want everything to be a reference to their Internet lives, and hipsters who think everything needs to be a European board game without exception. There are maybe some kids like the ones I described above, like the ones I grew up with, but they seem lost in the shuffle caused by the intrusion of popular culture into a once niche hobby.
It's a different world now with alien and terrible people in it. Sure things change as you get older, but the way that the cultural shift has warped my hobby and game stores is something malevolent and far worse than just natural change. It's a very conscious and deliberate shift being fueled by people who demand accommodation for their religious devotion to chaos and outrageousness for the sake of outrageousness. They don't care about games or gaming. They care about making you live and breathe their message and ideas.
It's a pretty god damned dark time we're living in.
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