Hi again journal
Among massive social media companies, the Russians are less evil than Facebook or Twitter, so let's see how this goes.
In Minneapolis this weekend, bbstenniz pointed out that a lot of these scrabble tournaments nowadays are just the same core group of people playing in various cities around the US. On reflection, that's a pretty sad indictment of the state ( Read more... )
1) We don't have a bestseller like Word Freak or a show on ESPN like we did back in our heyday.
2) Tournament Scrabble has gotten tougher, making it less accessible to new players. When I won my first tournament in Albuquerque 2002, I didn't even know all the 3s. That probably wouldn't be enough today. If I hadn't done so well early on, I don't know if I would have stuck with it.
3) The money has gotten a lot worse since then. There's less incentive to improve.
4) Tournament Scrabble is a nasty place sometimes. The scene itself has fractured-- WGPO vs. NASPA, TWL vs Collins, and the squabbles between each faction are friggin' unbearable. Even within each faction, there are cliques and cliques within cliques that don't get along with one another.
(You contribute to the decline every time you hijack a TWL thread with some trollish post about Collins. I don't honestly know if you've done this recently, but it was something you did regularly, and it didn't make anyone want to play Collins; it only sowed discord within the community.)
This is a microcosm of American society as it splinters away into ever more insular 'tribes' of people who all think (or fail to think) the same way, and can no longer stand to be around people outside their group. The same forces destroying Scrabble can be seen destroying everything else.
I find it helpful to recall that I got into Scrabble because Mike Baron introduced it to me. That's just one data point, I guess, but it seems like the recruitment must come from the individuals who make up the group.
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1) is slowly starting to come around. The modern equivalent of the ESPN show is streaming, podcast, vlogging, user-generated content stuff. There's not a lot of us with the time or technical expertise but there's at least some live streaming content that happens at big events. How useful it is in outreach to the muggle population is oft debated.
2) is a thing. I'm not sure what to do about it, or how much it's directly impacting us -- does chess have fewer new people getting involved now that the top players are using computer engines to create a new deep understanding of the game?
3) Fewer people == less money to go around == fewer people bothering to improve == even less money.
4) Is most directly the fault of the organization -- the reason we have an organization is to manage the community and prevent things like the WGPO split or endless dictionary arguments, and NASPA's actions have consistently made the problem worse. That's the largest problem -- there's no one in a leadership role in North American Scrabble who has a skill set that includes managing a community and creating consensus behind decisions, etc. It's been over a decade now and hasn't gotten any better.
For my own role, yeah, I'm sorry I was a dick. I've tried to not do that recently, and really am tired of the dictionary debate -- I'll play what I play, run the events that I run, promote what I feel like promoting, and leave it at that.
Thanks for the comment!
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