Even for Millennials, the shared zeitgeist is more distilled, in each exhibit there is usually a dominant figure, and it defines the entire type of thing. They have this ultra-narrow but white-hot generational affinity for things spanning roughly 1992 to a few years ago, the endpoint isn't really fixed yet, it might end up being 2014 in analogue to when my tolerance for society ran out. For Millennials, there's a real hotspot from 1999 to 2001 or so in which almost everything they liked or cared about was a pretty big deal in general for mainstream culture, and thus their nostalgia pivot points sit there. Post-grunge and nu-metal, boy bands (sooo many boy bands), Pokemon TCG, the Nintendo 64, the Star Wars prequels, the Harry Potter books. I could roll my eyes and say I can't relate, but then why do I go into a nuclear-grade nostalgia trance every time I hear Take the Time or Anybody Listening, fire up a game of Faxanadu or Super Metroid, or start my Nth re-read of The Belgariad? It's the same thing.
By the time you get to the Post-Millennials, whatever the hell we're calling them, the shared cultural convention has given way to a million different isolated cells of hyperfocused fandom, goes the theory. But if it's all isolated to the degree that anything can cultivate a following, does anything really become "huge" the way it once did? Maybe not?
Certainly in broad swaths we see a shared zeitgeist still. If you don't believe me, understand that Gangnam Style has been viewed on YouTube 3.1 billion times, as of this writing, and counting. And if I were to show you any of a dozen common memes, you'd not only know the most common versions of them, but probably the shorthand for the meme itself. But also we see that most "event" books, movies, and music are based on properties that rose to prominence during earlier generations.
The tabletop boom as we know it today started around 2010, as the economy dragged itself out of the trough of the 2008-2009 recession. So it's on the tail end of Millennial tolerance as a "generational" thing, Boomers and Gen-X-ers are already past the affinity stage so we just take it as another thing to do (and maybe that makes it more stable for us!), and what about the Post-Millennials? The tabletop boom is burning hot right now in 2018, and right now should be their nostalgia pivot years. This is it. A substantial part of the generation to which my kids belong is having their formative shared cultural experience peaking over the next few years.
But if their fandom is infinitely widely dispersed, is the entirety of tabletop enough to be a common nostalgia point? Is all of tabletop, from TCGs to board games to miniatures to collectibles to deckbuilders to party games to classic games and all the rest, enough to be a cultural impression as strong as Gangnam Style? What if the answer is No?
I can tell you right now, Allie, my oldest, will go from age 10 to 14 during these crucial years. She is a late Post-Millennial; Pew Research bounds "Generation Z" as 1997 to 2014 births. And Allie doesn't give a wild flying care about tabletop, for the most part. Her iPad is her Precious and you can attempt to wrench it away from her at your own peril. Video games are oxygen to her. Ask her about Minecraft. Maybe that's one of the few things that rises to the Gangnam level. There damned sure isn't much else that she sticks with for any length of time. She has the infinite channels of the eternally connected life. She can consume any content at any time. (Well, notwithstanding the papier-mache gate of Parental Controls.) My friend's cultural observation appears confirmed by Allie's reality.
I guess I wrote my way from one question into multiple questions. How will the rise of tabletop look decades from now... to whom?
The Silent Generation is mostly absent from tabletop, simply because it was never part of their lives beyond the simple bounds of Monopoly, cribbage, and playing cards. For the Boomers and Generation X, the rise of tabletop (and its inevitable fall) are probably going to look a lot like the passage of hair metal or grunge, the Disney Revived era, the 1990s comic book bubble, or what have you. We were there for it, and already adults, set in our ways, and rather than taking personally how "dated" it appears, it's a period piece to us.
Millennials are a little closer to the moment but theirs has been a skeptical generation even as it engaged in the hobby. They knew from day one that electronic pursuits would predominate, even though tabletop would probably always have a niche following. Their interest level in tabletop will drop the farthest and bottom out the lowest, and will track the decline of tabletop overall. At the trough, they'll see playing "analog" games as an embarrassingly silly thing, like late 1990s low-budget CGI effects.
Post-Millennials? I expect them to look at the rise and fall of tabletop the way I look at the rise and fall of disco. I was alive when it happened, but by circumstance of timing, I never had any reason to care. By virtue of their inevitable need to distinguish themselves socially from their predecessors, expect Post-Millennials to be the flagbearers for tabletop right around the time Millennials won't be caught dead placing a worker Meeple and passing the turn.
Generation Nextest, with births from 2015 until whenever, will see the tabletop era the way Xers like me see the Korean War. It was over before we begun. The primitive 4K video recordings of people playing tabletop games will look antiquated compared to the immersive omnidirectional content of their brain-stem network interface. They'll discover lost arts and spend their days fighting a virtual war against the computer systems of megacorporations.
TL;DR -- Probably a good thing I didn't sign a ten-year lease.
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