Last month's semi-annual Game Store Closures article was also quite a bit more work to compile this time, owing to the massacre of small specialty retail by some damned virus this year. I am delighted to see that post already in the Top 5 all-time most read articles here on the blog. If some more official source were tracking those closures in a more statistically rugged manner, it might be more useful to the industry and better for our position in the world of business overall, but until that happens, I'll keep offering up a favorable alternative to no documentation at all.
Documentation is underdone anywhere that there is not either a profit incentive or a legal requirement, and there's probably no real solution to that. When I worked for AZDHS, a routine part of my job as a senior analyst was exhaustive documentation of enactments, changes, amendments, repeals, and so forth, of applicable statutes, and more often, content in Title 9 of the Arizona Administrative Code. This documentation was crucial because I was also assigned to the review, drafting, development, and promulgation of code content outright. Naturally, both statutory authority and Title 1 of the Code (maintained by the Department of Administration) required that these processes be followed. It was essential that the work of literally governing the state be able to continue administering statutory and regulatory authority even if the executives, analysts, attorneys, or whoever worked on it at any point in time, became unavailable for any reason -- moving on to other work, retirement, even death. Plenty of law stretches back a century or more in origin, even out here on the frontier where we were only a territory until 1912.
I have been a fan of the Canadian progressive rock band Rush all my life, and I spent many years collecting any recordings and memorabilia I could find. By contrast to what I experienced at AZDHS, in Rush's fandom, documentation was mostly voluntary. This is why, until Rush were years into their careers, almost nobody was documenting their performance history (sometimes referred to as a "tourography") and until the later years of their career when portable technology caught up, almost nobody was documenting most of the performances themselves by means of audio or video recording. (The creation of "concert bootlegs" or "Recordings Of Indeterminate Origin" was a gray-market practice for a long time, but today in the YouTube and smartphone era, everyone just records whatever they want and no one cares.) Rush's entire late-1975 "Down the Tubes Tour" in support of the album Caress of Steel is so scantily documented that a whopping one concert recording has ever been found, and it wasn't found until around ten years ago, and it sucks. Eyewitness testimony regarding the setlist for the hometown and (presumed) best show on the tour is a subject of veritable archaeology, and provokes no small amount of disagreement (in a positive way, in mutual hope of getting it right). For a point of comparison, despite the crude tech available in 1980, Led Zeppelin's entire final tour is completely documented.
The Backstage Pass didn't start until late 2014, but I am glad that it has served as documentation, to some extent, of the business itself, in addition to what one might glean about greater industry events from my humble articles. The blog is eternally contemporaneous with the events and issues it addresses, except when there is intentional rear-view mirroring for one reason or another. I'm sure once I depart the business, whatever year that is, I will set to work writing a book about it, and these articles will form the backbone of that manuscript. We have some tumultuous chapters coming up, and I know it's going to be quite a ride.
The trenches-oriented business reality of the comic and hobby game small specialty retail industry has been even better documented by the likes of Gary Ray and Scott Thorne, and we have occasionally seen additional input from various others, ranging from highly credible to downright mötley. I'd be here all night if I started charting the various new media channels that we're seeing content of documentary value from. A lot of this documentation is profit-incentivized, either directly or just as an adjacent way to add value to the writer's top-line enterprise. However it's getting done, it's good that it is. This is a strange pinpoint in time, an unusual intersection of narrow niches of business, technology, social media, hobby pastimes, and fandoms. It's great to realize most of it won't be lost to fading memory when it's over. Not all cultural flashpoints are so lucky, and some that are, get documented mainly in Retrospecticus Format with talking heads telling us how it all went down. That can still be done well, as in the link above, but contemporaneous content is broadly superior.
In any event, thank you for being along for the ride these past eight years, and for the five-plus years that The Backstage Pass has been chronicling it all. There is so much more I hope to do moving forward both with this writing project and other content creation, but the reality right now is that progress within the business is the most crucial and exciting thing I can be working on most of the time. Hopefully I can sketch enough details down in the meanwhile, that it will be possible to chart and analyze the whirlwind afterward, once the storm has calmed down.
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