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During a 41 year career as a journalist, for our Editor Phil Parry spotting trends has always been paramount, and this is highlighted by new evidence today of an explosive growth in the use of non-digital games.
There is a motto in journalism that a story is never OLD until it is TOLD!
This could equally apply to old fashioned games which appear to be making a comeback, and it seems to be a reaction against ones using modern electronic consoles.
Take, for example board games.
Their numbers are telling, with the global board game market expected to almost double in value, from $19 billion in 2022 to $40 billion in 2028.
The resurgence of them owes much to the continuous innovation of the industry and the savviness of the creative teams.
Dr Johnathan Harrington, an Assistant Professor who has worked at a board game company in Malta, has an avid interest in creative play as well as the communities, production and design of board games, by studying how board games have captured people’s imagination once again.
“To be geek is to be engaged”, declares Dr Harrington, quoting from John A. McArthur, a Professor famed for his work on digital sub-culture.
With experience in testing games and talking to players before they are launched, he attests to how popular culture, such as the Marvel series, has given a new meaning to being “geek chic”.
“Board game players in the Anglophone community used to be considered ‘geeky’, but the perception has changed to something positive, something ‘chic’, ‘niche’ and intellectual over the last 10 years”, he proclaims.
Then there’s Pinball.
It used to be seen as the preserve of pasty-faced kids in arcades, but no longer.
There has been a huge growth in it (although the numbers are still small compared with video games).
The number of people playing in tournaments sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball Association (IFPA), the governing body, more than doubled between 2015 and 2024, from 16,500 to almost 40,000.
The number of companies making pinball machines has also grown, from just one—Stern, which stood alone for more than a decade—to about 20 firms around the world.
Behind this renaissance lies a strategic change: after decades of being scared by video games, Pinball manufacturers have worked out how to imitate them.
So don’t think of it as OLD until the story about them is TOLD!
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when spotting trends was central) as he was gripped by the incurable neurological condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – how another mainstay of journalism for Phil has always been exposing ineptitude when friends and family were appointed to senior positions, and now this is underlined by disturbing news of how exactly this is happening in Syria.
