Fads have been the Holy Grails of children’s merchandising for the last half century. They have borne companies aloft to untold heights of profitability… and crushed them under the boot of post-fad indifference. Finding themselves on the upswing of a fad, anyone with a spare teaspoon of business sense wastes no time in licensing the hell out of it. Lunch boxes, apparel, animated series, board games, and even role-playing games. The two products that spring most immediately to mind are the Pokemon Adventure Game and the upcoming Harry Potter RPG.

There seems to be an unquestioned belief in the RPG industry that “getting ‘em while they’re young” will result in a future generation of role-players; a cohort of people who are not only familiar with RPGs, but don’t consider them “geeky” or “evil.” It sounds like a reasonable assumption, especially given the painful obscurity of the hobby. “If only we could get people into the hobby earlier, show them how much fun it is before they become uptight teens and busy adults, then they’d be hooked for life.”

But is this necessarily the case? In the 1950’s, marketing professionals and social psychologists investigated “Fad Culture” when it first emerged as a recognized phenomenon. In particular, they were interested in why things like coonskin caps and hoola-hoops experienced such rapid drops in popularity after reaching such drastic heights. Their leading theory drew on the mechanisms of social imitation and the interactions between different age groups among children.

Point One - Children tend to imitate people they admire and differentiate themselves from people they do not.

Point Two - Younger children tend to admire older children, for a wide variety of reasons.

Point Three - Older children do not admire younger children and tend to differentiate themselves from them.

Enter in a mass media vehicle that can transmit cultural information to hundreds of millions of children almost instantly (ie, television) and watch the pieces interact. First, the older children adopt something new and, through peer pressure and media attention, spread it among other populations. Younger children see this and become interested in the Next Big Thing, too. For a brief period (a few months to a year or more), the toy/activity/movie/whatever becomes incredibly popular.

However, as the older children become aware that the younger children have also adopted the fad, its attraction to them begins to ebb. In order to escape association with “little kids,” the older age groups start distancing themselves from the fad and find something new. Of course, the more the older kids dump the fad, the less attractive it becomes to the younger kids. Just as quickly as it came, the fad disappears into obscurity.

This theory was borne out recently by a friend of mine. Tom has a 6th grade son and his son has a 4th grade friend. A few months ago, Tom’s son was very into Pokemon; he collected the cards enthusiastically, though he never seemed very interested in the game behind them. However, it has been many weeks since he has asked for any Pokemon merchandise or even looked at his collection much.

At the time of this writing, Tom’s son was getting ready to sleep over at his 4th grade friend’s house. In preparation, the boy dug out all of his Pokemon cards to bring with him. It would seem that the younger child is now into the Pokemon scene, just as the older child began to tire of it. (The real test of this would be to see of Tom’s son would be willing to play with his Pokemon cards in the presence of his 6th grade peers.)

But where do the assumptions of the industry come from? Part of the answer might be found in recent demographic numbers collected by Wizards of the Coast. According to their survey, 34% of role-players are between the ages of 25 and 35. They also indicate that people who have played RPGs for five years or more are more likely to continue playing RPGs. This has been taken to mean that, if we can start people on RPGs earlier, and therefore get them to play longer, they will be more likely to stay with the hobby as they grow older. The best way to get kids into anything, popular wisdom says, it to link it to a fad. Hey, it works for lunch boxes.

However, these statistics could simply be a result of the fact that RPGs were more popular 10-20 years ago when these people were in their early- to mid-teens and no new gamers have taken their place as they got older. It could also mean that those people are responsible for bringing in most of the “new blood.” Without word-of-mouth in the 12-18 crowd, none of them are being exposed to RPGs. If this is the case, then the actual number of years gaming is an effect of loyalty to the hobby, not its cause. To my mind, this makes a lot more sense.

The “fad culture” theory should have a special resonance for veteran role-players. How many people have you run into who say things like, “Yeah, I played AD&D in, like, first grade. Its a kid’s game.” In my experience, these people have been even more resistant to the idea of role-playing than those whose only exposure to it has been “After School Specials” or a few negative sermons here and there. After all, opinions based on firsthand experience are more resilient that those borrowed from the experiences of others.

What does all of this mean for the RPG industry? It means that there is a very real danger that getting people into RPGs when they are children will brand the hobby as something for children; something to be left behind with training wheels and action figures. It means RPG companies could very well become the engineers of a new stigma, just when the old “satanist geeks” stigma was finally beginning to wear away. We cannot predict the future, but we can prepare for it. Age demographics are funny things; tampering with younger populations can have lasting and unexpected effects on them as they become older populations. The marketing approaches companies take today could have serious consequences for the future of our hobby.

Daniel Pond is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Psychology program and co-director of the Immersive Entertainment Group (http://www.imeg-games.com).