Today I’m going to take a minute to write about diversity. And why representation matters. I mean sure, a load of people already know this – because, well, you know… they are under-represented. And when that’s you, you notice things like that. And you really want them to change.
And I want them to change too.
I mean, why do I care right? I have privilege? I’m already represented in the boardroom, the workplace, the awards, the products, the marketing? I’m a CIShet straight white middle aged man? I seemingly have it all?
No. Read on, gentle reader. It’s not one of ‘those’ blogs.
You see, even if I didn’t ‘care care’ there’s reason enough to care.
One, I like money. The more people buy boardgames from my shop, the more of it I have. It’s why I don’t call my game store ‘Dave’s House of Games’. Why we don’t have a guest list and a velvet rope. I want the world to think of us as ‘their ‘ game store.
Two, I sell happiness. I know I’ve mentioned this before – how retail therapy and the act of actively playing release neuro transmitters into our brains that really do help promote a degree of internal happiness. And happy people buy more. If you are spending your time in a store but getting the distinct vide of a Jordan Peele movie… well, you aren’t going to be in a happy place.
Did I mention that happy people spend more? See point one.
Three, I’m a nerd. I was a precocious kid who got talked down to a lot. Remember those nights when you lay awake thinking “When i get to be an adult, things are going to be different” and then you totally became a gatekeeper for your hobby? Nope, not me. Nobody gets to feel like they don’t belong – not on my watch.
Four, social justice. I like my games to be balanced. Sure, I love the asymmetric nature of games like Root. But asymmetric games need even more game balance than regular games, otherwise everyone wants to play the Marquise du Cat and then pretty soon nobody wants to play.
I can see though how, in that world – in Root Inequality (NOT an actual expansion TM) – the guy who owns that copy of Root may have a vested interest in playing Root and always playing the bloody cat, because it’s his bloody game. But we don’t live in the world of Root – and yes, I do always play the bandit.
How can I make Root Inequality guy see?
Well, it turns out I need a time machine and to go back around five years. You see, we haven’t always been the game store you know and love today. There used to be a time when if you googled Fan Boy Three, most of the responses that came back were about how shit we were.
But not about race or gender. This was all about middle aged white boardgamers. Ironically, not feeling represented. Voices drowned out.
Not feeling seen.
A bit of context.
At Fan Boy Three I’ve always believed that the gaming industry is a big tent. And the bigger the tent, the more poles you need to hold that tent up. Boardgames, roleplaying games, miniatures games and cardgames. Four poles. Four pillars. A decent store supports all of those games, at least a little. Otherwise you are like my cornershop in Bradford who pretended to sell every biscuit but actually only stocked bourbon creams.
And we had play space.
Most game stores have difficulty monetising their play space. Cardgames are comparatively easy to monetise – there’s a reason organised play started with Magic tournaments. Organised play was effective as a sales and marketing tool, because engaged customers simply bought more card packets than unengaged customers. Before Organised Play, the average purchase for a TCG was a starter and half a dozen boosters. Once Organised Play was a thing, that moved to most players buying at least a box.
Roleplayers play campaigns. They buy miniatures. Miniature players buy miniatures and paints. Thousands of pounds of paints.
But boardgamers often bought nothing.
#notallboardgamers
I know we have discussed why this is the Quantum Retailer blog before, but it’s worth talking about it again for a second. There’s a thing called the 20:80 rule, that says 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. Naturally as a business you need to lean into that 20% because they are 80% of your business. But lean too far and now you just cater to 20% of your customers and only make 80% of your previous business. The more you drill down the less overall money you make – see point one above.
Now, the smart business looks after number one – or number one to twenty – while simultaneously looking after the customers that only spend a fraction of the money. If you had a hundred customers spending a collective £1000, 20 customers spend £40 each and 80 customers spend £2.50. But that still adds up to £200. If you want to increase your turnover you either have to increase the spend per customer or increase the volume of customers, because the underlying math remains the same.
So the smartest business understand they have to grow their customer base to generate more revenue. See points one and two above.
Back in the time machine.
Old Fan Boy Three had two rooms – the front and the back. The back was our Organised Play space. People would come in, hang out, play D&D or Magic or Yugioh on the tables. Tables in the front of the store were nicer – of an evening we’d prioritise RPG groups, because it meant the back was quieter, more people could sit around a table in the front and it gave visibility to the games we played. People would walk past and see D&D being played and being played by people like them.
Cool, hip, young. And women. Because right from the get go we prioritised any roleplaying group with female players for priority seating, which – ten years on – had given us a reputation for being a place women could go play games safely without anyone batting an eye.
But this blog is about the opposite of that.
You see, during the day cardgamers would meet their mates in store for a cheeky game of magic or Yugioh. Remember ‘meeting mates?’ before the days of COVID and mobile phones. I’d stand on a street corner waiting for my friends to rock up so we could see Back to the Future 2. All over Bradford people would be lurking on street corners.
Now they lurked in my shop.
You are the USP that companies like Wizards, Konami, Bandai and Pokemon use to market their games. Your space. Your community. You want players in your store, and they want players in your store – its a match made in heaven. But one person’s heaven is probably another persons hell.
My shop had a bell. When you opened the door, it rang. Everyone would look up – maybe it was their friend, come to play that game with them? But it wasn’t. It was a boardgamer called Chris. Who ran the UK’s biggest Facebook group of boardgame enthusiasts.
By the time I had been notified of the attack thread, there were already hundreds of comments.
I’d though that building the space, putting a load of boardgames in, making space available to boardgamers was enough. I’d done the bare minimum, without thinking about it from a boardgamers perspective. CIShet white middleaged male boardgamers.
They needed love too. Craved visisbility.
When they walked through the door, dozens of cardgamers who had migrated into the front of the store to wait for their mates looked up, stared at them, and went back to sorting their Yugioh trades or shuffling their commander decks. You had to pick your way past them. Often cardgamers would want to watch another game in progress, so they would move the chairs in front of the shelves. Old Fan Boy Three was a lot tighter and narrower – gangways were easily blocked. It was all a bit Das Boot.
Boardgames were half the way down. We’d made an RPG nook by the front window, so they were clearly front and centre. Wargames was on the back wall. Cards by the till. What had made sense operationally for us now looked like a deliberate de-prioritisng of boardgames.
Reading that attack thread was pretty bad. Even though we had the best selection of boardgames in the North West people deliberately refused to buy from us. To punish me. To drive me out of business.
To cancel us.
Thing is, I could see their concerns. Not at first – I mean, we are welcoming and friendly – we had a global reputation for excellence in running Organised Play and our shop was always full? So I left the store, walked around and came back. And all the TCG players looked up as the door rang, like twenty meerkats. Then – because I was not their friend – looked disappointedly back down. It was the social equivalent of somebody throwing a bucket of water over me.
So we changed it up a bit.
Roleplayers are overjoyed to find a store that sells roleplaying games. We feel seen by little gestures, probably because we live so much in our own heads. I moved the RPG’s to where the boardgames were. Now boardgamers had their own boardgame nook.
We put piles of boardgames on our key tables as displays. Now TCG players had to go sit in the back.
Boardgames were now front and centre. And before long they were a large proportion of our sales. Not quite 80%, but decent. More than supporting their quarter of the four pillars.
Boardgamers wanted to be seen, wanted to be valued, wanted to be catered for. They wanted to be visible 24/7 – which is a lot harder if you don’t have events that attract them into store. We installed round tables on the top, customer facing floor of new Fan Boy Three – boardgame tables during the day, roleplay tables at night. Added a boardgame cafe and a boardgame library. Now they had that visibility 24/7. And in 2019 we were voted the UK’s number one boardgame store by the same group that had wanted me to die in a fire five years earlier.
We were still in essence the same store. The same people. The same ethos. Much of what we did was superficial. But when people – middle aged white CIShet males – tell me visibility isn’t important?
Well, it was for them.
Visibility – representation – IS superficial. Trust me, everyone understands that. But it is also vital. We all crave it – all of us. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that its not important, or that you shouldn’t care. See points one through four. Whether you care passionately about social justice or just increasing your sales, visibility is a thing you can probably achieve as a store – sometimes merely by rearranging things a bit.
This? Is something we call coding. How to code your store to attract a certain clientele. And it may be that by prioritising boardgames over miniatures you are sacrificing one community on the altar of another. This is an argument pure Magic stores make for just running Magic. And sure – probably not having tables of people playing magic in store day in day out, in your face as soon as you set foot in the store probably dinged a dent in our Magic turnover.
If I built my store again I might well have four distinct areas. Though even then, whichever the area you saw first from the window would become your brand representation to the world. Maybe four stores, with four different doors and four times the staff?
Fan Boy Four.
The Quantum Retailer 