Reply To: I am still wearing blinders (Origins Online)

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@neal5x5

It’s not. Origins is a major showcase for the industry to get things into the public eye in North America. I am sure that Origins will be back next year. Consumer shows have become a significant part of any companies marketing budget and the fact that more and more conventions are happening, and happening successfully, proves that.

@rastamann
But that is exactly what a trade association is supposed to do. This is not about Origins but about GAMA and who and what they represent. This is just the latest, and most public, step in a long series of struggles to define GAMA for a modern industry.

GAMA was created at a time when you could fit the names of all the board game publishers in the world on a small slip of paper. It was to be a way to help those publishers reach distributer and retailers with information about upcoming product. Early on they became a political tool to work with governments on things like trade tariffs, duties and taxes, and piracy

Now days there are tens of thousands of publishers as well as designers, artists, developers, sculptors, and more looking for representation. Along side the publishers and distributers you also have studios, manufacturing, design houses, licensing houses, and the retailers and consumers asking for a voice. Add to that things like Kickstarter and the tabletop game industry has grown exponentially without any substantial change in how GAMA operates.

Retailers got actual representation within the GAMA structure a few years ago but did not have voting rights (They are the Porto Rico or District of Columbia of GAMA) Designers and Developers are starting to be given credit for their work on many boxes but have no unified voice. When was the last time you were told who sculpted the miniature you just purchased?

Would a book get published without listing its editors? These are all people who the industry can not do without. People who, in writing, music, TV, Movies, Theatre and more would have been given credit for their work and have representation within the trade associations of those industries.

The fact the GAMA continues to ignore the groups it should be representing has been boiling in the background for quite some time. This is just the most public attempt to get a 50 year old association to grow up and actually represent its industry as it exists now, not last century.

As Erik says in his statement, this is not about a statement or about BLM or even race. This is about representation within a group. If GAMA was made up of people who actually include all of the groups that they claim to represent then missteps would be caught earlier and corrected, most likely in house before it becomes a public issue.

GAMA today announced the list of people to be voted to its board of directors, they are all males who represent publishers.

I fully believe that had this been the physical Origins show this would not have happened and that at next years Origins convention will not have any public issue. That it was a quickly created online attempt to say “here is our convention” allowed a smaller group to create a bigger wave and affect the public outcome. I do expect the GAMA Trade Show, the closed to the public industry get together, to be for more about what GAMA is and should be next year than it has in years past.