Most of you probably have seen the comic strip on BGG showing "the cult of the new": the fact that people only want to play new games rather than games they already know. One of my friend even made a comment: "People have so much unplayed games (because they buy too much) that they want to play their unplayed games first instead of playing old games or known games."
On the other hand you have the cult of the "one game" which creates groups like chess, shogi and mah jong clubs.
The advantage of always playing the same game is that you can analyse and play the game very deeply. The disadvantage is that it can become boring due to the lack of variety.
As for the Cult of the new, you have a lot of variety but you don't get a chance to analyse the game through repeating plays, the replay value of a game is useless and you don't get a chance to play an old game you like.
Personally, I am in between both cults, I want to play good games often enough to get a deeper analysis of a game but I want to play more than 1 or 2 games.
The cult of the new seems to follow the "Play and dispose" philosophy of video games. When a game is finished or has been played, players forget the game and want something else.
What does it change to game design? If people are not replaying games, designers won't make any effort to make their game replayable. Second, designers might also not make as much effort to make a good balanced game, because when the effect of the "new" would have passed away they know that weather their game is good or bad, people won't play anymore. So people play a game not because it's good, but because it's new.
Does any of you have suggestion on how to overcome the effect of the "new"? Making expansions can be a way for people to replay your game.
Could this be considered a problem that we should try to overcome?
Another drawback of only playing new games is that you need to learn new rules all the time which mean that the games needs to have relatively simple rules and fast to explain else people would find loosing too much time learning the rules. Which has the effect of making more complex games less attractive.
I did not quite understand what created the video game crash. Was it really because they were too much crappy games. In a report I have seen, I remember them saying that a few key games really sucked and people simply get bored to play video games.
Do you think a crash could eventually happen to board game industry?