Some numbers on the Wellington theatreform market

Wellington
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#1

I’ve been doing another quick-and-dirty data project on the Wellington theatreform market, aimed at finding out the total size of the market, number of regular players, and impact of out-of-town attendees. The data-set was the cast-lists of all standalone theatre-style games run in Wellington in 2015, covering 8 games and 128 player-spaces. The data was supplemented with information on gender and city, then anonymised before analysis. The original, unanonymised data set has been deleted. There were a couple of gaps in the data set, but not enough to significantly affect the results IMHO. The data does not include con events such as Hydra and Kapcon, or campaign games such as Dry Spell or World That Is - it is focused on the standalone market, the part of the market I’m personally interested in.

The numbers:

  • 65 people played at least one standalone theatre-style game in wellington last year. Of those, 8 were from out of town, and 8 are unknown. So, the size of the local Wellington player pool for this sort of game is at least 50.
  • 26 people played at least two games. This group of regular larpers were responsible for ~70% of all player-spaces played last year. Only one of them was from out of town, so there’s about 25 local regulars.
  • 17 people played at least three games. This is the hard-core, responsible for 55% of all player-spaces filled.
  • 9 people played at least four games, and were responsible for over a third of all spaces filled.
  • The overall player pool is roughly evenly split by gender (33F / 32M), and the regular pool is perfectly split. The hard-core in fact skews male (7F, 10 M), though the die-hards skew the other way.
  • Looking at it in terms of player-spaces, its only among the diehards where you see a significant imbalance (29 of 47 spaces were filled by women).

The gender results are puzzling. One of the reasons I was doing this was to try and get some hard numbers on “Wellington skew”, the way games seem to fill with women. But it doesn’t seem to be strongly present in the overall numbers, with a 53:47 split of overall player spaces. Is there another analysis which explains it?

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2016 Wellington theatreform statistics
#2

I think the Wellington skew is apparent most when trying to fit our current gender ratios into pre written games that assume less even ratios.

#3

[quote=“Adrexia, post:2, topic:21249, full:true”]
I think the Wellington skew is apparent most when trying to fit our current gender ratios into pre written games that assume less even ratios.[/quote]

We’ve been selecting against such games for a while, though (or at least I have been). If it doesn’t provide at least a 50:50 gender ratio, it goes on the “unrunnable” pile.

I notice it most in signup. 4 of my 5 initial signups for Wands at the Ready are women. A year ago, 22 of my 34 signups for Dead Man’s Chest were women (a bunch later dropped out). One game I’m aware of which is seeking expressions of interest ATM has 14 women of 15 total signups.

The latter game may be a genre effect. But at the least I think we can say that Wellington’s male larpers are slower off the mark at committing to games.

#4

I know your figures intentionally ignore the convention market, but this is interesting…

Sanctuary was written for the Kapcon market as it was in 2007-2008. There were 66 cast characters:
24 women : 42 men.

The upcoming Hydra run has 45 players:
25 women : 20 men.

At the time we first wrote Sanctuary we got a lot more women signing up than we expected (based on data from previous years), so rewrote a bunch of characters to be women. That’s a pretty sharp shift in a small-ish amount of time.

Another interpretation: perhaps we aren’t getting more women, but are losing more men the further we move away from tabletop?

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#5

[quote=“Adrexia, post:4, topic:21249”]
Another interpretation: perhaps we aren’t getting more women, but are losing more men the further we move away from tabletop?[/quote]

Caveats: Kapcon and Hydra are different markets, and the Kapcon market has shifted in the past 8 years. That said: Kapcon has a lot of casual larpers, who we really only ever see there, and they’re mostly men. So there’s certainly some evidence for your conclusion.

The Kapcon flagships have had a design requirement for some years for a 50:50 gender ration (with swing in the middle); I should really do some analysis to see what it actually gets. I think there are cast-lists public for most recent games.