Meetup.com and Roleplaying

Meetup.com has re-invented itself this month, and I think it's going to make a big difference in their success in smaller cities.

Meetup's purpose has been to build communities in the real world, instead of online, by helping people with common interests find each other and get together. But in the beginning, they had a clever plan that just didn't work.

They picked the categories, like Roleplaying, and decided when all the Roleplaying groups would meet. So every third Tuesday of the month, at 8 PM, every Roleplaying Meetup group in the world would meet. It was supposed to be neat, knowing that everyone else in the world was meeting at the same time as you, except that they weren't... only those in your time-zone were. And since this was about local, face-to-face groups, it didn't really matter who else was meeting. Strike one against the clever plan... they didn't let local needs influence the meeting time or date.

Then, they had a database of venues and presented three of them semi-randomly and asked members to vote. This meant that the meeting might not be at the same place every month, the winning voters may have no idea if the venue is even open or able to accommodate them, and private homes or venues not in the database weren't available. Strike two against the clever plan... voting doesn't guarantee a responsible party making sure the venue is appropriate, and local needs are again ignored.

Finally, if a meeting didn't have five members RSVP ahead of time, it was canceled. So a group with less than five members had no chance of meeting at all, and there was no way to communicate with other members online to arrange a meeting anyway. They wanted to encourage meetings in the real world, so they didn't provide online communication tools, which actually kept people from meeting. Strike three against the clever plan... if only three people want to meet, why not let them meet?

There were other issues, but those are the big ones that have prevented any of the Meetup groups I'm a member of from meeting since I signed up in June 2003.

But this month, the strikes are removed from their record. They now have forums and private messaging to allow members to communicate about details of the meetings. The group gets a volunteer coordinator, who chooses (through use of polls and discussion), the meeting dates, times and venues. The group can have more than one meeting a month. You can even have multiple groups about the same topic in one region (mostly for groups that are too large). Basically, they've put all the control of the details into the hands of the local group, instead of arbitrarily deciding for them. And that makes all the difference... the Wichita Roleplayers Meetup group is meeting for the first time this Tuesday. There may be only three of us (out of 14 members), but that's better than nothing and may be the boost we need to get some more of those members out.

Now what does all this mean for roleplaying? Roleplaying is already a social activity, so there are a lot of roleplayers meeting face-to-face. And some cities have really good game stores with playing space and opportunities for roleplayers to meet other roleplayers. So what does Meetup have to offer?

In my area (Wichita, KS) there just aren't any really good game stores. They're "mostly adequate" but what gaming space they have is very devoted to collectible games and wargames... there isn't a good time to go and meet roleplayers there, in part because nobody's organized such a thing. And that's where Meetup comes in... it's organizing something in a way nobody's really organized before. I recently learned of the WSU Gaming Society, but they're an all-types-of-games club, including board and video games. And they have a 1-hour "business" meeting, followed by games, including several roleplaying campaigns. They're not really what I'm looking for, though, because I mostly just want to meet other roleplayers and socialize with them.

But what about larger cities? Surely they don't need Meetup, do they? I've been talking to Ron Pyatt, the coordinator of the Dallas-Plano Roleplayers Meetup Group. The Dallas area is pretty big, and their Meetup group has 78 members. They've had 10 meetings before the big redesign, so Meetup is at least getting them together. Looking at their new members, it looks like Meetup is working well for people new to the area or wanting to get back into gaming after a long hiatus. (One of their venues, the InfiniTea coffee house, loves Meetup and puts up signs to welcome meetup groups on nights they meet there. Sounds like Meetup's working for InfiniTea, eh?)

There are 245 Roleplayers Meetup groups... why not see if there's one in your area?