Most normal people are just meeting with each other at their homes rather than a central location, which to actually be central and desirable would need to also be quite profitable which can be a hard thing for hobby spaces to achieve. There is a certain level of scale this all just falls apart where the place needs to charge customers more than it would cost to just buy the game and play it at home. The killer feature of allowing you to meet more people becomes difficult when all the people it's most fun to play with all meet each other after a few visits and never return while those who would not be invited are a fixture.
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Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
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Notes -
Most normal people are just meeting with each other at their homes rather than a central location, which to actually be central and desirable would need to also be quite profitable which can be a hard thing for hobby spaces to achieve. There is a certain level of scale this all just falls apart where the place needs to charge customers more than it would cost to just buy the game and play it at home. The killer feature of allowing you to meet more people becomes difficult when all the people it's most fun to play with all meet each other after a few visits and never return while those who would not be invited are a fixture.
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