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?