The Death of Brick and Mortar?

A lot of people are predicting the death of brick and mortar retail stores in the face of the internet. The two reasons I hear most often are lower overhead and the ease with which one can find and purchase a given item online. I will however, propose   that there is another important reason that brick and mortar stores are in decline: the lack of an active community. For today, a community is a group with a common interest that tends to gather in a specific place to engage in that activity or an aspect of that activity, and an active community, in contrast to a passive one, is a community that provides the three components necessary for making friends: proximity, repeated, unplanned interaction, and a setting that encourages people to place confidence in each other.

Bookstores do not generally foster this kind of community. While they do create proximity, there is little encouragement for unplanned interaction or placing confidence others. The addition of coffee shops has helped increase proximity, but has done little for unplanned interaction or promoting the placing of confidence in other people.

Game stores, in contrast, foster active communities. Because they sell games, they create proximity in the same way bookstores does by selling books. Having nights devoted to particular games or companies lends to unplanned interaction between members of the community. Finally, learning and playing games encourages team building behavior, i.e. placing trust in others.

Technology, through the computer and the internet, has successfully replicated the conditions for making friends and therefore creating an active community. There are chat rooms, forums, websites, etc. people gather around to create a community that has, in digital form, proximity, unplanned interaction, and team building behavior. In the specific case of the gaming community, the computer has even managed to improve certain aspects of the gameplay experience, removing endless shuffling from deck building games or keeping track of points. Despite successfully recreating the conditions necessary to make friends in an online setting and improving gameplay, people still gather regularly to play RPGs or board games in person.

Technology has failed to replicate some aspect of the active community experience. Whether that is simply literal face to face interaction, complex body language, or proximity to a group's favorite pizza joint, who knows? Thus far, offline communities have survived in the face of the convenience provided by online ones, and it looks like they will continue to do so.

This doesn't mean however, that game stores, and other brick and mortar locations with active communities, will not go the way of bookstores.  However, as long as businesses can continue to bring in an active community of sufficient size and  the benefits of an offline community continue to outweigh the benefits of an online one, brick and mortar stores will continue to exist. Owners can take a lesson from the internet when enticing communities to their place of business by encouraging the growth of the community in question and providing convenient access to other services that the community wants, such as food.