Dan Luu
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Why is Bridge declining?
🕑 Added 2018-06-08 22:39:12 +0000 UTC
My partner and I started playing bridge recently, and people at the local Bridge club. People often comment on how young we are. You'll find serious competitive players of all ages, but the median age of a casual player is probably in the 60s or 70s. There are a lot of discussions about why this is. The most common reasons I hear are:
1. People who are retired have more time to play games, the reason bridge looks so old is that that's who has free time.
1.b. Bridge isn't actually declining, as long as people keep retiring, the population of bridge players isn't going to decline
2. Kids nowadays don't have the attention span and play video games instead
3. Bridge takes a really long time to learn
4. Poker has sucked all the air out of the room, at least outside of Asian card games
(1) and (2) seem pretty obviously wrong to me. People my age and younger spend plenty of time playing games, they just choose games that aren't bridge. As (2) hints at, they often choose video games, but they often choose tabletop games (including other card games) instead. For 1b, this is clearly untrue if you observe the age of active bridge players, e.g., [the average age of ACBL members is increasing at 0.4 years per year](https://www.lajollabridge.com/Articles/EveningClubBridgeDecline.htm) and the players who are dying off aren't being replaced by younger folks who are playing non-ACBL bridge games.
(2) seems easily falsified by the popularity of Chess orf Go, games which take a substantially longer attention span than bridge, in that individual games run longer. One could also make this argument about "modern" board games that are now popular (by which I mean games that span the range from Catan to Puerto Rico to Terra Mystica).
I think (3) is a correct reason, but it isn't sufficient to explain what's going on. It's true that bridge has an extremely steep learning curve, much more so than games like Chess or Go, in that you can explain the rules of chess or go to someone in a few minutes and have them playing. Playing badly, but playing. This basically isn't true of Bridge (there's a sense in which it's technically true, but I think most people wouldn't call it playing Bridge), which takes multiple hours of explanation before someone can be said to be playing bridge.
I think (3) has some explanatory power and is consistent with the card games that are still popular, like poker, not to mention da lao er, da bai fen, tuo la ji, zhao pengyou, etc. (Asian card games which haven't seen a decline in popularity the way bridge has).
However, I don't think (3) is a sufficient explanation. if people really want an easy entry, they could teach spades as an entry into bridge, which is vaguely analogous to how people teach go on a 9x9 board before people "graduate" to playing go on a 19x19 board.
A related comment is that it's not clear that the initial learning curve to bridge is steeper than for a moderately complex modern board game like Terra Mystica (TM). When I see people learn TM, it often takes something like six hours to play, of which three are various rules explanations. In that much time, you could sit down and teach someone the rules of bridge plus the basics of one of the conventions "necessary" to play bridge (which is how I initially learned bridge). Modern board games as complex as TM aren't exactly wildly popular, but they're not in decline, either. If anything, it's the opposite -- relatively speaking, board games that complex are as popular as they've ever been since the euro game renaissance in the late 90s and early 00s (before then, wargames in the class of Enemy at the Gates or Advanced Squad Leader were arguably more popular, but it's hard to find sales numbers that would let you say for sure).
Even if it's true, (4) is more of a symptom than an explanation.
There's one factor that seems obvious to me that I haven't heard. Any time I think of something that seems obvious that no one else has thought of, I assume I'm wrong, but I'll write this down anyway.
One reason is that there's a stodgy bureaucracy around bridge. I'd like to illustrate this using bridge bidding systems as an example. If you're familiar with games like Magic or Netrunner, you can think of constructing a bidding system as vaguely analogous to constructing a deck, in that it's an "offline" activity you do before you play the game, and that there's a "meta" involving which systems (decks) are better than which, which is circular, in that it depends on what you're likely to face (although people wouldn't call it the meta w.r.t bridge). It isn't analogous in that learning a bidding system is much more work than learning a deck, so you're unlikely to run multiple wildly different systems day-to-day. Another major difference compared to Magic or Netrunning is that, in Bridge, you're required to disclose your bidding convention to your opponents. This last bit is important, because it means that, in tournament play, officials can penalize you *at their discretion* if they determine that you don't properly follow your convention.
If you look at bidding systems in use today, most casual players in the U.S. use some variation or evolution of a single system. There's more variety at higher levels, in tournament play, but systems that are considered too strange are either banned or highly discouraged. For example, Forcing Pass systems (where opening with a bid of "pass", instead of indicating a hand not strong enough to bid, is used to indicate a strong hand) are banned in American (ABCL) tournaments. In tournaments where FP systems aren't banned, players note that people who run FP are often severely penalized by tournament officials, e.g., see [the comment by Peter Fordham on how his team, which won the National Open with FP switched to another system because tournament officials didn't like them using an FP system](http://bridgewinners.com/article/view/defence-to-forcing-pass/). Any system that's classified as a Highly Unusual Method subjects the team to a significant amount of hassle. And, because penalties are applied at the discretion of tournament officials, additional penalties can be applied for minor offenses, even if anyone running a "natural" making similar or even worse mistakes wouldn't be penalized.
If you contrast this to younger games like Magic or Netrunner, meta-breaking discoveries are lauded; people are rewarded for thinking about the meta and figuring out how to break it. If you manage to "break" the game in a way that's not cheating, rules will be updated for the next tournament, but you'll win the tournament in a way that's considered to be creative and fair. In Bridge, officials may ban your bidding system for being too innovative in the middle of a tournament, forcing you to switch systems (e.g., Nilsland and Fallenius, playing for the Swedish team at the World Championship in the 90s, who had their system banned immediately after facing the French team).
Creativity in the meta-game is rewarded in these younger games that are also popular with younger folks. In bridge, one might be able to argue that the analogous kind of creativity is rewarded, but it's an uphill battle, enough of one that many successful tournament players have switched back to a meta that they believe is less effective because officials consider it too radical. If you're a Magic or Netrunner player, you're going to find this hard to believe, but some of the classic FP bidding systems that are too radical to use date back to the 80s. Some of these systems that are too radical to use are older than I am. Now, if you talk to bridge folks, you can find all sorts of eminently reasonable reasons for penalizing High Unusual Methods (they're annoying to play against, it takes a lot of effort to prepare a defense against them, etc.), but those reasons are just as true of some meta-breaking or anti-meta decks in Magic or Netrunner; it's just that the culture of those games is such that those reasons aren't sufficient for banning weird decks. Instead, people delight in them.
If, in the abstract, you imagine one card game where, decades after someone proposes a new meta, officials still ban it or penalize it as a Highly Unusual Method, and another card game, where people reward players for coming up with creative meta-breaking changes, and then you tell people to guess the relative age distribution of the games (ceteris paribus), I think most people would guess that the more creative game has a younger player base and the more conservative game has an older player base.
You might argue that this bidding system stuff doesn't matter outside of the highest levels of play, but the cultural impact trickles down to the beginner level. When initially learning bridge, my partner asked "why does the system say to do X?" a couple times, but she quickly learned to not ask that question. For one thing, most people don't understand the concept of a question like "why was the system designed in this way?" and instead answer the question "what does the system say we should do?", and even if you can convey the question, answers are often of the form "look, just learn what you're supposed to do" or "haha, look at this kid who thinks they can do better than Bridge experts". If you ask the analogous question when learning Netrunner (why was this deck constructed in this way), people *love* talking about this; part of teaching someone Netrunner is teaching people the reasons behind deckbuilding decisions and helping people learn how to construct better decks. Much like in Bridge, you don't expect that someone new is going to construct a world class deck or bidding system, but experimenting is encouraged instead of discouraged.
Much like (3), I don't think that creativity stifling bureaucracy is a sufficient reason to explain the greying of bridge, but it seems like a plausible contributing factor. I don't even think this is the top reason, but, even though it seems like a plausible contributing factor, I've never heard anyone mention this reason in person and I had to specifically look for discussions about banning bidding conventions to find this mentioned as a reason online. One might argue that the causation here is reversed (bridge is conservative because the officials are older), but Netrunner seems like a counterexample to this -- the creator was born in the 40s, but the game and ecosystem are still designed to reward creativity and the game attracts a lot of younger folks.
Comments
One possible reason you didn't bring up is that Bridge is always a team game, which dramatically raises the entrance barrier
This was fantastic!
