But the attitude of “things are better now because you have to be really smart to be here” is a stupid elitist notion, change it a bit and its the same argument that has been used to gatekeep hobbies so strongly instead of fostering someone’s interest in a thing into something better.

My quibble with “better” aside (if you’re talking a hobby, saying something is “better” as an objective fact flirts dangerously with wrongfun which is a concept that needs vicious, boot-stomp-on-the-neck grades of mockery to silence quickly), there’s a practical reason to be less of an asshole in your hobby.

I can provide you with two solid examples of hobby asshole gatekeeping that have, for all intents and purposes, killed the respective hobby … to the detriment of not only that hobby but to wider society.

Historical Wargaming

There was a time, believe it or not, when there were no computer games and when tabletop RPGs were a fringe hobby for nerds who were outcasts even among nerds. The true alpha nerd played historical wargames. These could be miniatures-focused or board-focused (and there was some not-so-friendly rivalry between these camps more often than not, despite the significant overlap). There were huge companies devoted to publishing the games, and in the case of miniatures games, an astonishing variety of companies making pewter figurines for every conceivable era of history. (Fantasy and SF wargaming was a thing too, but they were viewed as only slightly less outcast than role-playing gamers.) There was even a thriving industry in supplemental products: terrain, say, or a bewildering selection of magazines, or custom measuring tools for miniatures games, or board protection systems for board games.

Where are they all now?

Most of the old-timey publishers are gone. (Here’s me pouring one out for SPI. 😥) The few mid-timey publishers that remain are hollow shells who only hazard an occasional reprint or an occasional (usually failed) attempt at a Kickstarter. The (tabletop) RPG industry has, in that time, had not one, not two, but THREE boom/bust cycles (we’re in the boom side of the third now). Board and miniatures wargames still exist … but are primarily fantasy and/or SF with historical games being the tiny fringe of sad, old grognards who rail against people actually wanting to have fun. And what caused this?

When RPGs (and paired SF/fantasy wargames) started to rise, grognards did the toxic form of gatekeeping and basically made historical wargaming “that hobby filled with bitter old guys who hate us”. In a move that surprised nobody (except the grognards) people started to stay away from historical wargames in droves. As grognards died off, or grew away from the hobby, nobody came into it to fill in the ranks with new enthusiasts. Now historical wargaming is the domain of sad old men grumbling at how kids aren’t interested in history.

And that, there, is the cost I mentioned to society at large: when I was a kid wargames were a gateway drug into history. I personally know a dozen people who went from “meh” on history to post-graduate studies in history because of wargames. (I’ve known one or two who went the same path through RPGs, but nowhere near the numbers that picked up a love from history by recreating it.)

Ham Radio

Unlike historical wargaming, I was never a part of ham culture. A lot of my historical wargaming friends, however, were, so I’ve always been there on the side watching that clusterfuck play out. You want gatekeeping that kills a hobby? Just look at the ham radio community. The licensing requirements for ham radio needed you to learn Morse code until 2007. It was an absolute requirement: you had to show certain levels of Morse code skill to get a license. That nobody actually used Morse code in anger in the ham community at any time in my conscious life didn’t matter. It was a requirement and the ham community clung to that requirement like a rottweiler clinging to a meaty bone (attached to the leg of a trespasser).

Now picture a potential new ham pre-2007. They see their father’s friends playing with radios and talking with people around the world. This is fascinating and they want to know how they can start up in it. “OK, first you have to waste months practising and studying this useless skill that you will never touch ever again, but hey at least it’s tedious and pointless!” And that’s just one element in a whole bunch of licensing requirements that are a barrier to entry. Even today, without the Morse requirement, you have to write an exam to get the most basic of the ham licenses (and that is so restrictive that unless you’re in it for the long haul to get the higher licenses, you might as well not bother: there’s no casual hobby in ham).

And here’s the kicker. All that work to use technology that lets you talk to people around the world. Just like, oh, I don’t know, about a billion phone apps that anybody under the age of 30 has never even seen a world without.

The ham community gate-kept themselves into irrelevance and, while there are charms to the hobby, they’re a) not very well advertised, and b) buried behind tedious studies and exams and procedures that just strip any shine from it.

And that’s not even the worst part. No, that’s the second-worst part.

The worst part is that ham licenses are a public registry. You can look up the real life name and address of any ham call sign. Take a call sign at random: KB6NU. EVERYTHING about that call sign’s registry is publicly available with a simple lookup. (Before someone screams “DOXXXXXXX!” my “random” selection comes from a public blog where the owner of said call sign uses it as an example of how to read one.)

Given that there’s really good non-ham technology out there (it’s this thing called something like the Innarwebtubes?) that will let you harass the ever-loving fuck out of someone when you have fairly basic information about them (picture a typical *chan user going into ham, getting pissed off at what someone says, looking up their RL identity and then SWATting them) and you’ll have an idea of why an open, public registry is simply idiotic. That by itself is gate-keeping of the worst kind: entire swaths of vulnerable groups (racial and sexual minorities for starters) would be wide open to serious RL attacks.

And that is why ham radio is basically a dead hobby. (I’m going to ignore the whining in some circles about the cost of entry: loads of hobbies are expensive to start off in. That’s just the nature of the hobby.) They gate-kept themselves into oblivion and then made themselves an active source of fear with idiotic policies on top of that. And as with the first example, this has an impact on society at large. And unlike that one, which is a bit weak of an impact, the aging and dying off of hams has serious repercussions.

Repercussion #1: When (not if!) telephone systems fail in disaster zones, so do all the fancier, “better” technologies. In case of wide-scale disasters (even today!) ham radio operators have been lifelines, helping authorities and civilians alike coordinate, passing information along and generally being exceptionally useful. As hams die off, one of our best tools for communication into areas where more sophisticated technology has failed dies off with it.

Repercussion #2: As with wargames above, ham radio was a major gateway. In the case of hams, it was a gateway into electrical engineering. I’ve mentioned that a lot of my friends (from the wargaming community) are hams. Every single one of them, no exceptions, is also an electrical engineer. All of them were drawn to engineering because of ham radio. They learned the fundamentals of electronics, electronic design, RF, etc. as children through ham radio. You know what’s getting hard to find these days? People who are electrical engineers with a solid grasp of the fundamentals. Because more and more engineers are getting into the profession for the perceived monetary benefits instead of genuine interest. And with one of the main on-ramps of the past growing us new genuine engineers now littered with closed and barred gates, that’s a problem that’s not going away anytime soon.