Tuesday 19 January 2016

Wargames Illustrated ... period popularity

With the completion of a complete index for Wargames Illustrated issues 1-259, I thought it would be interesting to make a histogram of all the articles divided over all the different periods. Of course, I might have mislabeled some, and sometimes I subdivided (or did not!) a period into several subgenres for no good reason except my own illogical judgement. Nevertheless, the results do look interesting. It reflects interests in (historical) wargaming from 1987 to 2009.

The data below are the raw numbers. Please interpret as you see fit.
  • Articles which have a "blank" as period (usually modelling), have not been counted.
  • Some periods have a general category as well as several subdivisions (e.g. WW2, Napoleonics). The numbers are exclusive. I.e. articles counted under "WW2/Eastfront" are not duplicated in the general "WW2" category. Every article is only counted once.
  • A multi-part article in subsequent issues only has one entry in the database, hence it is only counted once here.




Row Labels Count of Numb
Medieval 106
WW2 104
Ancients 102
Generic 91
ACW 83
Napoleonic 69
Modern 68
WW1 53
18th 51
WW2/Eastfront 50
19th/America 46
17th 45
16th 44
19th 41
Colonial 38
ECW 34
Fantasy 33
20th 28
Pulp 28
AWI 27
WildWest 24
Vietnam 23
Colonial/DarkestAfrica 23
Scifi 22
WW2/Naval 21
Colonial/ZuluWar 20
WW2/D-Day 20
WW2/Pacific 19
7YW 18
FPW 18
WW2/Africa 17
Napoleonic/Peninsular 17
WarRoses 16
Napoleonic/Waterloo 15
CrimeanWar 15
WW1/Naval 12
WW2/Air 12
Renaissance 11
Pirates 11
BoerWar 9
Colonial/Sudan 9
15th 9
Medieval/Asia 9
GNW 9
Ancients/Naval 8
20th/Naval 8
SCW 7
War1812 7
WW2/MarketGarden 7
19th/Naval 7
RCW 6
Colonial/IndianMutiny 6
19th/China 5
Napoleonic/Egypt 4
FIW 4
Ancients/Gladiators 4
WW1/Air 4


Grand Total 1597

2 comments:

  1. Interesting, and close to what I would have expected, other than Napoleonics being further down the list. Then I added back Egypt, Peninsula and Waterloo, which brings Napoleonics up to 105, good for 2nd place. Of course, doing the same thing for WW2 brings it up to 180 articles which is first place by a wide margin.

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    Replies
    1. Of course, numbers such as these have to be taken with a grain of salt. There is a bias, present in submissions and editor preference. But they do tell us something, I believe.

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