Sadly, most games are not year-long epics of narrative glory. We all want to play those huge, spacious campaigns that give characters room to grow and develop, and plots time to reveal themselves fully, but most of the time that just doesn't happen. This is especially true for gamers in their teens and twenties, for a variety of reasons. Work, school, other obligations and simply the realities of life get in the way. The games of my age group are by their nature unstable, and necessarily short-lived. Most people in their early youth have a large number of quickly-shifting and unavoidable obligations: classes, work, and making bad decisions to name a few. High school and college particularly have the unique trait of providing at once an atmosphere designed to bring people together around common interests and hobbies, and split them apart just as quickly.

These institutions make it easier to build gaming groups; so far every game I have ever played in or run has owed the entirety of its membership to a common academic institution. And while these places do force people into interacting with individuals and ideas that they would not ordinarily pursue, the connections they make can be tenuous. People transfer to and from schools, they graduate, or they take a term abroad. They go on club trips, or vacations, or live with their parents for the summer. These places create an environment where players are consistently available and willing, but individuals are constantly preoccupied or obligated.

It would be convenient to say that gaming groups composed mostly of this age group seem almost doomed from the start. Regardless of the enthusiasm of those involved, the constant uncertainty of life in highschool and college is bound to muck up the works. Harsh realities interfere with fantasy, no matter how lovingly crafted that fantasy is. Someone has to drop out to get a job, or your DM just got accepted to an amazing program on the opposite coast. The DM and a player broke up, or a new paramour's attention takes priority over game. You console or congratulate is it's warranted, but the end result is the same: you're out a player, or a DM.

Losing one player isn't that big a deal to a game that's been going for only a few weeks, maybe a couple of months. These games can generally continue without one of the characters. But we've all been in that situation where the story is set, the characters are in place, and you simply cannot continue without a certain player. No matter how freeform your style of running a game is, or whatever obscure Gm'less system you use, losing a player has a huge effect on a game, and the longer it's been running, the more extreme the effect. There are ways around it of course. You can NPC the character in question or change the story, but it's disheartening in the extreme, and I've seen it end a lot of games. There are exceptions: I've seen a game that ran for two years and managed to keep going, swapping out players whenever someone left, and adding players whenever someone new came along. But most of those people were older and had more stable lives, and getting to that point in the first place is extremely difficult for most groups. Beyond that, not everyone wants to play in a game where it feels like they have a new cast every week. It can become tedious, and then you're back to square one.

It isn't all bad though. People in high school and college generally have a much larger circle of players and gamers to draw from, and a larger amount of time to play. It seems much harder to meet new people in general once you have a steady job and a more stable life, and having clearly defined work hours give you very set windows where you can play. Conversely, if your only obligations are throwing coffee around for four hours a day and sleeping through a two hour class, your options for when, where, and what kind of game to play become much more open. It stands to reason that in a place where you're forced to interact with and befriend new people every day, you would be more likely to find a few who share a given interest with you. In my experience, gamers my age tend to have a very large circle of friends who play this game or that, but only actively game with a handful of them at a time. We have pools of players and GM's to draw from, a network of potentials for any given game we want to play or run. Not all of them will be available or able or interested for a particular game, but you'll almost always be able to find enough people to run what you've got in mind.

I don't think the short lifespan of most high school and college games has as much to do with the mindset of the age or generation involved, as much as it does with the inherently unstable environment they inhabit. They don't know what time they'll be waking up in a month, whether they'll have a job tomorrow, or if they're going to remain in the same state. Those kind of concerns make it hard to focus on a single narrative or game for very long. Admittedly that might effect the mindset of the generation, but that's another topic. And some games do make it: I'm certainly not giving up. I'm getting ready to run a game I hope will go for the length of my senior year. If it ends prematurely, I'll certainly be disappointed, but it won't stop me from running my next game. Kid's my age may be short on attention span, but damn do we have enthusiasm.