I miss magazines, and I say that knowing that there are still magazines being published. While there are a few gaming magazines today, there used to be far more of them, and yet I still couldn't get enough. On my lunch break at work, I used to walk over to a book store (this was back when there were brick-and-mortar book stores) and buy a bagel and coffee, and I'd sit in the magazine section and read the latest issue of some gaming periodical. Sometimes I'd save up enough to actually buy one, but money was pretty tight then. In fact, that's probably why they were such a relief to read. I was struggling to get by, at that time, studying to improve my technical skills while working several retail and freelance jobs to pay bills. Opening a magazine that promised to reveal the 20 of the greatest abjuration spells, or to finally expose the real reason zombies hungered for brains, was like opening an actual mystical tome. For 30 minutes out of the day, I could stop worrying about how to pay rent in favour of worrying about how the evil forces of the undead could be held at bay. Gaming magazines were the in-world and meta gazeteers of tabletop gaming.
Magazines delivered stories about the game worlds we were playing in. I've always loved game lore, partly because it adds gravitas to the game. With a good story in mind, the process of playing the game becomes a kind of ritual. By performing the literal mechanics of the game, you're turning the clockwork of the game world. You're causing events to happen in the game that you've read about in the lore. And you can imagine that it's important that those events happen, whether they go exactly as described in the lore or whether the deviate. Either way, the events must be resolved. They must happen within the universe of your game.
I don't mind, and in fact I appreciate, that lore is an optional embellishment. Obviously games have existed long before anybody thought to publish stories about the fictional worlds the games are meant to represent. We don't have a Poker Deck expanded universe or Chess lore. But if you want to feel like you're connected to a game even while you're not physically playing the game, then stories are one of the ways to get the game into your head. It's tangential at best, because the story is not the game. But a story generally gives you something to think about, and when the story is themed in the same way as the game, you happily conflate the two.
The mental load of reading and processing a story is a significant source of inspiration, too. It's not uncommon for me to let a story I've read inspire actions in a game.
I used Ngati, a fortress hidden within the Astral Plane, in a Pathfinder campaign because I read about it in an article in Dragon magazine. There's nothing remarkable about Ngati, it just happened to be something an author invented for the magazine, and wrote a 3 page article about. It stuck in my memory until my players ended up in the Astral Plane and needed something to do. I was able to provide a location because of that article. The fortress was "real" for me because I'd read about it, and bringing players into the fortress in turn made it even more "real" because it became a shared experience.
I think many gamers have a complex relationship with rules. On the one hand, a new rule is yet one more thing you have to remember. On the other hand, a new rule promises to propel the game in a new and unexpected direction, and we like that.
I think rules that get published in magazines have a way of feeling very much like the optional and bonus material that they are. They feel non-threatening. It's not exactly an expansion of the game, because it's just a few pages in a magazine. You don't have to use these new rules, they're just fun to try, if you want to.
Of course actually all rules are optional. Games are optional. But it seems common for most of us to regard rules in the rulebook as requirements, and rules in an expansion set as equally required as long as you have purchased it and brought it to the table. But rules in a magazine? Those aren't even real rules until you use them. It's silly, but liberating.
Some game gaming magazines also included crafting and painting content. Besides being instructional, the painting and crafting sections made you feel you were creating physical representations of your game world even when you weren't able to craft. There have been several times in my life when I didn't have the space to store a bunch of cardboard castles and taverns and battlefield detritus, but it was inspiring, and vicariously satisfying, to see photos and tutorials about what other people were creating.
In fact, I was interested in crafting miniature worlds before I even knew what tabletop gaming was, much less wargaming. When I was very young, I accidentally wandered into a crafting section of a book store, and looked at tutorial books on crafting for, probably, wargames and dioramas and dollhouses. It was far beyond my abilities at the time, but the images of those miniature worlds never left me. They're still an inspiration for my humble crafting efforts today.
Beyond crafting physical gaming components, magazines also provided practical examples of crafting adventures and game rules. It takes time to understand the nuances of designing a system of rules, or the structure of a story, that not only holds together under stress and scrutiny, but also encourages unexpected exploration. I'm still learning the techniques, and of course the only way to learn is to experience. Not all adventures or rule ideas in published games or magazines are good. But you take the good with the bad, and you learn from them. It's part of the process, and a good gaming magazine provided lots of opportunity to experience new gaming ideas.
I've identified with gaming culture far longer than I've been an actual gamer myself. I did this in no small part through magazines. For example, long before playing Zelda, I read all the Zelda articles in Nintendo Power. I was excited about the idea of gaming. I didn't understand yet how I wanted to engage with it, I only knew that simulations within imaginary worlds intrigued me. Magazines were the literal embodiment of that concept. They were about games without being games.
Fascination with the act and culture of gaming is, of course, entirely compatible with also being a gamer. Even as an active gamer, there are times when I want a book about gaming rather than a gamebook. Sometimes you just want to immerse yourself in a game without the burden of rolling dice or tracking gaming components. You want to play without playing. It's an extreme form of idle gaming.
I've been writing about gaming magazines as if they no longer exist only because so many have ceased publication. Of course, print magazines still exist. There aren't as many as there once were, but browse at the magazine shelves at your local book store (if you have one) and you might be surprised at what you find.
I guess the theory was, at the time, that the Internet could replace gaming magazines, and I think for a while that was partly accurate. When the Internet had an active blogging culture that made it easy to discover people's content over RSS, you could more or less assemble your own gaming magazine from what was available online. I don't think that same culture is prevalent in today's Internet, but it does still exist. There's 28 magazine, and Snarl, RPG Planet, EN World, and many more.