One hundred issues, what an achievement - a mini-millennium for MWAN! I had just returned from Cold Wars when I received Hal's invitation to contribute an article for this milestone edition. It was an invitation that was impossible to resist, but what to write about? It occurred to me that most of my time at conventions is spent in talking, and the most popular topic of conversation seems to be wargaming - what is happening in the hobby, where it has been, where it is going. So, why not write about what we have been talking about? So, promising not to fall into the "when I was a boy" type of reflection, I would like to put forth some thoughts in a personal review of our hobby… Demographics of the Hobby The mirror reminds me every morning of the popular "graying of the hobby" description of wargaming. The implication of this lament being that historical miniatures as a hobby is dying because it is the same old fogies in the hobby as were there 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. At least two questions must be answered about this view - is it true and if true, is it good or bad? Placing aside the evidence of my mirror and most of my wargaming friends, I really wonder if we know whether the hobby is graying or not. If the evidence is the attendees at the major conventions, perhaps a case can be made, although I see more and more teenagers and younger accompanying their graying fathers to the conventions. But we must remember that conventions are not the hobby. I would put forward that conventions are indeed the domain of the gray-beard. Teenagers and college-students are far less likely to be able to have resources, both in terms of time and money to attend a convention. Even without the toy budget, it probably takes close to $500 to attend an out of town convention such as Cold Wars or Historicon. Many of us are also in the position to arrange business commitments to assist in defraying the expense - an advantage that younger gamers would probably not have. What we need to know is what is happening in the basements at home on the weekends of conventions. The good news about graying is that we might be able to tie the increase in availability of figure lines and resources to that trend. There is no doubt that the past ten (or more) years has seen remarkable growth in the production of wargaming related products and materials. This has to be financed by more money being spent on the hobby. At least part of this can probably be related to increased disposable income typical of a maturing market. It might also be financed by an increasing number of buyers which would work to refute the dying hobby argument if not the graying hobby argument. Consider for a moment the proposition that the hobby has always been graying, or perhaps more accurately, gray. The people who got me interested in wargaming were 10 or 20 years older than I. The people who kept me going in wargaming, however, were my age. The guys I arm-twisted into trying this toy soldier thing. Or the people I would stumble across at the hobby shop that were my own age. The older generation, the Scruby's, and Featherstone's, and Seifried's (sorry Duke!) set the goal to be worked towards and created the market, but it was kids keeping kids interested in the hobby that resulted in me becoming one of today's gray beards. Perhaps it is working the same today. The critical issue here is that we do not know. Worse than that, we are not trying to find out. Leadership of the Hobby For a hobby whose focus is the study of organizations that epitomize order and discipline, we are certainly a pathetic shambles. Those dedicated folks that work in wargaming organizations can perhaps best be described as mostly ignored, usually tolerated, and generally unknown by the remaining vast majority of the hobby. Unfortunately wargaming groups seem to eventually develop more of the characteristics of a Diplomacy tournament than an organization. Everyone takes sides and war breaks out. The most recent attempt at national structure seems to have self-destructed and many of the regional organizations are experiencing problems, some unnecessarily self-inflicted. Being an anarchist at heart who trusts no organization larger than five people, this situation is not a great bother to me (yes, I am a child of the '60s), but still this is unfortunate. There is a useful role to be played by an organization for wargamers. The question I feel is one of focus. If the organization has no focus or the wrong focus, it will be deservedly ignored - and the wrong focus is "leadership." The hobby is not crying out for leadership. The burning question at conventions is not "Who will lead the hobby?" The hobby does not care because the hobby does not need "leadership." It has been doing quite fine without leadership, thank you very much, for the 38 years I have been wargaming. What the hobby needs, and thankfully gets from some, are leaders who want to serve the hobby. To cite an example of this, and one of my favorite people, look at Don Featherstone. I think Don would never have considered himself to be leading the hobby, but he was, and still is, a leader of the hobby and serving the hobby. But it is a leadership by example, a leadership that is founded on finding and serving a common interest among the individuals of the hobby, a leadership that does not require or expect followers or trumpets or acclamation. (I think much the same can be said of Hal, but I did not want to embarrass him in his own magazine, which it probably would, so do not tell him I said so.) Many of today's self-styled leaders of the hobby should never look over their shoulder, they will find themselves remarkably alone. If an organization wants to be of service and therefore of importance to the hobby it needs to do things to help the hobby better understand itself so that it can grow and prosper. One such thing would be to answer that "graying of the hobby" question. My friend Bob Jones has for years been promoting the idea and possible methods for accomplishing some objective measures of what constitutes our hobby. To my knowledge, nothing has been done by any regional or national organization. As a result we continue to stumble around blindly not knowing what we are or where we are going. Organizing conventions is a wonderful service, but does it help us know who we are, does it spread interest in the hobby, does it open new markets to our dealers, or is it preaching to the choir? Why do we never see local news coverage at conventions that would at least let the people in the local area know about our hobby? Why do we never see wargame exhibits at other closely related hobby conventions such as toy collecting and model railroad? If wargaming organizations are to be useful they need to look outward, not inward. The State of the Art of the Hobby From the beginning I have been a rules person; I like the toys, but my passion has always been the rules. Without the rules, the toys just tend to sit there and that is pretty monotonous. After a period of only marginal improvement in the art of rules development, there has over the past few years been some, to me at least, exciting new concepts. The hobby has come to identify this new trend as a move towards simplicity. I am not sure this is entirely accurate. I view it as a change in perspective, a limiting of scope, and an appreciation for elegance in form. Regardless of what you call it, it has ignited a war of words between the opposing camps of "simulation" and "gaming," terms instituted by the "simulators" I might add. I find the titles inaccurate since I am undoubtedly viewed as firmly in the gaming camp, while I consider myself a simulator! Labeling aside, the process can be and should be good for the hobby. Competition improves the breed as they say. Unfortunately, this competition has resulted in charges from some of the "Old Guard" that the new approaches are "dumbing down the hobby." What balderdash! One might as well say that Keegan's The Face of Battle dumbed down military history because it took a different approach. If the state of the art is to grow then we must be receptive to innovative approaches. We must at least do our homework and fully evaluate the concept before issuing blanket statements from upon high condemning them. I have read a lot of rule sets over the years and found some new insight, or some new approach that I could use in my own development in virtually everyone of them. This is not to say I would have played them all, because I would not, but you cannot condemn one rule set just because you prefer to play another. To go back to an earlier theme, rules writers do not lead the hobby. They provide a service to the hobby that may be accepted or rejected to lesser or greater degrees. While this may determine the business success of the concept, it says nothing of the quality, the correctness, or the historicity of the concept. The hobby has changed its course several times reflecting, I think, a search for new insights into the history of armed conflict. We are after all a hobby based upon a love of history and a search for understanding. How can we expect or accept anything else but change in our search tool? What Next? What the internet has done and will do for commerce is a hotly debated question in the business community. Companies that have never made a profit are evaluated at hundreds of millions of dollars seeming because they have ".com" at the end of their name. While I do not normally make predictions, one prediction I can make is that the internet will dramatically change how we do wargaming. This is a perfectly safe prediction since the internet has already changed wargaming! This change can be seen in many areas, to name just a few: Resources - There are seemingly endless resources on the internet for history and for gaming. This ranges from pure research type information to commercial information to help us spend our money more easily. On the research side, take for example MagWeb, an online archive of wargaming related magazines. For a small annual subscription, you have unlimited access to a treasure trove of that obscure information that we find so rewarding. What does it mean in the long run? The 200th issue of MWAN will be digital and never see paper except in your personal printer! More and more publishing will occur on the web, less and less in hard copy. The comparative production and distribution costs will force the change. From a purely commercial perspective, manufacturers will have growing direct access to the individual gamer. This combined with the world wide reach of package delivery services such as UPS and FedEx will spell problems for retailers and especially distributors. They can be cut out of the equation and service can be improved to the customer. This should also facilitate the growth of new producers of products for the hobby because the ability to reach the customer has suddenly become more economical. From an advertising perspective, the web is the great equalizer. Internationalization - Our hobby will grow internationally at an astounding rate. My latest release, CdePK (shameless commercial plug), was play tested among other places in Tasmania because the internet allowed me to communicate easily with the players there. The Piquet gaming system is supported by at least four web sites, two of which are outside the US. Newsgroups such as rec.games.miniatures.historical have participation from gamers around the world. Not only does this provide a wider market for sales of product it provides a wider market for the growth of the hobby. Open Systems - The Piquet system (truth in advertising: I am a strong supporter of the Piquet system and CdePK is part of the Piquet family) provides what is now a truly unique example of the potential impact of the internet on wargaming. For lack of a better term, Piquet is being sold and promoted as an open system; meaning that the author, Bob Jones, is actively encouraging the modification, extension, and support of the concept by other people. For example, there are now three different Piquet based games for the Napoleonic period - the standard Piquet game, Les Grognards (corps level), Grand Piquet (army level), and CdePK (brigade level) - each written by a different person, each using a different variation of Piquet mechanics, but each sharing the same core philosophy and concepts. The entire family of Piquet products is growing at a rate I have never seen before in wargaming because it is not relying on a single person, but upon many people that are united by a common philosophy. That this diversity can be built on a single philosophy is a direct result of the internet because it provides the communications capability for all these people to easily talk and discuss ideas regardless of their location in the world. Bob's willingness to open his product to this type of expansion and his use of the internet to promote this concept are revolutionary. Ten years from now this will be the norm. The Rest of the Story - Most wargames exist in a vacuum. Nothing preceded them, nothing followed them. Everyone has always talked about the benefits of campaigns to place battles in context, but the bookkeeping was too great for most of us. Computers can change that by taking over the bookkeeping, but most of us can not program well enough to do that and finding enough people locally to do a campaign can be a challenge. The internet will change that. Entire worlds, historical or fictional, can reside on the internet and can be accessed from anywhere. Subscription campaigns as a common feature of gaming are not far away. With this change the story will become the important part of gaming not the competition, not the winning and the losing. This may be the important value added for the retailer to help him compete with direct sales. The local gaming store will become the local campaigning store and the history of the campaign will be published on the web. So, The Best of Times or the Worst of Times? Supposedly there is an old Chinese curse of "May you live in interesting times." The old Chinese who said it must be happy because we are living in interesting times. But, they are also the best of times and can only get better - especially with publications like MWAN. Back to MWAN #100 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1999 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com