I just wanted to drop you a note in response to your musings on Mr. Coggins' article that appeared in MWAN 105. I'm going to offer a bit of my own background to let folks know how I got here and then move on to what I see as the future of the hobby.
First, let me state that my wargame interests are quite diverse. Like many of us older gamers (35+ years of age), I started down this road with a strong interest in history fostered by the weekend "Battleground Theatre" or some such, that ran on a local television station. Each weekend I was treated to the exploits of John Wayne and Audie Murphy! As a child I wanted to be a soldier and do all the things I saw in the movies. My first toy that I remember was a GI Joe. Next came the Airfix kits which led me down the paths of antiquity. My Romans repeatedly crushed the Barbarians and conquered the world, My Robin Hood & Co. always routed the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. At around 10 or 11 years of age, I was drawing tanks on little blocks of cedar to accompany my WWII Airfix and building battleships with mousetraps in their holds which we'd then lob the remaining dominoes at, attempting to detonate the opponents "magazine" before ours went off and hurled our Airfix crews into the deep, blue sea.
I think this is a pretty standard recital of many of our initiations into wargaming. My story may diverge from the average historical gamer in that I also discovered Heroic Fantasy at around 14 or so. At that point, I cut all the brims and guns off of my US Cavalry Airfix minis and painted them as knights (The Airfix knights had become impossible for me to find.). I used them as Aquilonian Knights to play Armies of the Hyborian Age, by Scott Bizar, as I recall. This was a tabletop set of rules for recreating the armies that fought across the world of Conan, the fictional barbarian adventurer created by R.E. Howard. It was basically an historical wargame, with each country having a real-life historical counterpart, i.e.: Corinthia's army was modeled on ancient Greece, with heroes and wizards thrown in for good measure. Fourteen was also the age that I was given my first boardgame, Battle of the Bulge, from Avalon Hill. That was Christmas of 1974. Boardgaming soon became my gaming passion and was to remain so until I enlisted in the real army 5 years later. I continued to boardgame whilst in the service. It even turned out that my basic training platoon sergeant, SSG Wayne Uhden, was a gamer and he and I played a game or two when he was the staff duty NCO!!! One of my best military friends to this day, retired CSM Rob Nichols, became my friend through our mutual interest in boardgames. He was assigned to our Bn (The 1/15th US inf, Audie Murphy's outfit for those of you that enjoy coincidence!) in Germany and while he waited for his lovely family to arrive, we'd spend our off duty hours replaying Crete and Third Reich.
You might be wondering where the minis are? They weren't to come until I was 26 or so. At that point, I was doing a lot of D&D and a friend introduced me to Warhammer. He'd moved back to our area from Indiana. Out there he'd been active in Warhammer and was quite an accomplished figure painter. I fell in love with the dark, twisted world that Warhammer used to be. The quality and variety of miniatures was amazing! Soon, all of my spare cash was being spent on building up hordes of regiments. Like many gamers, I'm an impulse buyer! I've never been able to have just one army of anything... Consequently, today I have 7 large Warhammer Fantasy armies, 5 Warhammer 40K armies and respectable numbers of l5mm ACW and Medievals and a few corps of French and Anglo- Allied 6mm Napoleonics. All painted. (The large number of unpainted will go unaccounted in fear that my lovely wife may accidentally read this e-mail ... )
This rather lengthy introduction brings me around to the point of this letter and that's the state of the hobby as I see it. I think we need to define just what the "Hobby" is. For me, it's playing "war games" with toy soldiers. I'm not particular about whether or not the armies actually ever existed or not. I like painting and playing with nice miniatures so for me the "Hobby" encompasses the Fantasy and Sci-fi genres as well as the multitude of historical periods. (I subscribe to White Dwarf as well as MWAN.) I'm no longer even concerned with whether or not a ruleset is "realistic". No game can come anywhere near reality. (If you think so, you need to get out more.) I look for fun games. That's why I play Warhammer and Warhammer Ancient Battles. Whatever else they may be, these games are a riot to play!
I'm not the only one with this opinion either. Games Workshop retail stores are popping up all over the country (and I suspect, the world). While I don't enjoy dishing out the stiff prices for the minis and being subjected to a monthly catalog in the guise of a magazine, I have to admit that in my opinion, GW's games are good for the hobby and give me hope for it's healthy growth. If you've never done so, go and check out your local hobby shop's GW events More than likely, you'll see all those young faces that have been missing from Historicon and Cold Wars. For whatever reason, GW's products appeal to the younger folks in ways that our historical stuff just doesn't. I like to think that it's just because no single historical "Game Entity" has the visibility that GW has. It might be that, but I think it's also because the GW stuff is fun. Kids like fun. I like fun, The fellas I game with like fun.
My younger cousin, Brett Lague, now a confirmed gamer, was turned on to the hobby by hanging around his "crazy cousin", me. I got him interested when he was still in high school. Initially, his interests were in the Warhammer stuff As he matured and saw his dad reading WWII books and realized that his grandfather had been a Marine on Okinawa and saw the historical minis and games that I had, he came around to checking out this aspect of our "Hobby". (I'm sure there were other factors, but this is basically how he got here.) Now, he's looking for alternatives to Warhammer. We're both building 15mm fantasy armies and playing FR12. We're also planning on getting into 15mm War of the Roses armies and using Arty Conliffe's, Armati rules. Mr. Lagoe, a young man in his early 20's, is who I think the future of the "Hobby" is.
I don't know how many of the hordes of young Warhammer players will mature into folks that are interested in historical games, but I'm pretty confident that there will be a good many converts from "The Dark Side", as my friend John Petrella, a member of the Finger Lakes Area Gamers describes the Warhammer folks. I'd like to thank the creators of Warhammer for offering us WHAB. I think this'll go a long way to getting some of those Fantasy/Sci-fi players to cross over and see just how spectacular history's real heroes were! I included my personal gaming bio to offer an example of how I got to where I am today. I included my cousin's story to show a slightly more updated version. The current generation of upcoming gainers' paths will probably start with some computer game instead of the board-ames, but if the interest is there, then they'll find us.
I'm not sure what the computer age holds for this hobby. I do know that I now use Army Builder to generate my Warhammer, 40K and FRI army lists. This CD is awesome. It's just point and click and print out your list! What a time saver! I have played some "boardgames" via e-mai I and found that I didn't like them. I don't like computer games in general. I like pushing lead. We need to get as many folks as we can exposed to our "Hobby". I'm sure that every family has a young cousin like mine, or a nephew (I'm currently working on my wife's nephew!) that would just love to actually "Hang out with the Guys". If we each take it upon ourselves to pass on this passion to one other person, at least we'll keep the numbers we have, I know I just got a couple of my role-playing buddies to take the plunge and get into Warhammer. One of them at least, got really psyched when he went to GW's website. It made a difference in his decision to start "pushing lead". I'm excited about this because I hope that in 3-4 years time, they'll be subscribers to MWAN and collecting a new medieval or Napoleonic army and playing with their younger cousins and nephews. If someone's website helps hook these computer literate youngsters, then that's fine by me.
Back to MWAN #106 Table of Contents
Back to MWAN List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Magazine List
© Copyright 2000 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