From childhood until about age 25, I was a devoted wargamer, the last five or so of those years being a miniatures collector/painter/player as well. I was a founding member of a big wargames club, I produced their newsletter for years, and published several games of my own. Then a number of factors conspired to expel me from the hobby: new things competing for my time, the need to raise money to go back to grad school, an expensive divorce, a cross-country move... etc. For ten years I was out of the hobby altogether. I sold my vast collections of games, magazines, and miniatures and hung up my dice for (I thought) forever.
Fast forward a decade. Just this year, with my life a bit more settled, and having recently re-married a woman who is very artistic, my interest in collecting and painting miniatures has been re-kindled, and I am now back in the hobby with both feet. Hal, treating me like the prodigal son that I am, very graciously gave me a bargain blow-out on a big stack of old MWAN back-issues to catch me up with what's been going on in the wargaming hobby. I was perusing these last night and came across an interesting series of exchanges, beginning with an article in MWAN #103 by Tom McBrayer called "The Occult in the Wargaming Hobby." Mr. McBrayer argued, essentially, that the hobby had become very "dark," (he cited an encounter with a group of young boys at a gaming convention who were listening to a discourse on how to be a vampire), and that games today were encouraging a moral lapse in children. He felt that games of a previous era were "games involving trying to save the world from evil," but that current games were now quite the opposite: games in which young boys (and occasionally, girls) were themselves playing the forces of evil.
Over the next few months, the letters came in, and Hal dutifully reprinted them. The tone was overwhelmingly that of umbrage. McBrayer was disparaged by MWAN readers as a kind of religious nut. One reader called his article, " pseudo-religious claptrap," and Bob Bryant wrote that reading McBrayer's article in MWAN was akin to an intellectual "mugging."
I went back and re-read Mr. McBrayer's article. Yes, he is a nervous guy, and he falls prey to that simplistic reflex-action that blames every societal ill on whatever happens to: 1) catch his attention, and, 2) fall afoul of his personal moral convictions. People like him, over the last two decades, have blamed "what's wrong with kids" on everything from Dungeons and Dragons to Bill Clinton, from video games to Madonna.
But is he wrong about his most central point: is the wargame hobby in fact getting "darker?" I think my ten year Rip Van Winkel trip has given me an interesting perspective. I left the hobby in 1991 and returned in 2000. And from what I can see, it is darker. Mind you, I'm not trying to attach any particular value judgment to that observation. It's just a statement on what seems to be selling in the game stores and on-line. (That's a big difference for me: when I left the hobby, there was no such thing as the internet.) Let me give a few examples.
I live in Charleston, South Carolina, a city with a metro area of about half a million people. This is also a city steeped in history, and - one might expect - wargamers. Not so. I spent three months combing every available resource for game opponents, with little success. Once in a while I'd come across a guy in his late 30s or early 40s who might have a collection of ACW figures he hadn't unboxed in years. "Oh, yeah..." he'd say. "Yeah, there used to be a gaming club around here... Um, I think about ten years ago. We used to play Johnny Reb. Nobody does it anymore."
The historical end of the hobby in Charleston has dried up. But when I go to the two game stores in this area, I see rooms set aside with tables and chairs, and big blackboards on the wall for which games are scheduled. What are the games being played, and who is playing them?
The games are Necromunda, Chronopia, Warhammer 40K, and Mordheim: all Games Workshop products, and all played by teenage boys. In the hopes of finding somebody closer to my own age (I'm 35), I went to one of the game nights. To my relief, there was indeed a thirty-something guy playing Mordheim with his son. We began talking. Turns out that he, too, was an old historicals gamers (ACW, micro-armor, and ancients), but he hadn't played any of that in years. Then his son, who recently turned 11, began getting into the Games Workshop games, and he thought this would be a fun thing for him and his son to do together. So they paint and play games together.
But does the son have any interest in the old man's miniatures? I asked him. (He's a good kid, by the way - smart and funny, and not in danger of burning anybody at the stake or casting any spells anytime soon. He just thinks the evil stuff is "cool.") No, dad's figures are boring. The kid likes things that can do magic, or things that can fly, or aliens or monsters.
Perhaps this is just the stuff of youth? Maybe historical miniatures will be an acquired taste when the kids get older? Perhaps, but only if those product lines survive amidst the barrage of advertising, promotion, and above all, retail space devoted to the "cool" evil stuff. At my two game stores, both of which are quite large, there is about four feet of shelf space for "historical" games, and the rest of the store is for fantasy and sci-fi and role-playing. Occupying those four feet (in both stores) are the following historical games: Axis and Allies, Battlecry, and Diplomacy. One of the stores also has a lonely and ancient copy of SPI's game Patrol! sitting there miserably unwanted year after year, and probably wondering what the hell happened to the neighborhood.
I asked the store owner about this. He is perhaps a couple of years older than I am, and he also used to play historicals. He talks fondly about his Roman legions and all the opponents they bashed once upon a time. Nowadays, though, he plays the fantasy and sci-fi games exclusively. He just concluded a Warhammer 40K tournament in the store. "It brings in a lot of business," he confided to me in a low voice. I mentioned that I'd always liked fantasy games myself, and used to have a big Warhammer army, alongside my many historical periods. Then - without my asking or prompting him in any way - he said:
"Have you noticed how dark everything has gotten? I used to really like the artwork..." He picked up a copy of the latest White Dwarf magazine, which is displayed prominently at the front of his store, and began flipping through it. "Look at all this..." he said nodding to the paintings and sketches of mutated people and monsters, all bleeding, festering, or in some kind of agony, or reveling in bloodshed and flying saliva. "I played Chronopia when it first came out," he continued. "And there's no good guys. It's just these evil people versus those evil people. It's really grim. And Games Workshop is advertising now in Boys Life." We had a good chuckle at that. The Boy Scouts, who won't admit gay boys because it offends God, will nonetheless condone ads for demons and magic in their magazine.
Question
So here's the age old question: is the store owner responsible for 'making' the hobby darker, because he carries all these products and provides space for kids to game them. Or is the store owner just an honest businessman giving the people what they want? These products, after all, are very expensive. One (!) average GW metal figure costs $3.25. Yet they are being sold to teenage boys who, we assume, have rather limited incomes. In other words, the parents are supporting this hobby. Moreover, the people who design historical games are simply being out-marketed and out-produced. At the upcoming "Siege of Augusta" historical game convention the Games Workshop guys are putting on Warhammer 40K demo games every day (in one case, twice in one day.) They are on a massive recruitment drive. And finally -- as my store owner friend will tell you with a grimace of pain -if he didn't stock these products, the kids (i.e., their parents) would simply buy them over the internet. To keep a brick-and-mortar game store in business, he welcomes all the promotion and demo games. It brings people into the store.
But there is one final question about whether or not the hobby is getting darker, and that is the trickiest of all, because it involves the changing morality of generations. As a university professor, I have some interesting opportunities to see what 18-22-yearolds think about all kinds of issues. Their various prejudices and preferences are in many ways very different from the Baby Boomer generation. For example, the vast majority of my students will say that the US committed "genocide" against the Native Americans, whereas most 40somethings would say that there was a series of "wars" against the Indians.
My students are quite interested in History (the subject I teach), but most definitely not in military history. In my introductory 100-level courses, the final project is a paper on a topic of the student's choosing. Out of 100+ students, I rarely get more than one or two who want to write about a military topic. (There were two this year; one guy who wanted to write about Roman imperial defenses, and one girl who wanted to write about the Mongol invasions.) Most of the kids are much more interested in the history of daily life, or of religion, or of gender and family issues, or of the arts. (I had 18 papers on architecture!)
But these same kids will pay big bucks to go see the latest Star Wars or Dungeons and Dragons movie. The pop-culture trends of the times are moving against historical gaming, and in favor of fantasy and sci-fl. (Here again Mr. McBrayer was right, in his article.) It is very unlikely that a 17-year-old boy who is interested in Warhammer 40K will "graduate" to playing Armati or Empire. It may be the same hobby, but it's not the same world.
Darker?
But is their world really "darker?" In his letter in MWAN #107, Bob Bryant conceded that many grown-up people who play historical games do so "with killing in their hearts." We've all heard the cheers go up from around the convention tables as one side butchers the other. We indulge in all kinds of morbidities in the historical hobby. Consider the painting of "casualty" figures. Years ago, my ACW armies for Fire and Fury had a contingent of "dead guys" that I would place on the table to signify that a unit was losing cohesion under fire. How sick is that? Is that really so different from the gruesome artwork of White Dwarf, in which the Orc warlord hacks apart the human knight? In my own Battlegroup game I advised players to spray-paint cotton balls black to make nice, realistic-looking "burning vehicle" smoke when AFVs are knocked out. Think of what it means to be roasted alive in a burning tank, and tell me that we're not every bit as "dark" as those kids. They, after all, are slaughtering imaginary monsters. We, on the other hand, are studiously researching things like the exact number of men that have to be killed in a British infantry battalion before the survivors will turn, screaming and fleeing for their lives. We pride ourselves on calling our games "simulations," while the kids are satisfied just playing make-believe with aliens and monsters.
So in conclusion I would like to propose an unpleasant twist on McBrayer's thesis. Yes, the gaming hobby is getting more overtly dark, but only because the kids are more honest than we are about what war really means. The kids have grown up on computer-enhanced movies in which death and dismemberment can be simulated to any degree of agonizing detail. They want their gore up-front, while we sweep ours under the table and pretend we're more moral because we don't revel in it. (In the 1960s all those casualties died off-screen; nowadays they writhe and bleed everywhere while we munch our popcorn.) My students would take great offense at an Old West game, and would criticize it as glorifying the genocide against the Native Americans. But their generation expects gut-wrenching gore and blood to be depicted in their games and thinks that anything less is just boring.
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© Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum
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