As I come up to 15 years of wargaming in
various forms, I’ve started to think more and more about the place the hobby
has in my life and how it has influenced me over the years. I thought that for
today’s post, I would do something a little more autobiographical and then take
a look at why the hobby has such a hold on the lives of gamers.
My
life in the Hobby
Being
“that kid"
I have been involved in the hobby since I
was 14 but I was always building and playing with models when I was younger. My
first encounter with miniatures came when I was maybe 9 or 10 and I needed
infantry for my micro machines. I found a model shop and they have 1/72 scale
troops. They weren’t painted, but they were the right size. I kept going and
getting new troops and in the process noticed Warhammer.
For all their faults, GW is an amazing
gateway into the hobby and I would bet that a huge number of current serious
wargamers are products of the slick marketing and over the top hobby approach
of Games Workshop. While the accessibility of Games Workshop products to young
people has lessened given the prices, their focus on churning out new gamers
still brings the next generation onto the tabletops. My first GW product was
the excellent 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy starter set containing
Lizardmen and Brettonians. I recall not even trying with the Brettonians, but I
did get the Lizardmen painted in a garish dark green and bright red scheme that
invoked images of Christmas and festivities more than the deep dark jungles of
Lustria.
My first army was High Elves, and I still
look forward to the day when I have the patient to recreate my old force. My
Elves had bright blue hair and, as every cheesy High Elf player in 5th
edition believed, loved their bolt throwers. I played in a campaign organized
by the local store (the venerable Dreamers in St. Louis Park, Minnesota) where
victories brought rolls for “territories”. As we could choose between what we
rolled, I kept picking war machine territories and packed on the bolt thrower.
I can’t imagine it was fun for my opponents at all.
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| My army was basically as many of these as possible plus some blue haired spearmen |
Terrible
Tournaments
From there I got into 40k and other games.
I also, unfortunately, started playing in tournaments. You might ask why that’s
unfortunate. It’s not that I don’t like tournaments. I love the idea of
tournaments. You get to play three or more games in a day against diverse
competition. You meet new people, have motivation to finish armies and it is
generally a good time. Moreover, some of my best games have been in tournaments
and the mere existence of an upcoming tournament focused my hobby, led me to
many practice games and really energized me in general. Where I was playing a
game where I was unskilled or new, I had a great time at tournaments. However,
sometimes I was actually good at the game and then my competitive side came
out.
I am quite good at 40k. The game clicks for
me. I understand where to put what force at what time and how to bring about
results. I win the vast majority of the games I play, and oftentimes without
much muss or fuss. There’s something about it that really works with my way of
thinking, and so when I would go to 40k tournaments it would be to win. Of
course, these weren’t grand tournaments or anything, but little regional
affairs. I won my first 40k tournament
at the old Air Traffic in Bloomington, Minnesota in high school. I remember I
was playing an all infantry valhallan imperial guard army that I had been
working on building blister by blister for ages. I realized I loved winning
these things, and it totally ruined tournaments for me. I became a nervous
wreck who overanalyzed the games and didn’t just enjoy the fact that I was
doing something I loved. Making the right moves, creating success and crushing
my opponents became very important. Now, I wasn’t “that guy” and wouldn’t be
nasty or unpleasant to my opponents. This was more of an internal stress that
weighed down on my enjoyment. I would be exhausted and even winning, not happy
about how things went. I would focus on the small failures even among the
greater wins. I started to resent
tournaments. During a two year period while I was living abroad in Romania, I
won their national championship back to back. I should have been pleased and
excited about doing well against some wonderful players, but instead I swore
off tournaments.
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| Me at a competitive tourney. |
Frats
and Toys
When I left for college at 18, I decided to
not bring my miniatures. I was going down to Arizona State and felt that it was
time for a change. I was prepped for four years of parties, women and the type
of lifestyle that really didn’t suit miniatures gamer. What would my roommates
and other ultra-cool college guys think about little toys and my painting of
them?
I lasted two and a half months before I
walked the two miles to the local gaming store (the Game Depot in Tempe,
Arizona) to buy some paints and some miniatures. Now, a two mile walk isn’t
normally a big deal. Having since lived in New York and London, walking is a
non-issue. However, this was two miles in 110 degree weather (that’s 43 degrees
Celsius if you prefer) along baking sidewalks. No one walks in Arizona, but I
did just to get my plastic crack.
 |
Not painting and working on miniatures for
those few months was interesting for me. I’d been non-stop planning armies,
creating projects and looking forward to tournaments for years by then. It was
something I did everyday, and so removing it felt strange. I know I played more
video games and chatted online more, but it wasn’t like anything spectacular
filled my time. I found myself making fewer goals for things, even outside of
the hobby. I will discuss how the hobby interacts with my work and life in
terms of goals and objectives later, but basically I was less active in
planning my life when I wasn’t planning my miniatures. I felt less creative,
less engaged and just less myself. It was a strange feeling and I felt I was
better off with my gaming than without.
The hobby played a very strange role in
college. I wasn’t the normal hobbyist at school. I was a fraternity member my
entire time in college (Rah Rah Delta, ΔTΔ) and thoroughly involved in the partying, boozing and enjoying the
social life of America’s premier party school. I learned during this time not
to be ashamed or embarrassed that I enjoyed my hobby. Rather than being
something I was worried would make me look uncool or something, the paints and
models in my room at the house would become conversation pieces. Now, I didn’t
go out of my way to broadcast that I was a gamer, but I sure didn’t get
bothered that people knew. I realized that everyone has their hobbies and
interests and that the hobby simply was mine.
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| I expanded the tabletop games I played in college big time. |
After three years in Phoenix, I moved to
Romania for a study abroad scholarship and left my toys at home. For the second
time since I started playing, I decided to put down the hobby as I entered into
a new stage in life and focus on the new country. Little did I know that the
hobby would end up sticking around in its own way, and that even abandoned it
would have a profound effect on my life.
I was living in Cluj-Napoca, Romania with
an 84 year old woman who didn’t speak one word of English and I knew absolutely
no one. It was summer and school hadn’t started, which meant Cluj was deserted.
Not content to wait for classes to meet people, I took to trolling the bars and
being obscenely outgoing. Most of the time this resulted in nice conversations
with people I’d never see again, but one night I was a bar with a number of
pool table trying to talk to people. One group of people roughly my age were
playing pool and I thought I’d interject and ask them what game they were
playing. We started talking and shooting some pool. Then the guy in the group
called his shot. He said he was trying to hit the “Liche Purple” ball over
there. I thought I’d misheard him and asked him to repeat that. It was clear, I
had found another gamer.
 |
I started to hang out with this guy and his
friends as school started. We shared a common hobby and a common like for beer,
games and girls. In time I met more and more of his friends. Instead of gaming,
I was at the bars meeting people, clubbing and living it up. One night we
decided to pre-game before the bar with a friend of his and her classmates. One
of those classmates I met that night ended up becoming my wife. I think back
and think, “if he had said purple or pointed instead of broadcasting his
nerdiness is a most unexpected way, I never would have met her.”
On account of meeting her and having a
wonderful time in Romania, I decided to stay a few more years and to bring my
hobby with me. I met wonderful people, played in some tournaments and got back
to my old self. Sitting here four years after I left Romania, it’s the people I
met gaming that I still talk to and keep in touch with most. It felt like
wherever I went I could find people in the hobby with which to connect.
Hobbying
while Busy
Entering law school in New York after
moving from Romania changed my hobby greatly. For the first time, I was
intensely busy studying and becoming involved in the overwhelming world of U.S.
legal education. I was unused the competition and commitments required, and it
cut down my painting and modeling time greatly. Instead, I discovered trading.
I could sit in class and buy, sell and trade miniatures. Negotiations and
figuring out how to get the exact army I wanted for cheap was thrilling, and
even during those time when I didn’t have time to paint I knew I could still
enjoy my hobby. My wife volunteered to pack and ship things for a cut of the
money, and I was in wargamer heaven. I got games in here or there at the local
Games Workshop (8th Street for the win) or against my wife in those
games she enjoys, but the hobby was different during school. I had grown
frustrated with tournaments and how they made me feel, so it was just casual
gaming and casual trading.
After graduating law school, I started
working in London for an American law firm. The hours are long and the work
intense, but unlike in school, when I’m off work I’m off work. There isn’t
lingering pressure or study that simply is never done. I’ve been able to get
back to painting and playing. We got an apartment big enough to have a
dedicated hobby room (I will do a post on this at a later day) and I’ve found
some wonderful people at Dark Sphere to play games with on the weekends. My
hobby is quite different than it was before. I never know when the work will be
done during the week so I have to plan and anticipate games as opposed to show
up and play. I may have two weeks with no painting time and then two weeks with
tons of time. I’ve gone from cash poor, time rich to cash rich and time poor. I
always worried about what I could get and not how I would ever get the time to
paint it.
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| Too true. |
This time situation is what led me to start
this blog. I have some down time at work and thought that I could do an article
here and there. I love reading WWPD, Breakthrough Assault and Drunken Samauri
blogs each day and thought I could connect to my hobby through sharing my
thoughts, opinions, pictures and games with the gaming work. As my hobby
continually adopts to my lifestyle and I have to find new ways to feel engaged,
opportunities such as writing in a blog breathe fresh air into the experience.
It is this continual evolution and expansion that I want to write about today.
How does this hobby keep drawing me back into it and changing to suit my need?
Why
do we keep playing?
The
Ever Changing Hobby
Last week I wrote an article on the
Battlefront State of the Union. I wrote about the Vietnam river boats and how
much I liked the monitors. I then looked up the monitors on Wikipedia. This led
to reading about the riverine campaign and then to other areas of operations in
Vietnam. This led to me downloading the book “Easy Target” by Tom Smith (an
amazing read) about airmobile scout pilots. I finished the book last night on
the train home from work, and when I arrived home I unpacked the box of Loaches
that I’d picked up from the store and paid for the boxes of U.S. and NVA
infantry I’d found on the Facebook Flames of War Swap Shop.
My engaging of the hobby wasn’t just
writing an article and buying some models. I got to learn about a war I know
too little about, read about the experiences of a pilot and his struggles
through the war, and then have the opportunity to recreate situations and
battles that I read about. I’m starting a second memoir and have been
downloading a long list of Vietnam movies. The hobby isn’t just some toys that
I paint and play with but a mechanism for engaging my interest in the world
around me.
It is this “extracurricular” aspect that
keeps me going. The games don’t change much year in and year out. I find myself
painting basically the same models for the same armies for the same systems
that I was doing five, ten or fifteen years ago. Yeah, some are in plastic now
or are bigger or are extra fancy, but once you boil it down it’s all the same
thing. What makes it fascinating is the universe of other things that tie into
the games.
Historicals obviously have a huge advantage
with this. You can find history books, photographs, in depth analysis of
uniforms, organization and strategy. There are countless video and computer
games that cover many of the periods that these games occupy, and you can waste
hours using your Sherman tanks in a game before painting some up and playing
them on the tabletop. Fantasy and Sci-fi games are realizing the pull of having
a broad range of non-miniatures media around their games. GW has licensed the
Dawn of War series, pumps out novels with Black Library, created a godawful
Ultramarines movie and has even attempted to recreate some of the historical
feel with the Forgeworld campaign books. It is possible to spend all your free
time reading, painting, playing games and researching without ever leaving the
40K or Fantasy universe. Privateer is close on GWs heels with their excellent
line of books and their upcoming Warmachine video game. The hobby keeps growing
into new forms of entertainment.
The
Other Smelly Guys
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| Wargaming: where all your neckbeard and fedora dreams come true |
I have lived in many places since I started
in the hobby, from my hometown of Minneapolis to Phoenix, Cluj-Napoca,
Bucharest, New York, Budapest and now to London. In each place I was able to
find a wonderful, welcoming community of gamers with whom I made friends. In
each place I was able to find a place for myself, and it has done a lot to help
me avoid the pitfalls of moving internationally for relatively short periods of
time. I find the hobby to be my anchor through rapidly changing life
situations. I may be faced with a daunting new job or exceptionally strange
customs, but a d6 is the same everywhere I go.
When I meet up with my friends from high
school, we shoot the shit over old gaming days and current news. Where we have
drifted apart, the hobby remains something we share. My friends don’t always
understand the rigor of my job or how it is to be married or move so often, but
we always have something we are on the same page about.
I think community is an important part of
the hobby for many gamers. There are so many amazing options for someone who is
fantasy or historically minded to become immersed in their interest. People can
tour battlefields, do re-enactment or play the aforementioned video games.
However, tabletop miniatures has an intense social side that many of those do
not offer. You are forced to interact with others. The enjoyment of the game is
dependent on another person, how you act and the shared excitement of what is
happening on the table. This sets it apart and gives it legs. Yes, you can
interact with people in video games, but is it really interaction when a twelve
year old is describing how he fornicated with your mother? Wargaming generally
brings together mature, dedicated and interesting people who love the same
thing as a core part of the experience. It’s hard to become bored of that.
Plastic
Crack
We all joke about plastic crack and
obsession, but the more I think about the hobby the more I see this idea in my
experience. There is a high for me when I’m planning a project, researching and
dreaming about how it will look or play on the tabletop. I become excited, for
days or weeks, in a euphoria that I’ve only otherwise experienced when I become
exceptionally involved and busy at work on a big deal with tight deadlines and
the whole team is working towards the same goal. I crave that feeling in my
hobby. I start too many projects, and leave far too many unfinished. I buy,
sell and trade constantly as I jump into new, exciting things and start new
projects. It’s been 15 years and I still get the same excitement and feeling
when planning a new army that I did with my first. I don’t know how healthy it
is, but I guess if I’m going to be chasing a high, one relating to painting toy
soldiers can’t be that bad.
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| Got any more of those projects? |
Goals
and Productivity
Law school exam time in the U.S. is an
insane pressure cooker of long hours of studying, a feeling that you’ll never
learn it all, and a time to take stock in the fact that you’re directly
competing with some of the smartest people you’ve ever met for a tiny stock of
good grades (for the >70% of my readership outside of the U.S., law school
exams in America are graded on a curve such that only ~3-4% get the top grade,
~10% the next and so forth). Exam time is also when I was the most productive
in painting in my entire life. I got so many miniatures done during the few
weeks of exams that even I couldn’t believe my production.
When I’m productive in life, I’m productive
in my hobby. However, I have often also used by hobby to jumpstart my life
productivity. If I can push ahead and get that one unit done or that one
project realized, I see a visible effect on my work the next day or week. When
I was stalled with studying, I would put it away and paint to jump start my
productivity. I realize that as I paint I make goals. One more figure, one more
unit, one more vehicle. This thinking then gets translated to doing well on the
new document or being especially prepared for a specific meeting.
I was somewhat lost when I was younger. I
was immature in high school and really didn’t take school seriously. I didn’t
set goals at all, and just kind of lived life one day at a time. However, when
it came to toys I had goals, schedules of what to do and the ability to realize
those goals. It was only when I got older and realized how important all of
that was in my actual life that things started straightening out. However,
instead of having to learn all of those skills from scratch, I had years of
practice from my hobby. I never thought about how it would help me in the
future, but it meant that this major life change was far easier and far more
successful than it otherwise would have been.
The goal making and project based thinking
of the hobby keeps me glued to it. I’ve become so used to having a steady
stream of to-dos and goals set in my life that I feel empty without it. There
is always something more to work for and strive for in the hobby. It’s like
playing an MMO and grinding for the next level, except that there is such a
diversity of games and experiences that the grind doesn’t have to be. Making it
to that next level and finishing that project keeps gaming fresh and interesting
for me after all this time.
Conclusions
Everyone’s hobby experience is different
and we also place it to some degree of importance or another in our lives, but
the truth is we do have a shared experience. In such a social game, community
makes things happen. My blog would go unwritten without readers to share it
with, my projects would become stale without the amazing contributions of
others to give ideas and motivation while gaming alone would mean an end to my
playing days. The hobby may help me set goals, find my creative side and let me
chase the high of planning, but in the end it’s about meeting and connecting
with people over something we love. Seeing that new player understand how
amazing little toys on the table can be, or helping an old player reignite that
passion keeps me coming back time and time again.
I’d like to hear what makes you, the fellow
hobbyist, love the hobby. We spend so much money and time on these damned
little toys and yet it seems once people become miniatures gamers they tend to
stick. What’s your story?
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