I am going to support this thesis with several examples but let me start off by saying I do not associate winning with being negative. It is merely that the attitude of winning at all costs brings a negative aspect to many things that are meant to be fun. Lets face it, in the end we are playing a game with toy?soldiers, lets not take ourselves too seriously.
There was a singular event that drove me to writing this, the tipping point after years of watching the community slip towards its obsession with Mathhammer. I was at my local gaming store a few weeks ago teaching my painting class when a younger wargamer walked up, I would say close to the age I was when I started. He began talking to one of the people in my class and I couldn't help but overhear his conversation. Almost everything he discussed was about how best to win, the?technicalities?of the game and generally reinforced the uber-competitive attitude that pervades my local store. The thing that caught my attention the most is when he was talking about a Goblin Chariot conversion that he had made and was very excited and proud of. It had a Goblin Fanatic trailing behind the chariot by a chain, but the chain was removable so that people couldn't rules lawyer him into saying they could hit the chariot because the trailing goblin was visible.
This repulsed me on a primal level, the fact that this young kid felt the need to curtail and quantify his creativity to satisfy the competitive people who have taken over the reins of the hobby lately. When I was his age and even now I would never let the thought that someone could twist my conversions that I had painstakingly worked on to their advantage in a game stop me from doing what I wanted. This is not to say that stuff like that didn't happen, but I would then make sure to not play that person again. I used to work at a GW later in my teens and even then it was still a place that fostered creativity and fun over?competitiveness. There were the odd regulars who were known to be super?competitive?to the point that playing them was a chore and in general they were avoided by the majority of the customers. No one wanted to ruin their fun game that they were playing in their free time by being told that in fact their Rhino could be hit because the Marine in the hatch sticks out over the building.
I believe that there are a number of factors that led to this shift in the atmosphere. I don't know if any one of them is more to blame than the other, as they all happened at about the same time which led to a perfect storm and the first death cries of casual play everywhere.
Despite any other factors the largest by far was the rise of the internet. The hobby use to have a very minimal presence online and most of this was geared towards the hobby aspect of it. With the rise of websites geared towards the gaming side of it codexs and army books became a collection of charts, numbers and ratios that were pulled apart and dissected until only the most basic elements remained. People began posting their max-min lists online and this led to what I like to think of as lazy army list writing. No longer did you take that one unit that looked cool and fit your armies theme and still tried to pull a win out of it, now you took the?multiple?units of Grey Hunters in Razorbacks because?that's?what the internet says will win (honestly who thinks of Razorbacks when you picture the Space Wolfs?). With this the easy button was invented. Armies started getting ranked based upon how easy it was to build a completely domineering army list out of it. Let me just state that the mettle of any general can be tested with how well they do with the army they have and not how well they do with an arsenal of nuclear weapons. People are amazed when a non easy button army wins a tournament. It is because the best players will win with whatever army they are given. This?is?the way it use to be, everything was more varied and you won based on your tactical expertise. The Leafblower lists, Razor spam, Draigo Wing, these things are killing the creativity out there. The major problem with the internet is one that will never be fixed and has always existed, its just new to our hobby. The people with the loudest voices always win, and those people are almost always going to be the most entrenched in their opinion and the most?competitive?personalities.
Older players may know better, but think of all the younger players who are just starting out. I can?guarantee?you they are looking at these things online, kids now have tablets and computers at an extremely young age. These kids are being introduced into a world where individuality is discouraged and only building the same list as "that guy" will let you win. They are not getting to test out their own play style, they may never know how the Wolves are meant to be played according to the?meticulously?written background. They may never build that awesome conversion they were thinking of because the base size will be too large, or the model will be "too tall" and some competitive minded player at their store will call him on it.
There is a place for being competitive, its is in competitions, or against your friends if?that's?how you guys play. If the hobby had been this negative back in 2000 when I started I doubt I would still be involved with it today. I am asking for a return to form. This does not mean the death of?competition, merely to remember that we are playing a game where we pretend 8ft tall super humans blast each other apart with rocket propelled bullets, where elves ride dragons into battle against hordes of mutant rat people and we do all of this with our lovingly painted (most of the time, looking at you grey plastic army guy) toy?soldiers. We do this for the love of the game and the hobby and the fluff. If you do not enjoy these aspects of it you might as well play Risk or Call of Duty and save yourself a lot of time and money.
Remember, the kids who are getting into the hobby now, in this atmosphere, are the ones who in the future will be carrying the torch for the next generation. I know that sounds cheesy but it is true. Our hobby is already a niche and has many barriers to getting into it already, lets not build more. This is a call for everyone out there to step back, think about how they approach wargaming, and chill out a bit. Do this for the kids just starting out, the older vets who remember the good old days and for everyone else out there like me who looks at how it use to be 10 years ago and how it is now and has a hard time recognizing it as the same thing.
This is not meant to bash competition and say the casual more hobby oriented aspect of the hobby is better. I merely think that it needs to be more balanced then it is now. Sites like Bell of Lost Souls could try and publish more hobby or fluff articles alongside their how to build a winning army ones. I remember when I first found that site only a few years ago it had a ton of do it yourself codexs, campaigns, army transfers and army showcases. Now it is only the?occasional conversion article, most of which are linked back to the bitz site owned by the author, or a lore article (my favorite). Games Workshop has started to shift White Dwarf back towards being hobby oriented but they still have a ways to go. Their What's New Today blog online is great and really promotes the hobby and casual side of things while letting the average joe schmoe show off his painting to the masses. One thing I really hope they do again is a global campaign on the scale of Armageddon, Storm of Chaos, Albion, and Eye of Terror. Those really helped promote the story oriented side of things and made their game universes feel much more alive.
In the end all I hope this article did was make you stop and think about how you approach our hobby and maybe readjust your outlook.
Tyler M.
Source: http://mengelminiatures.blogspot.com/2012/03/mathhammer-problem-with-gaming.html
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