Well it's been a little while as the family and I had a little holiday over the Easter break, getting out and about and enjoying the great British weather (it rained!). There has been a little time for painting however very little time to take pics of anything, I'll rectify that tonight I think, so watch this space.
However I shall wax lyrical on something that has been bothering me for some time. If you read some of my archive posts you'll have noticed that my gaming is primarily done at my local club, with a group of guys that I've known for over ten years. Like many gamers we've tended to play the more mainstream games that were freely available (by freely available read "GW available") with a smattering of the odd and weird thrown in (board games and those weird CCG thingies).
Then something amazing happened - we discovered the internet! Yes I know it's been around a while but like most ageing groups of men playing with toy soldiers change comes slowly, if it comes at all (gratuitous film quote!) And that's what seemed to happen to the "fantastical" wargames industry as well, as the internet became more of a tool for our hobby so the industry changed with small companies cropping up or growing exponentially and quite successfully. At the same time the giant of the hobby released new versions of their core games that were not very well received (at least by me!), profits dropped and they began to consolidate. Hooray for the historical or small fantasy games company who could now market via the web at reduced cost, at the same time new manufacturing solutions were arriving (print on demand) and thus overheads and market entry barriers were reduced.
Woohoo, great for us gamers you'd think. And in general I'd say yes...... and no. Because I've seen a rather unpleasant illness inflicting quite a lot of us ex-fantastical gamers, the dreaded hobby butterfly!
We have more choice and lower cost, therefore were being drawn to whichever new and pretty thing is out there, playing for a few weeks and then moving on. We've became quite transient in our tastes, not really focusing on, and developing anything enough to try and improve on the original release, and thus support future content.
But wait, do we need future releases. Do we need the next new rulebook (v8) or campaign supplement, the hobby support and specifically branded paints and limited edition models. I'm sure you can read between the lines and see that I'm not so subtly having a go at GW however if it wasn't for them I wouldn't have been exposed to this daft obsession with toy soldiers and buildings made of plasticard. So I'm not ashamed of my entry to this hobby. But one thing that does concern me is the the title of this post - which hobby do you play. Do you wait for the author, publisher, manufacturer to tell you what to do or do you make up your own mind. Do you write your own rules, make your own models, use what looks right or do you wait for the commercial entity producing the hobby material to release something that supports your interest. Either is fine by me and going back to the start of the post there are members of my gaming group that do ascribe to the latter. But one thing that we all agree on is that the hobby will only stay healthy if we're open about our preference and do not descend into elitism or name calling.
I recently read an article in a popular wargames magazine where the author referred to the "GW Generation" of gamers. Ok, doesn't sound too nasty really, however earlier in the article he name dropped all the founding fathers of wargaming as his inspiration and whether he meant it or not this smacks of elitism. By doing that he inferred that because I didn't have access to Featherstone and Grant at the start I'm not a proper wargamer. And scarily I've found myself doing the same thing and looking down on others (in my immediate gaming circle) because they play the Hobby(TM).
So after that rather rambling rant I'll conclude with the statement that I play the hobby, whatever that may be. Be it corporately spawned monster codex or cottage industry limited print run homebrew rules. And hopefully I'll keep asking myself and others what they play, and keep questioning why they save on a 5+!
However I shall wax lyrical on something that has been bothering me for some time. If you read some of my archive posts you'll have noticed that my gaming is primarily done at my local club, with a group of guys that I've known for over ten years. Like many gamers we've tended to play the more mainstream games that were freely available (by freely available read "GW available") with a smattering of the odd and weird thrown in (board games and those weird CCG thingies).
Then something amazing happened - we discovered the internet! Yes I know it's been around a while but like most ageing groups of men playing with toy soldiers change comes slowly, if it comes at all (gratuitous film quote!) And that's what seemed to happen to the "fantastical" wargames industry as well, as the internet became more of a tool for our hobby so the industry changed with small companies cropping up or growing exponentially and quite successfully. At the same time the giant of the hobby released new versions of their core games that were not very well received (at least by me!), profits dropped and they began to consolidate. Hooray for the historical or small fantasy games company who could now market via the web at reduced cost, at the same time new manufacturing solutions were arriving (print on demand) and thus overheads and market entry barriers were reduced.
Woohoo, great for us gamers you'd think. And in general I'd say yes...... and no. Because I've seen a rather unpleasant illness inflicting quite a lot of us ex-fantastical gamers, the dreaded hobby butterfly!
We have more choice and lower cost, therefore were being drawn to whichever new and pretty thing is out there, playing for a few weeks and then moving on. We've became quite transient in our tastes, not really focusing on, and developing anything enough to try and improve on the original release, and thus support future content.
But wait, do we need future releases. Do we need the next new rulebook (v8) or campaign supplement, the hobby support and specifically branded paints and limited edition models. I'm sure you can read between the lines and see that I'm not so subtly having a go at GW however if it wasn't for them I wouldn't have been exposed to this daft obsession with toy soldiers and buildings made of plasticard. So I'm not ashamed of my entry to this hobby. But one thing that does concern me is the the title of this post - which hobby do you play. Do you wait for the author, publisher, manufacturer to tell you what to do or do you make up your own mind. Do you write your own rules, make your own models, use what looks right or do you wait for the commercial entity producing the hobby material to release something that supports your interest. Either is fine by me and going back to the start of the post there are members of my gaming group that do ascribe to the latter. But one thing that we all agree on is that the hobby will only stay healthy if we're open about our preference and do not descend into elitism or name calling.
I recently read an article in a popular wargames magazine where the author referred to the "GW Generation" of gamers. Ok, doesn't sound too nasty really, however earlier in the article he name dropped all the founding fathers of wargaming as his inspiration and whether he meant it or not this smacks of elitism. By doing that he inferred that because I didn't have access to Featherstone and Grant at the start I'm not a proper wargamer. And scarily I've found myself doing the same thing and looking down on others (in my immediate gaming circle) because they play the Hobby(TM).
So after that rather rambling rant I'll conclude with the statement that I play the hobby, whatever that may be. Be it corporately spawned monster codex or cottage industry limited print run homebrew rules. And hopefully I'll keep asking myself and others what they play, and keep questioning why they save on a 5+!
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