It turns out that this year is the 40th anniversary of the creation of Warhammer, and to celebrate, the Royal Mail is, er, putting out a line of Warhammer stamps and various other Warhammer-related paraphernalia.
Times have changed. When I was a lad carrying around Warhammer paraphernalia in public would have been like being caught with porn; in fact if anything it would have been even more shameful, because at least possessing porn would have been indicative of the presence of vestigial red-blooded manliness. Being interested in Warhammer was indicative only of the willing (or resigned) embracing of pariah status - the act of a person who had abandoned all hope of ever having a girlfriend.
But this, as I have written about before, gave the game (and others like it) a subversive, counter-cultural edge. An interest in nerdish pursuits at that time was even in its own way somewhat punkish: a stiff middle finger in the face of mainstream pressures to wear the right clothes, listen to the right music, participate in the right pastimes. I don't want to suggest that this was in any way conscious. But Warhammer players had a rebellious, ornery quality. They saw the aesthetic with which they were expected by their peers to conform, and eschewed it. This made them despicable, and it took a certain amount of gumption and disagreeableness to accept being seen that way.
(I think class dynamics have a lot to do with this. For people towards the bottom end of the social scale, let's call them the working poor, conformity matters a great deal - it is how you get on in life, and is often the difference between making it and falling through society's cracks. People from my background generally took very seriously the quality of being like everybody else, and vigorously policed those who bucked that trend.)
Fast forward 40 years and things are better, but also worse. On the one hand, it's great that people are now generally much less judgmental about what hobbies other people have - as is evidenced by these Royal Mail stamps. The idea that there would one day be Warhammer stamps that you could actually send on envelopes would to my 13 year old self have been utterly preposterous. Yet there they are.
At the same time, however, I can't help but feel that this is partly the result of mainstream culture itself becoming more 'geekified', mostly as a result of market forces. The Warhammer nerds of my youth have all now grown up, have decent jobs for the most part, and therefore have decent disposable incomes - and there is thus now a big market to cater to their nerdish interests. As a result, because these people represent a fairly significant chunk of the mainstream, those nerdish interests have themselves become incorporated into the mainstream too. And this blandifies them. The gnarliness of old Warhammer books, with their awkward, gangly John Blanche illos and their dense two-columned text, has been replaced by a unified and banal vibe - everything looks as though an AI did it, competently but boringly. It's all terribly MOR. And the sense that one once had of partaking in an activity that was vaguely illicit is long gone. There is nothing subversive about it. It is firmly within the zeitgeist.
This certainly has not harmed Games Workshop's share price:
But I do wonder if ubiquity is necessarily in its long-term interest. The love that the youthful nerds of the 1980s and 1990s had for Games Workshop games is undoubtedly what is powering the company's growth now, and that love did not arise from those games being mainstream - exactly the opposite. I wonder if today's adolescents are going to discover that love in the rather insipid notion of a game that inspires a line of celebratory Royal Mail stamps, and whether therefore in another 40 years' time there will remain a large body of adults to shell out the necessary cash to keep the operation going.
The nerds of the 50s assembled model trains. Their hobby was never illicit, but was certainly geeky. They never passed it down though, so it died out.
ReplyDeleteThe mass-market existence of Warhammer (and D&D) produces a lot of schlock that would not appeal to the less polished, more autistic interests of the true gamer geek, but let it not be said that we allowed our interests to die out, as our fathers did.
Did it die out, though? I see a lot of model train magazines at the local supermarket. This is a genuine question.
DeleteGood question. I am a long time Warhammer fan and have recently begun assembling terrain with the help of many YouTube tutorials. Judging from those, either the model train hobby is as healthy as ever or is resurging. I can see myself easily moving from WH into historical wargames into model train over time (already kind of started!), it has some calm and focused quality to it that appeals to my older self.
DeleteOn the stamps- boy do they look bland and boring. I was expecting some Blanche illos or something otherwise interesting. Instead, bloody Ultramarines...
Yes, surely the ideal Warhammer stamp would be one that combined the conventions of the stamp-as-artwork (Royal profiles, single-colour backgrounds, cross-hatching, assorted curlicues and framing elements) with some icon of the 41st Millennium or The Old World.
DeleteBut if nobody's going to put the effort in I suppose I'd prefer a Blanche thumbnail.
Wait, I have it - 'The Penny Black Templar'!
DeleteI love that idea. You could have a set of the Primarchs of, say, the dozen best known chapters.
DeleteI think this is fascinating...that the Royal Mail is celebrating GW and Warhammer in this way. Amazing.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I have a question about something else. Going back and reading your prior post on your "lower middle class" background, you wrote the following:
"These different phenomena formed a unique cultural space, very male (there's no getting away from that), very creative, very self-referential, and always aware that it stood adjacent to and aloof from both the mainstream culture of our peers (football, club/dance music, cars) and the highbrow culture of posh people (rugby, theatre, politics, wine, contemporary literature)."
And what was going on with the females of this class who happened to be bookish, intelligent, and interested in creative pursuits. If wargaming didn't appeal to them, what did they spend their time doing while you boys were banging your heads to Iron Maiden and playing D&D?
I ask this because, as a West Coast American of about the same age (born in '73), I DID play D&D with females (females who enjoyed rock music, though more Def Leppard and Billy Idol than Maiden) during the 1980s. Your tales of testosterone-filled British gaming are very different from my experience...where did the lower-class women with brains disappear to in your story? What was THEIR subcultural niche?
Sorry if I'm hijacking this thread. I'd love to have a sheet of Space Marine stamps if I lived in the UK. My kids (boy and girl) would *both* dig it.
The short answer is that I don't know because I'm not a bookish, intelligent, creative girl. I don't mean that facetiously - I wasn't part of that culture. My experience back then was that the sexes were quite segregated in terms of hobby pursuits. Certainly I don't remember playing Warhammer or D&D with any girls.
DeleteMy friends who were girls - some of whom were intelligent, bookish, etc. - tended to do an awful lot of this radical thing called 'studying' (and hence now have great careers).
Interesting. I do know a woman...about my age...who grew up in the UK and was quite into Magic Cards in her youth (early 20s), even participating regularly in tournaments. However, I'm not sure what her social class would have been. She also had no experience with D&D or (so far as I'm aware) Warhammer.
DeleteThe segregation seems quite strange. Certainly we had boys doing "boy things" and girls doing "girl things," but we were forced to mix in a lot of ways (including co-ed sports prior to middle/high school). And a lot of 80s fantasy in the U.S. (especially TSR stuff) had quite a bit of, um, 'feminine appeal' to it. I was introduced to Dragonlance through my female (D&D playing) friends, for example.
I started playing D&D in 1980 at age 10. I never, as in not once, ever played with a girl or even heard of a girl who played D&D, until the 1990s. And even then it was a girlfriend of one of the regulars whom he dragged along. I didn't have the impression that she was there for the D&D, but rather for him. She certainly had never played D&D before meeting him.
DeleteFwiw I have many women at my D&D tables nowadays but no women at the wargaming con I go to. I think there are fairly hardwired reasons for the split.
DeleteYes, I think you would have to be bending over backwards to be politically correct in failing to acknowledge that men tend to much more interested in war than women do, and are therefore much more likely to be wargamers on average.
DeleteOn the other hand there's no reason why there should be a sex difference in the numbers of RPG players except I think that men are much more likely to do their socialising around a structured activity of some sort than women are - and, again, one would have to be bending over backwards to be politically correct not to notice this.
Regarding that last bit, I will politely disagree with no backwards bending needed...I've observed plenty of female "socializing around structured activity" (sports teams for certain).
DeleteWargaming came out of a masculine tradition (military service and study) and has always been a rather small hobby, so I understand the smaller representation...though I've known many artistically inclined ladies who enjoyed the painting of miniatures, war and otherwise. And perhaps there IS something "hardwired" about it: my own daughter has ZERO interest in playing wargames of the type my son and I enjoy.
But she digs D&D in all its bloody glory, as have many girls/women I've played with over the decades.
"[W]here did the lower-class women with brains disappear to in your story? What was THEIR subcultural niche?"
DeleteI have fairly extensive experience of this and as Noisms implies, these girls spent their leisure time 1) reading novels and 2) study-grinding desperately to effect a social-mobility-fueled escape from the lower-class environment they found themselves in. Mousy, timid girls with coke-bottle glasses *really, really do not*, or did not when I was school age, want to have to adapt to lower-middle/working-class norms for women, family formation and so on. What they want(ed) is to get the fuck out of the place where they grew up, get a job in the arts, and make everything about the class-culture they grew up in illegal. (I don't think this is the place for an extensive discussion of the sociopolitical impact of the girl-swot bloc of the last 50-odd years, but it certainly has the *potential* to be expanded on.) I will say that in my experience they haven't on average had "great careers"; the typical trajectory has been going for curatorial jobs and the like which may have prestige and cachet among other women like them but which are far from being as well remunerated as the typical swot-lad's tech job, or realistically even as socially impactful.
Nobody is saying that there is no female socialising around structured activity or that women don't play sports or games. I'm just saying that there is a greater preponderence of that kind of activity amongst men, probably because men are generally more socially awkward and tend to be more interested in 'things' than people. Generally.
DeleteI wouldn't go so far as Mr Anonymous in suggesting that the girls from my social background wanted to make 'everything about the class-culture they grew up in illegal' but I certainly saw a (pretty natural, when you think about it) desire to study hard as a way to get out of the life they were in that a lot of boys just didn't exhibit. Even the bookish, intelligent, nerdish boys I knew often eschewed study and preferred spending their time doing other things (music, nerd games, etc), and suffered somewhat in later life as a consequence. (I include myself in this - I coasted through school and university without ever really working at anything, and could have done a lot better.)
To be fair,
ReplyDeleteGames Workshop has always aimed for the high street and brand recognition as THE British toy/game company
always poking and prodding the market for for a space marine shaped hole to push it's product into
It's done this unashamedly so, succeeded far beyond any 80s fanboy wildest dream and to date has never felt the slightest urge to apologise for anything, not its wealth or its business practices
And for all the hate it gets from the fandom it remains the absolute gold standard of what a nerdy craft hobby can be in terms of product quality availability support advice etc
Long may it reign
Their genius is knowing how to push the profit margin to the point at which fans will complain but still make the purchase.
DeleteYep.
ReplyDeleteAnd I seem to remember that I already mentioned here how some time at 200...s GW had an official concurs for self-made / converted figurines for use in their games. And how at 2010s they started to prosecute people for not using their official figurines... Telling, I think.
Mike
The existence of stamps is not a problem for me. (Just one nerdish hobby doing homage to another, no?) The slick, hard, programmed upselling that hit my face a few years ago when I wandered into a WARHAMMER store innocently trying to purchase a single specific pot of paint, that was a problem for my past and future quest for authenticity.
ReplyDeleteIn short: It's the hobby, not the homage.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Though I haven't been in one of the shops in 10 years, probably.
DeleteI'm all for games people making money but I think that the observation about angular interesting games being flattened to be accessible maps to model design too. Early 90s to early-mid 00s is peak model design on nearly every front despite often inferior tech and lower sales.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit out of touch on the modelling side of things so I can't really comment on that.
DeleteYou know, I would love to read about how the British (or English?) class system, ones awareness and experience of it, affects how one approaches and designs settings and characters in RPGs. It's something I think about quite a lot when reading British fantasy fiction, how as an outsider to that system I'm probably missing so much that a British reader would intuit. The relationship between Frodo and Sam, for example, was almost incomprehensible to me when I first read the book in my teens and didn't really know anything about class in England. Occasionally when listening to an audiobook I'm surprised by the narrator giving what sounds to me like an accent indicative of class that I had not expected, (e.g. Elric's close friend doesn't sound nearly so aristocratic as he and his cousin do) and I'm left wondering if I've misinterpreted the text or am misinterpreting the voice or if the narrator or director is making a decision here on some basis I don't see.
ReplyDeleteIt's a big topic, but what I would say about the Frodo/Sam thing is that it is very old-fashioned, and nowadays that kind of landed gentry/servant relationship has almost disappeared from British society - it certainly has no cultural relevance, and the traditional aristocracy and 'gentry' now have basically almost no cache, and their pursuits are widely denigrated.
DeleteThe really important class dynamic in contemporary British society is I think the conflict between the upper - and lower-middle classes, the working class having been hollowed out (as across the world) and transformed into an under-class, and the traditional upper-class, as I suggested, having largely lost their prestige. Nowadays the big difference is I think between upper-middle class people who go to decent universities and are associated with very technocratic, elite professions (civil service, tech, finance, etc.) and lower-middle class people who tend not to go to university, or to go to crap ones, and are either self-employed or do bullshit jobs.
There was for a brief period during the 20th century a loosening of class structures so that things became more meritocratic (grammar schools played a big role in this) but things have since then, I think, rather cemented themselves again and the gulf between upper/lower middle class, or between elites/non-elites, is now very wide. But that's true across the Western world, I think.
Class, as in social class, ought to be a fundamental feature of medieval fantasy RPGs. Are there any that handle this aspect well? You've probably already covered this elsewhere.
DeleteOn GW, two thoughts. I don't think there was a conscious decision to go "mass market". They had a shop on every high street in the 90s, because that was just what retail did, they've been mass market for a long time. I think there was a conscious decision to go kid-friendly (or rather parent-friendly) in the late 90s early 00s though. You can see it in the way the art and fiction changed in this period. The weirdness (and sex) went away, and is only just starting to come back now. Most big battle scene art is a bunch of guys shouting at each other.
Point two, if you think it's bad now, just wait until the first live action TV or movie comes out.
Very tangential... listening to the BBC Radio 4 adaptations of Lord of the Rings in 1981, I remember being impressed by the actor who played Sam - fella called Bill Nighy. I didn't see his name crop up again for another decade or two, and was shocked to discover that he wasn't some servile west-country bumpkin, but apparently from the other end of the social scale.
Delete