How the Deteriorating Quality of White Dwarf Battle Reports Undermines Western Civilisation, and What to Do About It

A lot of people are worried that we are approaching the dawning of a post-literate age - one in which it no longer becomes necessary to really read. Claims like this have been being made for a long time and I have my doubts whether we can make bold conclusions about epochal change. But what is for sure is that more and more people are reading less and less, even if it is true that there are still lots of hard core readers out there who still love books. 

Whether one describes ourselves as becoming 'post-literate' is an interesting subject for debate, in other words, but I am more concerned with the empirical observation that not enough people are reading in depth, and particularly reading books. When people don't read very much they don't tend to think deeply. And the only way to really read properly is in the form of a book. Book-reading forms habits of concentrated and focused thinking that are necessary to engage with complicated ideas, and novel-reading especially gives us the ability to think in a concentrated and focused way about both ourselves and other people, such that our theory of mind becomes fully developed and sophisticated.

I was reflecting on all of this recently when leafing through the pages of the latest edition of White Dwarf, which celebrates 50 years since the founding of Games Workshop. I am not a regular White Dwarf reader - I must have bought it twice in the last twenty years. But there was a time in my life when I read it avidly. And since, like I assume a lot of readers, the battle reports were always my favourite features, I quickly found my way to the one in this edition - a 40k battle between the Imperium and Chaos Space Marines.

I was shocked - shocked, I tell you! - and appalled at what I saw. What passes as a battle report is, and I think it is important to use this particular word in this particular context, unreadable. Have a look at these photos I took of some of the relevant pages:

It is not, let me make plain, that everything does not look stunning or that the models are not shown off wonderfully or that the battle report is not slickly put together. And it is not that there are not, strictly speaking, chunks of text on the pages that one could I suppose, quote-unquote, 'read'. It is the extent to which it is almost impossible to understand what is going on because so little effort is made to explain it in text form. The sections which set out the thinking of the two generals in terms of planning and deployment consist of the most threadbare concessions to the concept of thought. This, for example, is the entirety of the rationale set out by the general of the Chaos army in his section of the preamble:

Nothing about set-up, nothing about tactics, not even anything in particular about the units or why he has chosen them. Here, meanwhile, is the section on deployment, where there is ostensibly an objective, 'referee view' account of how the two different armies are set up:

That is the whole thing. What even is that, other than a cursory list simply reciting where various units are placed? Why are they being placed there? What is the reasoning behind all of this? 

And that's to set aside the account of the battle itself, which reads like the most bare-bones horse-racing commentary that one could imagine: brown horse, brown horse, now it's black horse, black horse, grey horse on the outside, grey horse, oh but another brown horse, brown horse...:

Have a look at the side bar. This happened, then this happened, then this happened. Oh, and then this happened. BUT LOOK AT THE PHOTOS OF THE MODELS, EACH OF WHICH ONLY INDIVIDUALLY COSTS £38.99 ORDERABLE FROM THE WARHAMMER WEBSITE.

This is not good. This is stupid and insulting to the reader. It reveals a basically pornographic approach to the hobby - phwoar, look at that bolter; phwoar, look at the lascannons on that; phwoar, look at that big, thick, throbbing shadowsword - but, more importantly, it reveals a post-literate one. Yes, there are words that are there to be read, but it is totally unnecessary that you read them. They are superfluous. They can be ignored. They are grey, uninteresting, sidelined, and irrelevant. What matters is what you can see.

Compare this to the battle reports of yore. Through careful and extensive internet searches undertaken over the course of months of deep research (well, okay, I conducted a single Google search) I found that some legendary champion has undertaken an act of sheer heroism and uploaded a load of old battle reports from long lost White Dwarfs of yesteryear and put them in a PDF on 'tinternet. As soon as I got it my eye was immediately drawn to a Warhammer battle report that has always stuck in my mind called, The Battle of Skull River, from Issue 170 (in 1994). 

Note the way in which each general lays out in some detail a plan, a rationale for unit selection, and an idea about deployment and tactics:

And note how the battle report plays out, with a proper textual narrative providing an exciting prose account of what is happening, combined with commentary:

Note the different emphasis. Yes, there are images showing off the models. But this does not come at the cost of actually being able to work out what is happening on the basis that an actual battle is taking place. And note above all the use of maps which allow you to, at any point, work out easily where the different units are and what they are doing so as to gain a proper bird's eye view of proceedings - the use of visual aids to add to the interpretation and clarity of the text, rather than the complete domination of the former at the expense of the latter. (There isn't a single map in the 2025 battle report outlined above. Not one!)

This is a battle report, in short, which treats the hobby as something that is not just Nice Expensive Models to Gaze Adoringly At, but something that one should think about, engage with, and interact with as an intelligent agent. It is a battle report which assumes its readers have a modicum of intelligence and that they are able of digesting information over the course of a page of text rather than in a series of fancy images. It is a battle report for the age when people were expected to be literate.

It is a truism that as people age they get it into their heads that matters are deteriorating in some sense in comparison to the good old days. But this does not mean that they are always necessarily wrong. In this case, I am right. People are reading less, and they are becoming stupider. And this will have bad consequences that extend beyond even the confines of the Games Workshop hobby.

What are we to do about this? It starts at home. Read more. Watch screens less. Encourage your children to read more and restrict their access to screens. Stop being lazy. Set the tone in your personal life: what you do with your time is important, and you can spend your time well, or badly. Time watching screens is time spent badly; time reading books is time spent well. Your mind is important and you should protect and cultivate it. This does not mean that you are not allowed any hobby or leisure time or that you should live like a Spartan; it means that if you have a hobby pursue it in such a way that it makes you better as a person rather than worse. It is in your hands to make a small difference to the culture by acting out a different set of values - so get on and do it.