The Futility of Man… In Wargaming

Here’s something I’ve been pondering for a little while. As I burn through ideas, new ideas, old ideas, all half baked, I began wondering why things (at least in my brain) are like this. Why start a project, become intensely focused on it for a short time and then flit to another?

Maybe it’s just the caffeine…

And I want to say up front this is in no way an indictment of myself. I’m not passing judgement on myself or you if any of this ramble rings true. I’ve always firmly believed that you should go wherever that hobby feeling takes you, even if at times it is total anarchy, as satisfying that feeling, exercising your creativity for me is what the hobby is all about.

Maybe it’s just the neurodivergence…

The hobby definitely feels faster these days, and even though I’m largely not a Warhammerer, most of my hobby includes things I bought for a pound and Irregular Miniatures. I’m not immune to the occasional shiny thing:

But Games Workshop (or is it Warhammer now… Citadel Miniatures?), being the Palaeoloxodon Namadicus with gigantism in the room, it’s hard not to imagine that somehow they’re involved?

Maybe it’s my tinfoil hat…

I remember as a kid, trying to scrounge enough pocket money to buy a box of Iron Warriors from the Warhammer bloke at Kettering’s street market, and convincing my parents to pay for my monthly White Dwarfs that before Games Warhammer was as huge as it is now, their release schedule was a little slower. I could miss entire editions, pop back into a Games Workshop store and still recognise everything on the shelves. I think now if you missed a couple of months you’d feel out of the loop.

And for the ‘little guy’, by which I mean the likes of Warlord, Mantic, Corvus Belli, to keep up, and not be buried in a wargamer’s social media feeds, I suppose they have to speed up too.

Long gone are the days of Peter Cushing’s pace:

Maybe it’s also the extent to which we absorb Wargaming content too. Going back to being that kid, I got white dwarf once a month, visited the Warhammer bloke once in a good while, got to visit Games Workshop in Northampton during the school holidays, and on occasion had a mate who was also interested. That was the full extent of my Wargaming experience back then.

Now I pump wargaming content directly into my cerebral cortex every zeptosecond I’m conscious. That’s got to have some effect on how flighty, flaky, floaty light, my hobby seems from time to time.

I’m sure if Peter Cushing were born significantly later, he too would be hassling the general public in bus stations for spare change so he could get his next fix of plastic crack.

I may not be as susceptible to the marketing as most. Say Board Games War Shop releases a new set of Necromunda models, I won’t exactly be chomping at the bit to get to them, but the flood of sci-fi gangs I see in the social media feed, as a result of a new Necromunda release may well sway me off what I’m currently involved in. I may have painstakingly sculpted a miniature range, and written the rules for a rank and flank game of grannies hurling pies at each other, but now I’m thinking about sci-fi gangs…

Misogyny inbound:

I suppose people are always excited and interested in the new, the different, the novel. It seems to be a highly lucrative (for the companies) aspect of human nature.

Maybe there something deeply wrong with human nature.

Theological reflections aside, maybe it just takes a special kind of nerd to only collect the figures to paint and refight the Battle of Gettysburg.

Maybe that’s just a different flavour of neurodivergence…

Maybe all human endeavour is ultimately pointless and we don’t actually have free will anyway, so do what you think you want… I guess…

Maybe it’s 6am and the dog decided it was time for me to get up at 4am and now I’m spiralling…

You got any spare change?