What even is 40k anyway?
Ash over at Guerilla Miniature Games has a side channel called Inside Tabletop, in which he and a buddy who owns a games store talk shop. I was quite taken with their most recent video, provocatively titled "When did you fall out of love with 40k?"
Now, some people are going to watch this, roll their eyes, and see two 40something men bemoaning the new in favor of the old. One, that's not what it is. There are some keen observations in here about where 40k is going, where analog games writ large are going, and where culture even more broadly is going. Those observations are parsed in normal language, but that's actually why I'm so taken with it. Part of the reason I went in on qualitative research in grad school rather than leaning into strictly theoretical or historical research is because I think there's more to be said about the ways people interpret the world around them than just about anything. I like listening to people talk about what they know.
Two, as I've written about here and elsewhere, I find the impulse, mostly liberal, to insist nothing was better as dehistoricizing as the rote nostalgia which says everything was better. Some things used to be better. 40k is one of those things. And, for what it's worth, it used to be worse in that the players are a decidedly more diverse and interesting group of people who are able to participate largely because Games Workshop is a bigger, global, diversified (in the sense of its media presence) outlet. Those things can live in tension with one another.
Their main critiques fall along these lines:
1) 40k used to let you tinker with both rules and your miniatures, with long lists of customizations for your heroes and units which were supported by the rules and the style of play, which were far less tournament-facing. In turn, the miniatures were modular and customizable.
2) The tournament scene has homogenized play so much that they feel disconnected from the very personal acts of painting and converting their miniatures. Material changes aren't supported by either the rules or organization of play.
3) Since tournament play demands homogenization for balance, things like the much touted new terrain rules (where objectives are no longer circles on the ground but eg a building or hill) are basically just, as Ash says, circles of a different shape. And he asks, I have all this bespoke terrain but now it can only be important if it fits into a cardboard, pre-printed footprint, so what am I supposed to do with this stuff?
4) All of which combines to strangle the narrative style of play. There's a tension, going back to day one of miniatures wargaming, which is unique to the form. It's one of the few (the only?) form which is simultaneously collaborative and competitive. Up until recently, and mostly due to Games Workshop's gargantuan influence, the idea was that you tried to win AND compete with the person across the table from you. It's been my experience that this is a really, really difficult thing for most people to reconcile. I play with close friends who have quite expansive notions of TTRPGing, for instance, who simply can't tamp down enough of the presented competition to enjoy the complexity of the form. And vice versa, for that matter, though it's far rarer.
5) All of this patches into Games Workshop's DLC model of rapid releases: a new edition of every three years, army books every month or so, weekly releases of new miniatures. Except, since they're in the business of selling miniatures and publicly traded as one of the only hot UK stocks, they're always accelerating their releases while pumping up the number of miniatures required to play "correctly". So now you spend months painting an army to play one game, except then they release some rules tweaks which make it suck, and that wouldn't matter save for the fact that not sucking is the only way to play which is meaningfully supported. But maybe your army sucks entirely, so everyone is incentivized to sell the army or put it in mothballs to buy a different army.
6) Very early on, Ash's friend Chris says he had a great time playing it with some friends over a long weekend after cudgling the rules into something suited to his group. To which Ash replies that you can have fun doing anything with friends and that Chris probably wasn't playing 40k at that point. That gets to a long in the tooth but still important matter at the intersection of design and theories of play: what is a game? Is the game the rules? Is it the play? Is it some intersection of those things? Is it the case, paraphrasing some of the old Forge designers, that if you houserule a game you're cheating?
Ash closes with a lament that he wants a game of 40k to be a process rather than an outcome again, that 40k is the painting and the jokes with your friends and the unexpected events. Nestled in here is a broader observation: everything is like this now. Nothing is about process. Chasing the meta in 40k is just the same quest for ruthless efficiency that permeates everything else. It's in our games. It's in our work. It's in our computing. It's in our romance. It's in our sleep, our trips to the gym, what we eat. Why would 40k be any different?
When I was a World of Warcraft power user, I spent a lot of time on the Elitist Jerks forums. One thing that was said regularly, and I believe it was most commonly said by forum posters who went on to become highly influential designers at Blizzard, is that it doesn't matter what color spell you cast so long as you beat the boss. To place it more specifically, it was always brought up in discussions about whether you should spec fire, frost, or arcane as a mage. Have a playstyle preference for big hits over snares? Doesn't matter, shoot blue. Imagine your character as a master of the subtle flows of the arcane? Switch. Raid bosses, as the saying went, were simply a math equation to be solved: can the group do X damage in Y time before incoming damage outstrips the tank's Z hit points + healer throughput.
At the time, it was compelling. For all the talk about how "hardcore" it was to think this way, another saying on the forums was that there's nothing more hardcore than sucking at the game, because if you were bad and couldn't solve the equation you would be in that raid for five hours.
Now, I'm not so sure. What seemed like escape mostly just feels like job training now. And games were always job training, but the analog sphere was supposed to be different. The guardrails were thinner, the interpretation of unforeseen events because of dice rolls or bad moves or faulty memory were supposed to combine to create something more than the math equation.
Which was part of the point of my doodads talk the other month, which I posted here. If the distinction between analog and digital matters at all, it is only in the set of cultural and political expectations attached to both. Nothing is pure. Except even those expectations have withered as digital games design expectations increasingly influence the analog games sphere. I don't think one is better than the other in any sort of objective way; I have my preference and that's all, which is something Ash is careful to say by way of mitigation of what I suspect he knows is the inevitable pushback on his position in this conversaion. But I do think that having those differences and options is good on their own terms. Choice matters here.
One note on the competitive/narrative difference. I wrote about this in my dissertation (and forthcoming book; more to follow on that in the next couple of weeks), but if the 40k crowd is more diverse now it's my strong suspicion that it's not the game in the action-at-the-table sense but the narrative elements combining with a just better (not perfect, better) environment for non-white not men to participate in everything.
I base that on my own experience in stores. We have a local store in the Triangle area which skews heavily toward narrative style games: big Horus Heresy narrative campaigns, Necromunda, niche non-Games Workshop skirmish wargames, etc. And this store, despite eschewing the tournament scene which supposedly buoys 40k's popularity, attracts a far more diverse than tournament oriented stores I've been to. Not close. This is not to say that it's representative of the general population. It's still mostly straight white guys talking about work and buttrock. But it's not all.
Me? I'll of course play 40k, but 40k has always had, as Ash notes, a vibe of "I like to paint 40k but I like to play Fantasy Battle." I've always struggled to love it as much as most people I know, even as I drag my old Orks and Genestealers out to paint. So to answer the question the video poses, maybe I never loved it, but I've always wanted to. If I even know what it is.
