I guess it's the 1980s again in Greece. Check it out.
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With the big financial crisis the country is in, they probably cannot afford the current models of Scapegoat.
On the other hand, I think the article has some salient points to it. I've met a lot of gamers and SF fans in conventions and they typically do tend towards the white, male, and fairly right of center in political persuasion. although it's not as universal as it was in the 80s, that leaning is still there. The Greek gamer culture may actually still be in that 80s stage compared to our own. I'd be very wary of making unqualified comparisons to our gaming culture
I also think that the person in his zeal to defend the game is totally off base in his characterization of Warhammer 40k, especially if anyone has ever read some of the comics set in the Judge Dredd and simmilar universes that come from the island side of the Pond.
Europeans who in general, have had more direct experience of right wing excess may justifiably be more paranoid about it than the average American.
I agree generally with all this.
Being an ex-40K player, I also found a particular trend in that community for folks to be more close-minded and more zealous about their personal political beliefs (whatever they may be, right or left) than in other groups, including other gamer groups such as that of RPGers, video gamers, and board gamers. However, that's the sample of my local community from my perspective, which is to be taken with a large grain of salt. I can't say I'd think 40K players would be like that everywhere.
And the comment she quoted from the guy about women... *sigh* I believe he believes that, I believe he wasn't misquoted, as I have heard that kind of thing from a lot of 40K players, said to my face (I am a woman). As a woman, I found the hardest thing indeed to feel like part of the community was the other community members' attitudes toward me and other women players (the few of us there were). It was hard not to feel either unwelcome--people feeling they couldn't trash talk around me like they could around their buddies (when I really didn't give a flying f+#% what they said) or just kind of staring, or people being overly condescending about whether I knew the rules, always treating me like a n00b when no one else in the store was, or alternately, being treated like a precious rainbow pony and being kissed up to, which is awkward in its own way. THAT SAID, those were all worst case scenarios--and I think the community when I left it overall was developing better attitudes around women, where people would just treat you like a fellow player, neither poor treatment nor special treatment given.
On the other hand, I think the author did show a failure to separate fantasy from reality or show that the gamers were capable of doing so, which I'm sure they were. I don't think anyone advocates the world of 40K as a world we want to aim for. It's grim and dark and horrible--it's about all the awful and the extreme attitudes that lead to a universe of total war. I don't think that means it's promoting those values to exemplify in real life, far from it.
And if you disagree, I'll shoot you with this flamethrower.
(That was a joke, just to be clear.)
I'm sometimes surprised at how often gamers are conservative.
I can't believe any of you really believe she was right in linking 40K players to Nazis.
I know 40K players tend to be very loyal to their game. But I know a lot of them, and not a one of them is a Nazi, and not a one of them is a misogynist. One very zealous player is among the nicest guys I know. I also happen to know female players, and they are very smart people. In fact, all of those players are smart people.
You wouldn't want this woman generalizing any group you belong to by the off-hand comments of a single member, nor should any of us expect that it is right to do so. Yet, those of us who were playing tabletop games in the 'eighties remember only too well how easy it was to find ourselves ostracized by playing "Satan's Game."
This writer is doing nothing more valid than that. She has no point, because all of her points were derived from bias and ignorance. That she may have accidentally touched on something you might once have also encountered, doesn't make all the hyperbole and misinformation okay.
You know, I realized when I brought this up, that not a lot of people here are 40K players. I'm not either. I am mainly a roleplayer with a bit of Warmahordes in me. But whatever 40K players might be, they are a part of our community. We share pretty much everything crucial to our hobbies with them.
I sent an email to that magazine. Because what they did was wrong. And once the moral panic begins, it doesn't end until everybody has been touched by it.
Bruunwald, despite what you may think, we're not all one community. Gamers in Greece, aren't the same as Gamers in New York, or Gamers in Los Angeles. They come from a different culture where misogynistic attitudes are considerably more accepted than here.
If you want proof of how not one a community we are, just listen to to the Pathfinder, 3.5E, and 4th Edition players all happily bashing each other.
I do remember gaming groups in the 80's and while it may be painful for you to hear, the bulk of them were anything BUT female friendly. And it would not surprise me given what I know of Eastern European culture, being half-Romanian myself that gaming groups of Greece will tend to more resemble those gaming groups I encountered 3 decades ago.
Racist stereotyping much.... Greece is not Eastern European in culture any more than Italy or Spain is.
There also appears to be a lot of role player elitist sentiment in some of the posts above along with the insidious inference that the majority of male gamers are bunch of socially awkward neck beards.
Way to bash on the community - yeh there are some jerks but they are proportional to any other community. I think you will find in communities that are female dominated an equal number of a-hats.
There also appears to be a lot of role player elitist sentiment in some of the posts above along with the insidious inference that the majority of male gamers are bunch of socially awkward neck beards.Way to bash on the community - yeh there are some jerks but they are proportional to any other community. I think you will find in communities that are female dominated an equal number of a-hats.
The amount of sexism present in gaming communities is still pretty high. Women are becoming more common in the community, but I still see plenty of guys who look down on them or act like creeps around them. I hear women complain about how their treated and they basically get told to shut up and sit in the corner. This happens in public, online and in private. It can take a lot of different forms, but it's happening all over the place.
Online, I've seen (multiple times within the last 6 months) women targeted with threats of rape because they speak up about this kind of stuff. Most of these are pretty much hot air, but it says something when people think it appropriate and okay to say that (though part of that is from the security of anonymity).
Rape, and even the threat of rape, is the ultimate expression of sexism. When that is still present in our community, it is impossible to claim that it is gone.
I love gaming, but that doesn't mean I'm going to turn a blind eye to our community and culture's failings.
My irontruth my point is, that sadly this behaviour is part of all communities and to insinuate that your average gamer is less socially evolved than say your average person is resorting to lazy stereotypes.
Mixing it with some casual racism and gamer elitism you have the posters looking like hypocrites. Rather than comming up with actual ways of improving our communit, some people are happy to take pot shots and be snide.
When I am not working at my day job, I make terrains and I paint minis. Then I go to various places around my state (and am now branching to other states), and I sell them. I sell them to all kinds of gamers. Casual gamers, hardcore gamers, roleplayers, wargamers, 40K players, Warmachine players, and even some people who just think they are cool.
Some of my customers have accents. Some barely speak english.
I assure you, we are a community.
My irontruth my point is, that sadly this behaviour is part of all communities and to insinuate that your average gamer is less socially evolved than say your average person is resorting to lazy stereotypes.
Mixing it with some casual racism and gamer elitism you have the posters looking like hypocrites. Rather than comming up with actual ways of improving our communit, some people are happy to take pot shots and be snide.
I guess I failed to see how your comments were more helpful than their hypocrisy.
I do see differences in communities and cultures in regards to how prevalent jerk-off behavior is. Someone will always be "that guy", but if we put some effort in, we can make sure there are fewer of them.
I would agree that the original article against the Warhammer players was definitely biased. It's a very shallow analysis that arrives at some false conclusions. Some of the information contained within is true though, I know I read it and thought to myself "yup, I've known people similar to that". There was a lot that the author didn't seem to grasp about the community or what those facts meant.
Well, I have to say, I do not for a second recognise the world the auther, and even some posters here are discussing.
I'm a brit. In the UK, any discussion of gaming culture, is also a discussion about Games Workshop as well.
This is GW's home, and you'll a games workshop in ever major town and city in the country. If you go looking for a gaming club, the first place you ask is the local games workshop, when you find a club, you'll find people playing something games workshop related there, form WFRP and Dark Heresy through to 40k.
Almost every gamer I have ever meet in person has had some contact with GW.
And here in the UK, it is my experience that gamer population is anything but right of centre.
While both warhammer and 40k's settings are brutal autocratic and superstitious states, they are also crumbling, broken and doomed to failure, filed with gallows humour ("What do you mean we just bombarded the wrong planet into the stone age" "Sorry sir, it looks as though the scribe copied the message wrong.") No one I have meet, past the age of about 16 has ever consider this world to be something aspire too.
I'm only vaguely familiar with 40K and know next to nothing about its universe or backstory and don't personally know anyone that plays it.
With that said, I don't this this Antipope is arguing that his hobby doesn't have its share (however large or small) of political conservatives or that some extremeists may enjoy it. I think what his major problem is that the journalist writing the magazine article was practicing very bad journalism. Not being there and not reading Greek, I'm going to have to take the Antipope on his word, but it does sound like the journalist came into this story with preconceived notions and then made the story fit those stereotypes.
According to the Antipope, the journalist constantly asked players if they knew anyone in the extreme right who plays 40K. This seems to me that she wanted to find some extremeists and kept asking about them until someone gave her the answers that she was looking for. That is not good journalism, it's essentially writing an op-ed piece and should have been published as such if that's what she was doing.
It's like if I lined up a hundred Pathfinder players and started asking them, one after another, if they know any KKK members that play Pathfinder. The first 99 players say that they don't know any, but then the last guy says that he's heard that maybe, in some other country, there might be some. Then I write an article about how Pathfinder is a gateway game into racist, homophobic, anti-semitic groups. Obviously that's not true and it's an "out there" example, but this is the type of reporting that this journalist was undertaking.
I don't think that any would disagree that some rather unpleasant people probably do enjoy role-playing and war games of all types. However, for a journalist to preconceive that any of these games are "really bad" and then go out with the purpose of proving that preconception, isn't reporting. And unfortunately many people, particularly when they aren't personally familiar with the subject, take journalists at their face value, assuming that they are presenting well-researched and "fair-and-balanced" articles.
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Anyone read this and think "this sounds like a Chick Tract?"
I have to say Zombieneighbours is spot on about the gaming community in the UK. It's generally pretty liberal and GW is all pervasive.
That said GW gaming is almost exclusively male (or at least it was 5 years ago when I was really into it.) At the grand tournaments I have played female wargamers are noticable by their absence.
With RPG's it's a completely different story. I would say amongst the wider gaming community I play with the split is more or less 60/40 male to female.
How's it with the rest of you?
Brooks it's a pretty cheap shot to counter someone's argument by reducing it to extremes. If I'm saying that American gamers tend towards the right in thier views, it's not the same thing as saying that they're all a bunch of Nazi loving Klu Klux Klanners. But I've gone to lots of conventions in my time and met and judged lots of gamers and while I will say that things have improved since the 80's, Gaming does seem to have a lot of incidents where local groups still cling to a "boys club" school of thought. And since Games Workshop was mentioned, I'd like to mention that Games Workshop is one of the two big gaming stores in Manhattan which is where I go to shop, the other being Compleat Strategist. The latter store gets a small amount of female visitation, the GW store practically none. I will say that compared to the American population at large, the gamer tends to be further to the right than most. (Yes, there are "pinko liberal" exceptions to the rule, but that varies strongly by region. :)
Antipope is evaluating the article secondhand as I'm pretty sure he didn't go out to the scene and did his own research. It's little more than cheap armchair criticism coupled with the tribal defensiveness fans get when their "precious" is criticized.
I think you may have misunderstood what I was saying. At no point was I addressing you or trying to counter any arguments. All I said was that, it seems to me, Antipope is not upset because there are conservative, liberal, extremists, or generally nice people playing 40K. He's saying that he's upset because the journalist writing the K Magazine article was going into it with her own preconceived notions and that she then "cherry picked" quotes and facts to support that preconceived notion. I'm saying that this is bad journalism and I think that's what has upset Antipope.
As far as whether this evaluation was secondhand or not, I have no idea. I clearly stated that I wasn't there and was merely going off what he reported. However, he was obviously there when at least the photographer was (he appeared in pictures that accompanied the article) and, from what he says, he directly talked to the people that were interviewed. At least in my mind, that lends him at least as much credence as the reporter who wrote the magazine article.
Again, I'm not arguing about what type of people play 40K, I'm merely saying that, from the information I have at hand, the Greek journalist that wrote this article was engaging in opinion, not reporting.
And here in the UK, it is my experience that gamer population is anything but right of centre.
While both warhammer and 40k's settings are brutal autocratic and superstitious states, they are also crumbling, broken and doomed to failure, filed with gallows humour ("What do you mean we just bombarded the wrong planet into the stone age" "Sorry sir, it looks as though the scribe copied the message wrong.") No one I have meet, past the age of about 16 has ever consider this world to be something aspire too.
My experience is almost exclusively with the US for gaming (though I've been a lot of places, I've never gamed in another country).
I do agree with you on the gallows humor and I think she fails to recognize the presence of such in the setting. She also fails to see that gamers have the ability to tell the difference between a fictional world and the real world.
There are problems and common themes in the gaming community, that article did not address any of them in a realistic or intelligent fashion though.
Warhammer 40k players may not idolize the world as something to aim for, but they do seem to very much idolize the characters from that world that they like and the methods they use. I see it very much as the same kind of thing when people sympathise with the main character in "Falling Down.", the appeal of violence in dealing with the restrictions of civilisation.
That's not something I've experienced personally. I have friends who enjoy 40K fiction and enjoy the characters, but not in a way that "idolizes" them, and certainly does not prize their methods.
Zombieneighbours' description of the attitude toward the 40K universe falls much more in line with my experience on the East Coast of the U.S. (although his other description of how GW works within the gamer world in the UK sounds like a bizarro alternate universe to me--GW and Warhammer is very fringe and very not considered to be part of the "normal" gamer community. Hell, I tend to think of wargamers as separate entities from gamers, and I think of myself as a gamer who also likes wargames, but as two distinct hobbies with only some obvious common links).
FallofCamelot, I think the gender split in my part of the U.S. sounds the same as what you say of the UK... I one of very, very few girls in the local 40K community when I was part of it (you could count us on one hand, even if a few fingers had been cut off), but we have a more or less even split of male-female RPGers.
I think Brooks' evaluation of the journalist's bias is accurate. There are some valid concerns in there, but in an enormously slanted light (which unfortunately undermines any useful point she could have made).
As an aside, funny thing is, not reading Greek, the article looks like a White Dwarf battle report or something with all the pictures.
Well, it could be worse. In my country, we had a newspaper f@!!up a few years ago. A young man, 17 years old if I remember correctly, was found murdered. The journalists found that his main hobby was Vampire live action and rpgs. They focused on this to the exclusion of all else, even going so far as to publish a photo of him dressed up in a Dracula outfit as the front page of more than one newspaper. Not to mention they photoshopped this to make him look more evil and menacing. They published tons of articles about the danger of rpgs by a known paranoid delusional drama psychologist devoted to a crusade against rpgs... But they did not publish this woman's name because she claimed to have had death threats.
After three weeks of this character assassination of the young murder victim and his hobby, the police published their conclusions: he had gotten mixed up with criminal elements, and one of those murdered him, IIRC over a debt, and rpgs had not even the slightest relevance to what had happened.
The journalists never even asked forgiveness for their behaviour.
You wouldn't want this woman generalizing any group you belong to by the off-hand comments of a single member, nor should any of us expect that it is right to do so.
Well, I'll let xkcd explain.(Link)
Not about Nazis, but about humans do many things:
You see a generic person (not belonging to any group you are prejudiced against) do something bad, you think of him as bad. You see a person belonging to one of the group you're prejudiced against, you attribute it to the group and say everyone from the group is like that.
Everyone does so. Many don't overdo it, or catch themselves doing it and rethink their stance, but others never go that far.
Yet, those of us who were playing tabletop games in the 'eighties remember only too well how easy it was to find ourselves ostracized by playing "Satan's Game."
Those of you playing it in the eighties in the US, mostly. At least, I don't think it ever was much of an issue here. Of course, that might be worse, since most people have no idea what RPGs even are, or that they exist. They might think of psychodrama or kinky stuff, but not people sitting around a table pretending to be wizards.
Anyone read this and think "this sounds like a Chick Tract?"
I have to say Zombieneighbours is spot on about the gaming community in the UK. It's generally pretty liberal and GW is all pervasive.
That said GW gaming is almost exclusively male (or at least it was 5 years ago when I was really into it.) At the grand tournaments I have played female wargamers are noticable by their absence.
With RPG's it's a completely different story. I would say amongst the wider gaming community I play with the split is more or less 60/40 male to female.
How's it with the rest of you?
Certainly, there is a significant male bias in WFB & 40k players. I suspect that reflects cultural bias, more than anything. I know female wargamer, a fair few actually, and not a few GW staff. Five or six years ago years back, I was still going to gobstyks in lincoln (part of the GCN) and they had several female war gamers, though more female roleplayers.
I think generally the lack of female players is something that GW would like to counter. After all, it increases their audience.
Warhammer 40k players may not idolize the world as something to aim for, but they do seem to very much idolize the characters from that world that they like and the methods they use. I see it very much as the same kind of thing when people sympathise with the main character in "Falling Down.", the appeal of violence in dealing with the restrictions of civilisation.That's not something I've experienced personally. I have friends who enjoy 40K fiction and enjoy the characters, but not in a way that "idolizes" them, and certainly does not prize their methods.
Zombieneighbours' description of the attitude toward the 40K universe falls much more in line with my experience on the East Coast of the U.S. (although his other description of how GW works within the gamer world in the UK sounds like a bizarro alternate universe to me--GW and Warhammer is very fringe and very not considered to be part of the "normal" gamer community. Hell, I tend to think of wargamers as separate entities from gamers, and I think of myself as a gamer who also likes wargames, but as two distinct hobbies with only some obvious common links).
FallofCamelot, I think the gender split in my part of the U.S. sounds the same as what you say of the UK... I one of very, very few girls in the local 40K community when I was part of it (you could count us on one hand, even if a few fingers had been cut off), but we have a more or less even split of male-female RPGers.
I think Brooks' evaluation of the journalist's bias is accurate. There are some valid concerns in there, but in an enormously slanted light (which unfortunately undermines any useful point she could have made).
As an aside, funny thing is, not reading Greek, the article looks like a White Dwarf battle report or something with all the pictures.
Certainly seperate hobbies. But if you find an organised club of gamers here in the UK, it is an odds on bet that the club is one of two things, A university roleplaying soc, or a current or former member of the Games Club Network, which is a Wargaming club network set up by Games Workshop.
We don't really have a culture of FLGS in the same way they seem to exist in the states. Sure we have travelling man, and orcs nest and a plethera of small comic and games stores, but they rarely have play space, they rarely do much to support the hobbies and really are not the best place to go for information on local gaming. By comparison, GWs are everywhere, and even if the staff arn't roleplayers, there is likely to be someone there on veterans night, who can point you in the right direction.
Then there is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. This is the one common theme through every gaming group I have ever played in. Here in the UK, we kept the dream alive form first edition, through the dark times, right upto the end of second edition. Only my current group doesn't really play it. But there are other people whom I play with still do.
Almost any mid to large sized gaming club seems to have at least one 40k RPG game going on at any one time.
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40k and Warhammer are massive over here. They are bigger than any other tabletop gaming company over here by a country mile. Every high street has a Games Workshop on it and every gamer knows at least one person who has worked at a store.
It's safe to say that the only large scale convention in the UK is GW's Games Day and that is entirely devoted to GW or GW related product. I couldn't tell you how many people attend games day but seeing as they hold it at the NEC in Birmingham (the UK's largest convention centre) I would safely say 5,000+, probably more. For sheer scale it's the UK's GENCON only not as diverse.
Actually I would contend that the reason we don't have an American style FLGS culture is down partially to the success of GW. It's hard to compete with such a megalithic company and as a result most FLGS don't last long. It may be that my experience is unusual but I doubt it.
Well, this seems to have derailed. I really don't think it's constructive to debate which side of the pond has moral panic worse, or what years it hit one country versus what years it was going on in another country. No amount of bandying over whether it is human nature to distort and lie to spread panic helps, either, since we all know people do that.
I will reiterate my previous point one more time, as concisely as I can. I said earlier that we share everything crucial about our hobby with 40K players.
That includes acceptance or lack thereof. Tolerance or lack thereof. Understanding or lack thereof.
Do you really think the author of that article knows the difference between a game of 40K and a game of Pathfinder? Or of D&D? Do you think she'd care to see a difference?
And I don't care that you could debate the difference until you're blue in the face. Any of us could.
What I'm saying is that this author could not. And would not care to. And you either hang together with your geek brothers, or you hang separately.
Good stuff..
Our game evolved from the war game community, every gamer I currently game with played 40k.
What has annoyed me in this thread is that we have one person looking down on war gamers as a seperate and lesser species and another poster using racist stereotypes of eastern Europeans.
I have never encountered the far right at a GW store it would be on the list of bad behaviour that would get you ejected from the store. There are behaviour codes for painting and gaming, in GW stores swearing threatening or abusive behaviour will get you thrown out.
We are playing a WHF Campaign at one of my friends house. About 25% of those competing are female. I also play 40k. I love the fluff, but it is a world I would not want to live in. I do think that the journalist is showing the same bias as those who where involved in the D&D witchhunts in the eighties. A friend of mine's books were burned by his father. This is the type of journalism that led to book burnings, and that is unacceptable. I would hope that most of you out there would agree. By the way, I am definitely not right wing.
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I guess it's the 1980s again in Greece. Check it out.
The 'funny thing' is if I read that very biased article (with great game shots mind you) and I was a teen who had never played a table top game before I would definitely ask for this game and hope for it to be under the Chritmas tree, I bet the author of the original article will get some Greek teens interested in gaming.