Hello yall. Did not really know where to put this one, but this seems to be the most appropriate place. As part of my Gaming Studies and Cultural Analysis minor i had the opportunity of writing about Warhammer Fantasy as a transmedial gaming platform, so i did. After i have written it, i started wondering what the lizards here think about it, so be sure to let me know what you think about it. It has to be handed in in around 6 hours from now, so if you are quick, i might be able to even use some of your suggestions . If i have a change of mind on a passage, i will update them here as well. Yes, it is pretty long, around 2000 words, those not interested, i do not blame you . The appendix is a 2400 P army list, this should be a well known concept for the people around here, so i have not added it. Warhammer Fantasy: Emergent narratives in tabletop war-games. Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles (Warhammer Fantasy) is a tabletop war game written and published by Games Workshop played with physical models by two or more players on tables constructed for this purpose. There are two main forms of Warhammer, Warhammer Fantasy, which has a fantasy setting, and Warhammer 40K, which has a science fiction setting. Both games play out in the same universe, and there is some overlap between the universes, but they are mostly separate entities. Both have similar rule systems, but due to the differences in armament of the models the games tend to play out quite differently. This paper will be mostly on exploring the fantasy setting, it will mention the science-fiction setting when relevant. Players in Warhammer Fantasy command armies of fantasy races such as Orks on game boards. To see what happens in a game, the players declare actions and roll dice to find out the results of the actions of models on the table. A unit of Skeleton Archers might fire their bows at enemy Goblin Spider-riders, a player would declare this in the relevant phase and the result of the shots would be determined with the rolling of dice. Any casualties would be taken off the board, presumed dead. Other attributes that support the players during the game are measuring tapes, templates (to simulate the effects of artillery and spells) and the rulebooks. To keep the game balanced and fair, players in both systems first decide on a point value before a match. Regular Saturday night games which would take around three hours to complete would be 1500-2400 point games, while 2400 point games are the tournament standard for Warhammer Fantasy games. All models you can include in your force have a specific point value, the stronger a model, the more expensive it is in points. The point values for all the individual units should ad up to the set point value of the game at the start of the first game turn. Players physically build their own armies, models are bought from sprues and must first be assembled and painted before use. This makes Warhammer Fantasy more then just a game to play. Some participants do not play the game at all and focus on painting or even just collecting the models. It is most accurate to describe Warhammer Fantasy as a hobby, there are no Warhammer players who just play or just collect. All players have had at least some experience with all the three main aspects of the hobby, those being collecting, gaming and modeling. Within this broad categorization you have certain sub-classes of which the most numerous are tournament players, casual players and casual collectors. What sort of a hobbyist you are determines what sort of purchases you make in the hobby. Painters will mostly buy paint and aesthetically pleasing or aesthetically challenging models, while tournament players will buy models that have strong or other wisely competitive rules associated with them. Collectors are the most varied in how they interact with the hobby, but they often collect models from a certain army or models with a certain theme to them. Warhammer Fantasy lends itself only to avid and active fans. The barrier of entry is high, the cost of a regular tournament army is around 1200 euro's, notwithstanding the expenses and time needed for painting. It is not only a high barrier of entry, to keep a competitive force up to date hobbyist must buy new models to be able to keep playing at a high level. The same is true for painters and collectors, to remain active in the hobby, one must buy new models and paint. So, any player that is playing Warhammer will be very enthusiastic about their hobby, else it would not be worth the investment required to participate in it. Due to the enthusiasm of fans a lot of para-texts are written on the topic of Warhammer Fantasy by the players themselves. This is what makes the Warhammer Fantasy hobby as transmedial as it is. It has a relatively small playerbase when compared to the amount of money that circulates in the system. There are a lot of videogames based on the Warhammer lore, only in 2015 3 major titles based on the Warhammer universe released on pc, these being: ''Mordheim, city of the Damned'', ''Blood Bowl 2'' and ''Warhammer, the End Times: Vermintide''. These are games in different genres, there are Warhammer RTS's, RPG's and even Warhammer sports games. There are also many books written on Warhammer, both on the lore and on the game itself. A lot of Youtube channels are also dedicated to Warhammer, making mostly battle reports and lore videos. There have also been some full feature animations made using lore from the Warhammer universe. There are many T-shirts, outfits, cosplays and even birthday cakes based on the Warhammer universe. Warhammer is thus truly a transmedial entity, and due to the enthusiasm of fans, a lot of the story-writing is conducted by fans themselves to then be distributed freely to other fans. ''Through play, Star Wars toys owners could explore and create great expanses of the text’s storyworld, thereby making it more accountable to and reflective of their own interests, and ensuring that this storyworld would always be greater than the sum of the six Star Wars films. To play with or in a storyworld is to gain more ownership of it, to personalize it, and to move it out of the space of the spectacle and render it a malleable entity. Toys will thus always pry open storyworlds, and, especially when they enjoy huge popularity within children’s popular culture, they will offer multiple opportunities for community engagement, not just individual personalization. That said, inhabiting a storyworld is not just a child’s game. Rather, multiple forms and styles of media-related games exist, addressing a wide range of audiences (Quote from: Gray, ''In the World, Just of Screen: Toys and Games'', p. 187). '' This quote from Gray is quite fitting for the way Warhammer players experience their hobby. Next to the origin story of Warhammer Fantasy that shapes the main characters there is the stories that players themselves tell with their models and the experiences they have had in battles and other scenario's. This is, as the quote mentions, an inherently social activity, games are always played with at least two people. The community is always active in not just creating new stories, but also in finding new opportunities to tell stories in a different way. Players come together in larger groups to have a larger pool of models to tell their stories with, and they craft their own new stories with the new options available to them. An example of this is a Warhammer 40K scenario that pitched the Space Marines (humans) and the Orks against each other on a planet with a moon orbiting it. This scenario had to be played on two seperate tables, both the ''moon'' table and the ''planet'' table. This made players interact differently then normal with their models. The sum of the aspects in the Warhammer hobby becomes greater then it's parts because of the way players feel about their models, and how they tell new stories based on the origin story from game experiences. These extra texts, the scenario's, are both sold by Games Workshop, written by players themselves and shared via online sources. They are varied in their appearance, sometimes they only change the rules slightly, they might just ad the rules for night-fighting which is quite easy to simulate. They also might feel like another game entirely, outlining in great detail which armies both sides field and adding and ignoring a lot of rules. An example of this would be the canonically accurate recreation of a siege. When playing a game of Warhammer, it also required to write your own supportive texts. Every game of Warhammer requires the players to write an armylist specifying every model in the army, giving details about the possible magical weapons, rules and other factors it might be ''armed'' with. Appendix A has an example of an armylist. One could see an armylist as a menu from which a meal is chosen from a restaurant. Players have certain resources to build their army with, the point limit, and they pick and choose their army based on what they think is strong, what works well together, which models then own and what they think is fun to play with. Other considerations in list-building can be the theme of the army the player wants to build. Sometimes, players want to reenact certain famous battles that have happened in the Warhammer Fantasy lore. They will try to include units of warriors that were present at the time of the battle, and thus they will tell their own story in the construction of the list. This practice of choosing units that are thematic for the current engagement does not limit itself to reenacting battles told by the Warhammer Fantasy lore. Players often come up with their own stories or classical battles, writing their own scenario's and rules for certain types of engagements. In this way, armylists are the basis and the preparation of another larger story that is not yet told. They are a blend of rules and story in a fixed format that can also be changed if both players desire it. These armylists are not for purely individual use, on forums dedicated to the hobby such lists are discussed in great detail on their thematic complexity and consistency, how fun they are to play and what their competitive strength is. ''Emergent narratives are not pre-structured or pre-programmed, taking shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself. Game worlds, ultimately, are not real worlds, even those as densely developed as Shenmue or as geographically expansive as Everquest. Will Wright frequently describes The Sims as a sandbox or dollhouse game, suggesting that it should be understood as a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories. Yet, unlike Microsoft Word, the game doesn't open on a blank screen. Most players come away from spending time with The Sims with some degree of narrative satisfaction. Wright has created a world ripe with narrative possibilities, where each design decision has been made with an eye towards increasing the prospects of interpersonal romance or conflict. (Quote from: Jenkins, ''Game Design as Narrative Architecture'', p. 10). '' Another aspect of the nature of the Warhammer hobby is how emergent the play aspect of the hobby can be. As mentioned earlier, players tend to often write their own story in the form of scenario's. This writing of fans is not just limited to the period before the game, rules are sometimes changed or adapted during play. This gives Warhammer battles, especially battles which are based on fan-written scenario's, emergent narratives. Much akin to the Dungeons and Dragons experience, players fudge rules and interpret rules in such a way that is fitting and fun for the game they are playing in. The fact that the battles take place in an evocative space helps with this aspect. Even players new to the hobby can intrinsically understand the logic behind the Warhammer universe, as it is clearly based on the fantasy setting invented by Tolkien. This ads to the emergent factor of the game. A lowly Goblin champion killing an Aspiring Champion of Chaos is fuel for new stories to be added in the emergent factor of the game as it unfolds. There are some aspects of the Warhammer hobby that are less emergent, as there are some clearly written rules that define every battle of Warhammer. They are for example always battles, conflict on the tabletop is always dealt with using violence, some very few games with limited diplomatic possibilities are the only exception to this rule. Warhammer Fantasyis thus emergent due to the large amount of rule-bending and self-writing players in the hobby tend to employ. The ruleset can be viewed as a moldable tool-set of a certain rule logic. The evocative space and the fantasy setting helps constructing this emergent gameplay. The gameplay is not wholly emergent due to certain limitations in the concept of every game being a battle. In this piece, the Warhammer hobby has been outlined and defined. It's transmedial nature was established using examples of the hobby's influence and scope. It then explained how only avid fans can be hobbyists in the scene, due to the high barrier of entry. This high barrier of entry has led to many para-texts being written by fans themselves, their enthusiasm and activity has led to a high percentage of Warhammer lore being written by fans themselves. The barrier of entry is lowered by the usage of the evocative space of the fantasy setting, players can easily start writing their own stories in the space. This becomes even more apparent when players create experiences of emergent gameplay with their own written pieces, the fact that evocative spaces are used to tell the Warhammer origin story is a contributing factor to this. Warhammer Fantasy is one of the few games that has the potential to be experienced as something akin to an emergent narrative in the definition of Jenkins. The game is only hamstrung by the fact that it does mostly simulate battles, peaceful solutions are not often an option in games of Warhammer due to the nature of the rules. The hobby of Warhammer Fantasy has great potential for hobbyists in both a gameplay and a creative aspect for all participants, and due to it's popularity, it is a truly transmedial game.
Interesting reading, I'll have to finish it after my exam later today, but I really like the approach you have to this report. It's pretty fun to see an actual thesis on Warhammer, well an analysis. Something you spend lots of your free time with, written in such a contest is for me quite exciting.
Thanks, am interested to see what people here think. It is a somewhat deeper approach on the hobby then we normally take, i actually think that people will dissagree on quite a few points on here. Would not call it a thesis, it is just an essay really with the lack of references (we were, stupidly, only allowed to use 2-3 long quotations), but i think i still got over some points.
You defiantly did It's interesting to think about how the narratives of the universe is expanded by each game and each fans on interpretation of it. Just look through this page for the variation of written material, from fans to fans, based upon the universe. That's not even taking into account, what you write, how that every battle and every scenario lends itself to a new story being formed. Just like in DnD, as you also mention
Yeah, it is all really expansive when you start thinking about it, Warhammer in that definition has a lot more options then a videogame. Videogames are always limited by the code, while Warhammer is only limited by your own imagination and the fact that you are fighting a battle XD
Finally got my note back for this one, a 7.5! Pretty ok in my opinion, this comes down to a B in most other systems.
I once had a course that was being cut, so our run was the last. This meant that the final exam was basically just passed failed, but with grades. Resulting in a 3 hour written exam, having contend I solved in 15 min and got an A for this. Which pretty much everyone got, by the way
Damn, seems you were quite lucky there, when you can put some A's on your list here it can really put you ahead in recommendations/studying abroad etc. That effect might have been a bit less when everybody got an A though
As I said it pretty much meant that it functioned as a failed/passed test. Still count to the average I suppose, but it was kind of a cheat