Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Quo vadis hobby

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Pledge:  Still plugging away at the SCC Regiments of Renown.  I’ve nearly finished The Avenging Knights of the Cleansing Flame.  Final detailing on them tomorrow then an entry for the project.  Then I’ll be over the 365 completed models for the year so I’ll give myself a treat and paint a character model.  Maybe the Green Knight.  Probably the finest hand sculpted model that GW ever made.

Where is this (hobby) all going?  What’s the end goal? Where does the journey lead? What are we aiming for? Will be in some years time all be just painting virtual 3D models in the small sleepingpods of mega cities? Will be still have larger gaming conventions and meetings?

Answer:  Goodness me – you like setting us a challenge don’t you.  The whole future of the hobby and our place in it, discuss 😀  Thank you for the challenge.  I’m game.  Let’s try breaking things down a bit:

Firstly.  Stop.  It is easy to feel overwhelmed.  Finding some boundaries might be helpful.  Where are the edges of your hobby?  Can you find them and help yourself to define what is in, and what is therefore out and not requiring your focus.  Try starting with what you definitely don’t do.  We game in 3 main areas – Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Historical.  Do not do one or two of those?  Then within each there are identifiable categories, again find things you don’t do.  So if you are a Sci-Fi gamer does that include; Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr Who, Babylon 5, Dune, 40k, Terminator, Predator, Battlestar Galactica, Mars Attacks, War of the Worlds, etc.

By eliminating areas of non-interest you can more easily find some areas of focus.  These can change over time and that is also okay.  I had a huge Star Wars collection from the Grenadier/WEG era but AMG games didn’t grab me and I ended up selling all of the old miniatures.  It is fine to move on.  So look through your existing collection and Marie Kondo the shit out of it.  Not bringing joy – move it on.  It will bring joy to someone else so why are you being selfish and denying them their joy when it no longer sparks joy for you?

Where is this all going?  The past is the best guide to the future any of us will ever get.  Yes, the hobby is bigger and has more games and points of focus than it did five or ten years ago.  Did we focus on all of those games and miniatures then? No we did not.  How could we?  There were already more games than could be played and more miniatures than could be owned.  The hobby has always been fractured and we allow ourselves to follow the things which attract and sustain our attention.  I’ve never been interested in naval or aviation wargames.  Instantly I can rule out whole swathes of hobby content that some people spend their entire hobby time and budgets on.  I do wargame in the three main topic areas, Historical, Sci-Fi and Fantasy but there are whole areas I don’t get involved with.  I cut back to just 2 different scales across my whole collection, 2mm and 28mm.  I found that very helpful for my focus.  That lets me play two main types of game; whole army command at the corps level (2mm) and large battle down to individual skirmish games (28mm).  For me that’s got everything covered.  I don’t want anything else.

What’s the end goal? Where does the journey lead? What are we aiming for?

We all follow our own path.  Hobby is personal.  Having looked into what I was actually interested in and then narrowed the area of focus a bit (and sold off plenty of the extra stuff) I’m now happy to follow where the hobby butterflies lead me within those boundaries.  I embrace shiny syndrome because I enjoy the ride.  Don’t let anyone else tell you what you have to follow.  Don’t be like Ron Weasley.  You can follow the butterflies.

I looked forward to retiring my entire working life because I knew I’d get time to enjoy my hobby more and gosh darn it I’m going to do that, because otherwise what the hell was the 30 years a wage slave for otherwise?

So if you like Sand (not Dune) then buy it.  The rules are £21.50 + P&P.  Not expensive, even for a modest hobby budget.  If you read them and don’t like them, great.  No need to do anything else.  Put it on the shelf or sell it and move on.

Will be in some years time all be just painting virtual 3D models in the small sleepingpods of mega cities?

No.

Will be still have larger gaming conventions and meetings?

Yes.  People are social animals.