Why Wargamers Game

[Guy Farrish]

https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/wss_gws/gws-2020-personality-and-motivations/

The above link takes you to the results of the WSS Great Wargames Survey 2020 extra questions on the personality of wargamers.

Apparently over 10,000 of us responded and the results are included in an academic journal article (behind a paywall -$36 if you don’t have access). The authors also wrote the short article published above for general consumption, which probably raises as many questions as hackles.

I suddenly find myself once again wondering about the accuracy and usefulness of social science models of human personality. Not that negatively obviously, as I wouldn’t want to be scoring too low on the ‘Openness’ scale.

What does it tell us about wargamers motivations for gaming? I suspect, in my Disagreeable, Close Minded way that the answer is stuff all. Or at least nothing that isn’t already blindingly obvious without having to ask 10,000 of us to fill in a questionnaire (Did 10,000 wargamers really complete a psychological survey in addition to the GWS survey itself? I did, so why am I sceptical that another 9,999 would bother?).

In the conclusion the authors note: ‘Yet, the motivation questionnaire pertained to only gaming but not to other important elements of the wargaming activity such as collecting or painting miniatures‘. I cannot remember how clear this was made in the questionnaire at the time but it does rather miss out a huge chunk of wargaming as I see it and I suspect many others do as well.

If you filled in this part of the 2020 GWS, or if you just want to check out the motivation and psychological profiles of the people you encounter in the hobby so you can avoid them, why not click the link and see. (all info is anonymised).

I’d be interested to hear what people think.

[willz]

I logged on to do the survey but by the fifth question I had decided that the questions were of the style we are doing a survey but we want these answers.  So working on my fall back mode of you put rubbish in a computer you get rubbish out, my feeling was that the survey was intellectually above my pay grade.  All I know about why I wargame is because I enjoy it, get great pleasure out of painting my toys and I pushes my soldiers across my table if some form of delusion that I understand military tactics.

[Tony Hughes]

If people were as simple as those descriptions infer then we’d have stopped doing this kind of research many, many years ago. These guys try to pretend they are scientifically analysing when, in truth, they are fixing the results with questions that are ‘loaded’ to fit some aspect of their preferred model. Classic misuse of the methodology, been going on for years but still in wide usage.

 

[Mike Headden]

My first thoughts …

Lies, damned lies and statistics!

… and I have been involved in the production of more than enough statistics in my working life to know whereof I speak 🙂

 

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Mr. Average]

You can’t dissect the animal without killing it. I question the need for this research anyway, and don’t think it tells us anything about anything. Their conclusion that “different people like gaming for different reasons” seems like it didn’t bear any discovering.

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Hmmm. As a social scientist, let me give my professional opinion that this is pretty bad research. This is really a marketing survey and there’s certainly not much that can be said about wargamers’ motivations from it. That would probably require a much better constructed survey AND accompanying qualitative research that goes well beyond “hanging out with three or four guys at the local Bamberg gaming club”.

The problem here isn’t “social scientific models”: the problem is the guys are doing bad social science.

To begin with, large opportunistic surveys like this can be very much garbage in, garbage out. When I filled it out, I noticed many moments when what I do wasn’t provided for, so I just grabbed whatever to get through the survey.

Frankly? They’d get better answers from ethnography, coupled with a survey like this. This survey, again, was designed by someone who was a marketeer at heart, whatever their academic training.

What raised the most flags for me was this: there is no way their survey could accurately assess “emotional stability”. “Emotional stability” isn’t even a permanent characteristic: it depends a lot on circumstances. Also? Asking people to self-assess their personality characteristics is notoriously problematic. I’m sure we all have had experiences with some gamer who thought he was really something and certainly wasn’t.

This is very much a low effort “publish or perish” paper. It is very much “if we had ham, we could have a ham sandwich, if we had bread”.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Guy Farrish]

Thanks Thaddeus, I was hoping I’d prod you into a reply with my unwarranted comment on social sciences! My apologies.

I don’t know the authors but from what I remembered they were supposed to be piggybacking on the GWS as an easy access self selecting wargamer sample – all sorts of problems with that methodology for a start I would have thought. The GWS survey feels like a cross between a marketing survey and a genuine attempt at grabbing any data about wargaming and gamers, and fair play to that.

I thought Korner and Schulz were using the Survey to access a large number of gamers to ask what purported to be more academic questions; so not a marketing exercise in itself (unless you think satisfying a pressure to publish counts as marketing?).

I am glad to hear that OCEAN has more nuance than suggested in the write up for Karawansaray.

I have just had a quick flick through the full paper and it doesn’t fill me with any more confidence. They concentrated on the gaming aspect because they were trying to fit the data into the Trojan Player Typology which was developed as an online gamer specific scale. This claims to be a culture independent and cross genre measure but obviously was designed for a different base than tabletop wargaming with figures, although no doubt there are overlaps.

I’ll have a deeper read later.

In the meantime, for some reason the name  ‘Smarty Pants’ for those wishing to maintain or improve cognitive ability through gaming I find particularly grating. I don’t play for that reason myself but it seems a childish and pejorative name for an admirable or at worst innocuous aim. It seems an odd name to use in an academic study but then again I’m not sure how much academic kudos there is in any case for explorations of the psychological motivations of people playing with toy soldiers.

[Geof Downton]

Thaddeus Blanchette wrote:

I’m sure we all have had experiences with some gamer who thought he was really something and certainly wasn’t.

I can think of  one or two – they were definitely something…

 

What disturbs me most about this kind of ‘research’ is that people are being paid (possibly taxpayers’) money to do it.

One who puts on his armour should not boast like one who takes it off.
Ahab, King of Israel; 1 Kings 20:11

[Not Connard Sage]

If anyone is interested in reading the paper, it’s here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348602364_It_is_not_all_for_the_same_reason_Predicting_motives_in_miniature_wargaming_on_the_basis_of_personality_traits

Reads like bollox to me, but I’m not a social scientist.

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[ian pillay]

I wargame or game as I prefer because I can. I enjoy lots of aspects of the hobby because it’s my hobby. Sod the statistics, unless it stacks the dice in my favour 😉

Tally-Ho! Check out my blog at…..
http://steelcitywargaming.wordpress.com/

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Yeah, Guy, there are a hell of a lot of problems with it. This kind of self selecting marketing survey isn’t bad for catching gross quantitative details: e.g. how much of the gaming community is probably playing Warhammer 40K? But it’s utter shite for doing any of the deeper personality stuff they are on about.

And there is absolutely no such animal as a culturally independent scale. What that typically means is that they tested it on a bunch of Americans and Europeans as well as maybe some Koreans and Japanese. But as you point out very well, the “cultural divide” here probably isn’t national or ethnic but tabletop versus digital. The fact that they don’t catch that or even mention it while smugly asserting their metric’s “cross cultural applicability” indicates to me that they are probably sociologists with a marketing or “applied” background and a very dicey understanding of “culture”.

I, too, bristled at the “smarty pants” category, but considering that the original work was probably written in German, I figured it was probably just a tone deaf translation.

As for taxpayers paying for this stuff, Geof… maybe. But look, I really doubt that someone who is opportunistically piggy-backing on a survey has lots of cash to blow about. Also? That’s science in any field: a lot of dross gets done for the occasional nugget of gold. Investigating gaming is hella legitimate, given the financial impact of gaming, alone, and the fact that it is often used for political recruiting.

These guys took a swing and a miss, but that’s science. At the very least they provided a good object lesson for some future scientist to point to as what NOT to do.

Finally, you often have to show proof of concept work before you’re even allowed to ask for money. This could be simply something they can wave around while saying “In spite of all the many admitted methodological issues, this shows there’s gold in dem dere hills! Give us money and we will bring you back some nuggets.”

 

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Nathaniel Weber]

This does look like a poorly done survey with vague, squishy terminology that comes to a non-conclusion.

[John D Salt]

I found the categories of motivation in the Trojan Player Typology quite interesting, and the findings on how they seemed to match personality traits believable. Possibly this is because I saw it as confirming my personal prejudice that competition gamers are disagreeable, but that’s confirmation bias for you (“Now I’ve heard of confirmation bias, I see it everywhere!”) It also confirms the under-representation of women in the hobby, which the hobby has only recently begun to worry about. And it was good to see the stereotype of wargamers as spotty teenage nerds refuted. A shame they didn’t ask questions on personal hygeine.

I’ve seen a depressing number of poorly-designed questionnaires in my time, and sent some back unanswered with a covering note telling the researchers that they were not asking the right questions, but from what I recall of the WSS survey, it was by no means as bad as those. If not designed by brilliant test battery designers, it was at least designed by wargamers, so not as tin-eared as a lot of academic research questionnaires. And at least they got a really decent sample size; I get depressed by papers having to analyse samples with n=20 or less.

Of course all social science surveys end up reporting that “some do, some don’t”, but I reckon a better description of the different ways different types of player enjoy games could be very useful to game designers. I suspect that the “smarty-pants” category fails to quite cover the motivation I and lots of my historical wargamer pals have, of studying military history, strategy and tactics through simulation games, which is a different thing from improving your cognitive abilities, and I further suspect that this motivation is more common among board gamers than figure gamers (or MWG players, as I have never before heard them called), and more common among figure gamers than computer gamers. But I have absolutely no data beyond personal observation to back that up.

At least the authors have managed to say more about wargamers’ motivation for wargaming than “It’s supposed to be FUN!”, which one repeatedly sees presented as if it were some great intellectual insight by wargamers who cannot abide the idea that their games might include any element of anything so blatantly boffinish as simulation.

All the best,

John.

[Not Connard Sage]

“Simulation”, it’s a slippery word. No-one ever quite manages to define it.

Here’s a simulation: Waterloo 1815. Roll a D6, on an even the Allies win, on an odd the French lose. Historically accurate or what? Works for any battle, just change the names. You could even add a bit of variation and use average dice, the result would be the same.

…and wargaming’s one of my hobbies. It’s supposed to be bleedin’ fun. Like other hobbies I have/had, it’s a good excuse to meet up with like minded people, bugger about, have a laugh and a few pints, and go home happy. I don’t expect to be Valentino Rossi if I take the bike out, Date Masamune practising iaido, Jimi Hendrix playing guitar,or ****ing Napoleon playing wargames. If I gain a bit of insight while I’m doing it that’s great, but it’s not why I’m doing it. If I happen to fall over a bit of *gasp* ‘simulation’, bonus!

 

 

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Guy Farrish]

I was hoping to avoid the whole ‘fun’ canard.

Leaving aside professional wargaming which is a paid activity, we can probably accept that any wargamer does it for ‘fun’.

How one derives that  ‘enjoyment, amusement or light hearted pleasure’ (Oxford Dictionaries definition) from a wargame however will be  personal.

The derivation of enjoyment in a wargame is not confined to a particular form. Some will derive fun from simple fast games with beautiful toy soldiers. Some will enjoy very intricate rules which track every round across the miniature tabletop. Some will believe the latter gives an accurate simulation of combat. Others may seek to investigate organisational interaction through Command Post games. All these and many other types of game can deliver ‘fun’ to the people who enjoy them while being  massive turn off to those whose idea of fun is different.

Perhaps some use may come of studies into the motivation of wargamers if they allow us to accept that we all seek and find fun in different ways of wargaming, including ‘simulation’.

 

 

[irishserb]

Reading the free/short version of the article (I wasn’t willing to wade through the formality of long version), I came away with the only conclusion being, “different individuals have different motivations for playing miniature wargames”.  If we assume that the CANOE/OCEAN theory is valid, then unfortunately, the survey (probably) doesn’t tell us anything that we “didn’t already know”, assuming that we had given the question any thought.

I think that the survey may suffer from four basic flaws:

First, qualifying the term “Gaming”.  When a “gamer” says “gaming”, to me that immediately includes the entire scope of hobby activities.  Researching, sculpting/casting/buying/figs, rules writing, building terrain and associated models or gaming aids/tools, etc., fall within the term “gaming” in my intent and experience.  I don’t remember the survey qualifying the limits of the term, maybe it did, but given the discussion in the output article, I question if the respondants understood the intended scope of the term.  I don’t remember my understanding at the time of the survey.

Second, the size/scope of the battery of questions strikes me as being to small, thus resulting in each question being forced to impact to broad a range of issues associated with the intention of the survey.  I would expect the process to be more granular.

Third, the validity of the survey (and its conclusions) depends on unbiased response.  I suspect that our answers are prejudiced by our biases, and in some cases may purposefully be corrupted by those who might have contempt for the survey, or find some humor in skewing the results.

Last, I question the biases of the surveyor.  For example, the use of the term “smarty-pants” strikes me as being out of place, and while maybe intended to simply be humorous, it could be perceived as demeaning by some, and may suggest potential bias on the part of the those making conclusions based on the data.  Other potential biases may be less visible to me.

Given all of that, it strikes me this portion of  the survey is really a sort of missed opportunity.  I fund the motivations, interests, behaviors of gamers to be interesting, and wonder what draws us to gaming and to those parts of the hobby that we individually most favor.  I wonder why I have my preferences, and why others have theirs.  It might be intersting to see if points gamers generally have different personality traits than scenario gamers,  if skirmishers, sci-fi, napoleonic, and WWII all have tendancies pecular to their interests.

Maybe the intent of those who considerd the data was met, but as a gamer, their presentation and conclusion leaves me feeling no better informed, than before I read it.

[Not Connard Sage]

Guy Farrish wrote:

I was hoping to avoid the whole ‘fun’ canard.<noscript></noscript> .

ISWYDT 🙂

I’m a live and let live kind of bloke usually, but when anyone presumes to tell me I’m having fun in a way that doesn’t meet their perceptions of fun my hackles begin to rise. So they can continue to have their fun in their way and leave me to get on with having fun my way, as long as they leave out the passive aggressive insults.

If they can’t do that, I can give as good as I get. I’m looking at you UshCha, you prat.

 

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[McKinstry]

I think I may have filled out that portion of the survey but as with others, find the results both vague and a bit silly in trying to lump motivations/personalities into a few very broad categories. I am not a competition gamer and really cannot address that aspect but as to the rest, most of my gaming friends and fellow travelers over the years have been a mix of motivations that can vary over time.  Many if not most were enjoying the creation of a visually enticing activity that had the added benefit providing a social experience coupled with a degree of intellectual/imaginative stimulation. All a fairly windy way of saying many of us stay with a hobby that lets us be creative and have fun with friends.

The tree of Life is self pruning.

[Tony Hughes]

He didn’t tell you to do anything NCS, he just pointed out that one man’s fish is another man’s poisson. Fun means what is means to the individual is all he said. I don’t disagree with either of you but stop biting each other’s head off at the drop of a hat, it gets us nowhere.

 

 

 

 

[Guy Farrish]

?

Whose hat? Whose head?

[Not Connard Sage]

Guy Farrish wrote:

? Whose hat? Whose head?

 

Er. Wot?

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Guy Farrish]

Dunno mate. I think we’re on the naughty step but I’m not sure.

[Mike Headden]

For me, gaming covers not just tabletop miniatures games but board games, tabletop RPGs, computer games and probably other things I’m forgetting right now. It is research and planning and acquiring and organising and painting (though not often or fast enough 🙂 ) and storage and sometimes even playing! My reasons for playing vary, depending on who I’m playing, where I’m playing, what I’m playing and how I’m feeling.

The honest answer to most of the list questions was “all of the above.”

Any last shreds of engagement with the results vanished at “smarty-pants.”

I would like more realistic questions like

“How much have you spent on gaming in the past 12 months?”

“How much did you intend to spend?”

“How much did you tell your ‘Significant Other’ you spent?

🙂 🙂 🙂

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

I said it above, but it bears repeating: I’d bet that “smarty pants” is a poor translation of some German colloquial term.

Even so, they should’ve run the text past a native speaker, first.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Not Connard Sage]

Guy Farrish wrote:

Dunno mate. I think we’re on the naughty step but I’m not sure.<noscript></noscript>

 

Oh well, won’t be the first time 

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[deephorse]

Mike Headden wrote:

I would like more realistic questions like “How much have you spent on gaming in the past 12 months?” “How much did you intend to spend?” “How much did you tell your ‘Significant Other’ you spent? 🙂 🙂 🙂

But are they “realistic” questions?  Who on earth kept track of how much they spent on gaming over the last 12 months?  I certainly didn’t, and when I answered that question in the 2021 survey I just had to guess.  Likewise, how much do you intend to spend?  I don’t ‘intend’ to spend anything.  I don’t know what product I will come across that will tempt me.  I don’t yet know whether or not I’ll be able to go to a show.  I have no idea whether or not I will start some new period/collection.  So again, I just invented a figure for the survey, thereby helping to invalidate the results.

As for “how much did you tell your significant other…..”, absolutely nothing.  I just have to put up with the dirty looks, and the tut-tutting, when the postie delivers another parcel.  I have no control over how many cats we have (currently 12!), so why should she be able to exercise any control over my hobbies? 🙀

Play is what makes life bearable - Michael Rosen

[Not Connard Sage]

Thaddeus Blanchette wrote:

I said it above, but it bears repeating: I’d bet that “smarty pants” is a poor translation of some German colloquial term. Even so, they should’ve run the text past a native speaker, first.

 

FWIW I ran ‘smarty pants’ past my iPad’s translator. It came up with ‘Klugscheißerchen’.

 

Which is even more insulting. 🙂

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Guy Farrish]

‘Smarty Pants’: one of the six categories posited in the Trojan Player Typology by Adam S Kahn et al* which is described as comprising players who say: ‘Games make me smarter’ and ‘I play games to enhance my intellectual abilities’.

Given this was published in a journal about computer human interaction I would guess they thought it sounded ‘cool’ rather than it being a mistranslation; dealing with geeks probably doesn’t help awareness of the nuances of vernacular speech either.

To be fair to Korner and Schutz they singled out that category name with the use of inverted commas as if they were aware of its negative implications even if the originators lacked insight or used the term in a deliberately pejorative manner.

As for the ‘how much do you spend’ etc – that is in the WSS questionnaire but the additional questions from the Bamberg team were seeking to look at motivational type vice how guilty we feel! They did use data from the standard WSS questionnaire but about age, length of gaming etc rather than the obvious marketing questions.

John Salt’s somewhat tongue in cheek (?) observation about competition gamers struck a chord, but I was surprised at the correlation of ‘openness’ with competition. It wasn’t the category that struck me as most likely (from observation not statistical analysis of the questionnaire). Conscientious struck me as a more likely category but perhaps I am being unfair to all parties here. Traits in the latter category include ambition, persistence, thoroughness, control. Whereas openness includes:  originality, preference for variety, curiosity. I’m not saying competition gamers don’t have those traits but it seems to take a degree of perseverance to take part in wargames competitions.

The ‘Predictive’ part of the paper concerns me as well. I am a confirmed contrarian and I want to believe that the blandishments of advertising professionals and the now related machinations of social media manipulators are so much utter tosh. I sometimes wonder how much of this type of marketing and political massaging really makes much of a difference or is it, like economics a descriptive ‘science’ rather than a predictive one? Can surveys like this and the work done on personality types actually predict any behaviours?

Anyhow – I wasn’t biting anyone’s head off!

 

 

 

* Kahn, Adam & Shen, Cuihua & Lu, Li & Ratan, Rabindra & Coary, Sean & Hou, Jinghui (Jove) & Meng, Jingbo & Osborn, Joseph & Williams, Dmitri. (2015). The Trojan Player Typology: A cross-genre, cross-cultural, behaviorally validated scale of video game play motivations. Computers in Human Behavior. 49. 10.1016/j.chb.2015.03.018.

 

[Not Connard Sage]

Guy Farrish wrote:

Anyhow – I wasn’t biting anyone’s head off!<noscript></noscript>

Neither was I. I’m not a werewolf. 🙂

 

Obvious contrarian and passive aggressive old prat, who is taken far too seriously by some and not seriously enough by others.

[Roger Calderbank]

Guy, I wonder if the correlation of ‘openness’ with competition at least partly arises because the classification system was based on video gaming, where solo play is common. I know there are many wargamers who play mostly or entirely solo, due to force of circumstances, but a wargamer who chooses to play solo, despite having opportunities to play face to face, could be considered less ‘open’ than a wargamer who attends competitions/tournaments.

Even the somewhat odd-sounding ‘smarty-pants’ may derive from a claim that playing the game teaches you something beyond the game itself. What would you say about someone who claims that, because they are good at wargaming, they would be a good general in real life? Also, I generally play games set in periods of history in which I have an interest. The times I have played games set in periods I know little about, I’m not sure I’ve learned much about the period, beyond how the rules play and what the troops may have looked like.

Competitions/tournaments, and those who play in them, tend to get a bad press. In the decade or so before lockdown, I went to 2-4 tournaments a year and enjoyed them all. I got to play with a much wider range of people, and armies, than I ever could have done in a club or social setting. Whilst playing 3 or 4 games in a day may be more a more intense experience than some people want in their games, most players are there to have a good time. Yes, there have been some ‘difficult’ opponents, but I have encountered similar people in other gaming settings as well. I can also see that some tournaments use rules that are more likely to attract those for whom winning, rather than taking part, is the main reason they are there, but again the same would probably be true of those rules in a club setting.

Given the wide range of reasons why people play wargames, and the sort of games they play, any attempt to classify wargamers into a small set of categories seems bound to produce as many exceptions as it does useful insights.

RogerC

[Guy Farrish]

Hi Roger, I suspect that you are right and that the video player categorisation doesn’t map onto tabletop gaming as well as the authors think/hope.

I think perhaps a bit more drilling down into the categories might be useful for me, as perhaps not all the terms are being used precisely in their everyday usage.

I take your point about competition games/gamers and I wasn’t trying to draw that kind of negative stereotype – I think of the traits I selected from the list as quite admirable.  I have, as you know, taken part in competition games myself (not many and I am not sure how typical Impetus tournaments are/were) and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I enjoyed meeting the people there and perhaps that experience does play into the openness category quite well.

Your last point ties in perfectly with my doubts about the predictive nature of the study: can one really predict the type of game and experience of a gamer from a Myers Briggs type allotment of personality type? Far too much of this type of characterisation harks back to Jungian types, the validity of which I am deeply suspicious. I would think that that although there may be ‘types’ attracted to wargaming, those types may be more varied and less fixed than this study is trying to show.

Nice to hear from you again Roger, hope you are well.

Best wishes

Guy

[Mike Headden]

deephorse wrote:

Mike Headden wrote:

I would like more realistic questions like “How much have you spent on gaming in the past 12 months?” “How much did you intend to spend?” “How much did you tell your ‘Significant Other’ you spent?

But are they “realistic” questions?

Clearly not enough smileys used to indicate that was a joke. I will try harder in future!

On the who knows how much they spent angle. I keep a spreadsheet of all purchases, primarily, to avoid buying things I’ve forgotten I already have! I can also see how much I have spent in a period and how much prices have risen.

On the mapping of computer archetypes to tabletop gaming, I’m a gamer – board games, computer games, RPGs or tabletop minatures it’s all gaming.

“You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me,
The pleasure is to play, makes no difference what you say” – Motörhead – Ace of Spades

 

 

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[John D Salt]

Not Connard Sage wrote:

Guy Farrish wrote:

Anyhow – I wasn’t biting anyone’s head off!<noscript><noscript></noscript></noscript><noscript></noscript>

Neither was I. I’m not a werewolf.

Easy to say on a quarter moon.

Get back to us in three weeks.

All the best,

John.

[Geof Downton]

Mike Headden wrote:

On the mapping of computer archetypes to tabletop gaming, I’m a gamer – board games, computer games, RPGs or tabletop minatures it’s all gaming.

…and this is why perhaps I struggle to understand this rather odd ‘research’, and often have found many of the questions in these surveys ill suited to me. I’m primarily a modeller. Ancient and fantasy wargaming (which I nowadays do very rarely) is an excuse to build stuff, because I’m not into trains, otherwise…

In a parallel world to Mike’s, I’ve built dollshouses, miniature furniture, dioramas, and scenery and buildings for ‘wargaming’ – it’s all making.

One who puts on his armour should not boast like one who takes it off.
Ahab, King of Israel; 1 Kings 20:11

[Mike Headden]

I used to be a werewolf but I’m alright noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow!

 

Well, someone had to 🙂

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Mike]

Werewolves that know they are, are referred to as awarewolves.

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Mike wrote:

Werewolves that know they are, are referred to as awarewolves.

 

Not woke wolves?

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[Thaddeus Blanchette]

Personally? I wargame because the chicks dig it.

I am upset that wasn’t an option on the survey.

We get slapped around, but we have a good time!

[deephorse]

Mike Headden wrote:

deephorse wrote:

Mike Headden wrote:

I would like more realistic questions like “How much have you spent on gaming in the past 12 months?” “How much did you intend to spend?” “How much did you tell your ‘Significant Other’ you spent?<noscript></noscript><noscript></noscript><noscript></noscript>

But are they “realistic” questions?

Clearly not enough smileys used to indicate that was a joke. I will try harder in future! On the who knows how much they spent angle. I keep a spreadsheet of all purchases, primarily, to avoid buying things I’ve forgotten I already have! I can also see how much I have spent in a period and how much prices have risen.

Yes, not enough smileys, and if I remember correctly, two of your questions were asked in the survey that I responded to.  I keep a database of Osprey books that I own for a similar reason, to avoid duplicate buying.  I have a considerable number of them, and memory alone has not stopped me from buying ones that I already have.  Couple that with Osprey’s sneaky trick of putting the same book inside different covers from time to time, and you have the perfect storm.  I don’t, however, record how much my books cost.  Knowing that total would be very worrying.

Play is what makes life bearable - Michael Rosen

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