“We Die for the Glory of the Emperor”: Young People, Warhammer, and Role-Playing War Online

Abstract

Play and militarism have long been connected (Lenoir and Lowood 2003). Gunplay has been a central theme of a range of game activities almost since the invention of the weapon (Poole 2000). War games, with their emphasis on strategy and combat, have existed since the earliest civilizations (Durrigan 1997). Given Sheldon Brown’s assertion that computer games are “the medium of our moment… a medium that is telling our cultural story” (Electronic Software Association 2005), it is little surprise that technologically-based play has become the tool through which this aspect of humanity is now explored. Of course, no story is ideologically neutral and many writers have seen war games as important cultural artifacts through which political discourses are articulated and maintained. Yet they simultaneously have the potential to resist and subvert. In this chapter I consider how young people use one of the long-standing war game series, Games Workshop’s Warhammer. Drawing on material from a wider five-year ethnographically informed study of online games,¹ I suggest that rather than simply recreating existing expressions of order, Games Workshop’s highly militarized representations provide opportunities to explore alternate and sometimes oppositional moral perspectives.

Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survival or extinction.

-Sun Tzu, Art of War

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only War.

-Games Workshop marketing slogan for Warhammer 40k series games

Yeah, and sometimes it’s just good to be bad.

-Voxtaris-Munday (‘Blood Angel’; age 15)