Post by jonathan e on Feb 1, 2020 6:31:13 GMT
Good morning.
Forgive the rather abrupt assumption of power on my part here; I will pass the conch momentarily, but there's something I'd like to say before another X Gamers project goes ahead.
It's about that word "Gamers". I think we forget, quite often, that the point of the Four Gamers challenge was to generate proper gamers' armies and play games with them, because the Studio did a good job of the showcase collection but wasn't really presenting the compleat hobby as it was experienced in the real world.
The "real world" is a place of limitations: hence the rules about what could be spent in a month and the sense that getting it all done in a month was part of the achievement. I feel in my soul that the difficulty of organising games in our mid-thirties and beyond when we all live in different places is such a limitation; that we owe it to the spirit of the X Gamers challenge to work against that limitation and chronicle our efforts to do so.
I also feel, may I be forgiven, that any old "here's what I painted this month" is not quite in the spirit of the challenge; there is or should be more to it than that, and yet that's what it degenerates into if people aren't organising and playing games. At the risk of sounding like a proper melt, if you ain't gaming it's not a Gamers challenge, you're just collecting stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that but don't call it what it's not, y'know?
Think about the original run of articles, with Rich Hobson's adventures at the Staff Tournament and Roy Barber's struggle to actually win a game with his Skaven. The next generation had the Lustria campaign, the 40K one had a Carnage scenario at the end and so on.
I don't say all this to scold, or to set myself up as the Grand Arbiter of What's Proper or anything. I say it because I think what makes X Gamers great is the spur of building towards gameplay and actually getting it done – building an army worthy of Mordor or Cadia or even, gods forgive me, Ulthuan (hawk, spit).
SO WITH THAT IN MIND: knowing that I'm doing Dark Elves as a side project this year, benjie03 has challenged me to play the Tears of Isha campaign with him. Because we meet and play on the occasional if not frequent basis, this is likely to actually happen, and should light a fire under my ass and give my hobbying the thrust toward the tabletop that makes it a potential Tale of Two Gamers, even if he's going to be waiting a while for me to put together even 1000 points of Naughty Elves.
I encourage – nay, plead with – those of you thinking "I'll do X Gamers this year" to make that X not a variable but something specific. Find a friend and play with them. Pick an event and build an army for it. Arrange a meet-up not for everyone who says "hmm, bit of a trek that" and kills the occasion with ScHeDuLe PrObLeMs, but for the handful of semi-locals who you can personally round up and strap to a gaming table. Make this more than just "put some photos online at the end of the month" – because that's what every other bloomin' challenge boils down to, and this can be so much more.
Thank you. You may have the talking stick now.
Forgive the rather abrupt assumption of power on my part here; I will pass the conch momentarily, but there's something I'd like to say before another X Gamers project goes ahead.
It's about that word "Gamers". I think we forget, quite often, that the point of the Four Gamers challenge was to generate proper gamers' armies and play games with them, because the Studio did a good job of the showcase collection but wasn't really presenting the compleat hobby as it was experienced in the real world.
The "real world" is a place of limitations: hence the rules about what could be spent in a month and the sense that getting it all done in a month was part of the achievement. I feel in my soul that the difficulty of organising games in our mid-thirties and beyond when we all live in different places is such a limitation; that we owe it to the spirit of the X Gamers challenge to work against that limitation and chronicle our efforts to do so.
I also feel, may I be forgiven, that any old "here's what I painted this month" is not quite in the spirit of the challenge; there is or should be more to it than that, and yet that's what it degenerates into if people aren't organising and playing games. At the risk of sounding like a proper melt, if you ain't gaming it's not a Gamers challenge, you're just collecting stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that but don't call it what it's not, y'know?
Think about the original run of articles, with Rich Hobson's adventures at the Staff Tournament and Roy Barber's struggle to actually win a game with his Skaven. The next generation had the Lustria campaign, the 40K one had a Carnage scenario at the end and so on.
I don't say all this to scold, or to set myself up as the Grand Arbiter of What's Proper or anything. I say it because I think what makes X Gamers great is the spur of building towards gameplay and actually getting it done – building an army worthy of Mordor or Cadia or even, gods forgive me, Ulthuan (hawk, spit).
SO WITH THAT IN MIND: knowing that I'm doing Dark Elves as a side project this year, benjie03 has challenged me to play the Tears of Isha campaign with him. Because we meet and play on the occasional if not frequent basis, this is likely to actually happen, and should light a fire under my ass and give my hobbying the thrust toward the tabletop that makes it a potential Tale of Two Gamers, even if he's going to be waiting a while for me to put together even 1000 points of Naughty Elves.
I encourage – nay, plead with – those of you thinking "I'll do X Gamers this year" to make that X not a variable but something specific. Find a friend and play with them. Pick an event and build an army for it. Arrange a meet-up not for everyone who says "hmm, bit of a trek that" and kills the occasion with ScHeDuLe PrObLeMs, but for the handful of semi-locals who you can personally round up and strap to a gaming table. Make this more than just "put some photos online at the end of the month" – because that's what every other bloomin' challenge boils down to, and this can be so much more.
Thank you. You may have the talking stick now.
