Short institutional memory can’t excuse wargaming’s most insidious cultural issues.
Bigotry and bad behavior in the hobby cannot be treated as isolated incidents.
Last week, vast swathes of the wargaming community simply disappeared. We faded into nothingness, like the fleeting memories of a bad dream, or the victims of a particularly precise Thanos snap. Patient Zero was Annie Norman of Bad Squiddo Games, who noticed herself evaporating into a quickly-dissapating cloud of smoke. Countless others followed, including this writer, who flickered in and out of reality for some time, an incorporeal phantasm. It made it quite hard to type, I can tell you! It soon became apparent that all the victims had one thing in common — we were all women who enjoyed historical wargames. Armed with that information, experts were able to trace the source of the phenomenon — an article in Dispatch titled The Warhammer capital of the world by Peter Carlyon. More specifically, it was the following paragraph, featuring a quote from Warlord Games co-founder John Stallard:
One barrier to wider recognition may be who the hobby appears to be for — and who it appears to exclude. Many women paint miniatures, but far fewer play. Parts of the industry remain openly resistant to the idea of change. When I asked John Stallard of Warlord Games whether more women were taking an interest in his products, he bristled. “You had to get that one in, didn’t you?” he snapped. “Nobody interested in historical wargaming are women. It’s a lazy journo question. Don’t like that.”
Then, we remembered that our existence isn’t dependent on the approval of some cranky fossil and just got on with our lives.
I’m going to be completely honest with you -– I didn’t want to write this piece. I shouldn’t have to write this piece. As much as Rascal exists to do serious, capital-J Journalism, there’s not a single member of the team who wouldn’t rather be writing funny little blogs about lovely games that made us laugh/cry/think/horny/all of the above. We write about games because we want to, but we write about the industry because someone has to — and right now, that’s us. While I don't want to give Stallard any more attention, one of the blokes in charge of the company that makes what is arguably the most prominent historical miniatures wargame on the market saying that no women play historical games is simultaneously newsworthy and the same shit that women in wargaming have to deal with constantly.
