Games Workshop is a juggernaut in the world of tabletop games and miniatures with a long history and near total market dominance of the wargaming industry. However, over the last decade Oldhammer, a game and hobby community, has sought to contest this hegemony by rejecting Game Workshop’s 21st century games, miniatures, and aesthetics in favor of an attempted return to an earlier vision of the Games Workshop hobby and an accompanying possibility of alterity. We explore how Oldhammer uses memory and craft to return to the conditions of possibility which allowed for other possible tabletop futures and even the potential for resistance. In doing so, we draw on theories of memory, craft, and nostalgia to show how Oldhammer, however imperfectly, contests corporatization and control.
The Nintendo DS has been, given its huge popularity, relatively understudied. This article is a small step toward correcting that and, in doing so, contributes to game studies in general. Using Goffman's and Benjamin's theories of play and Innis's analysis of media, this article explores the nature of play on a handheld videogame system as an illuminating case of the tension between time-based storage media and space-based transmission media. Storage, transmission, space, and time are intertwined and made complicit in the ways in which the Nintendo DS is used and played. By engaging with non-diegetic aspects of the video game experience, such as saving and pausing, we can begin to address the materiality of handheld video gaming systems as objects with which we play with and rework time and space. In turn, mobile play itself is highly contingent and spatial-temporal practices take on special significance in this light.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.