ON A KNIFE EDGE

In any hobby there is a tendency, over time, to develop a mini lexicon of sorts, as terms take on their own meaning in the context of what you are doing. We have plenty of our own within wargaming of course: think of the Grognards at your club, of slap-chop painting, or of WYSIWYG rules. These are all relatively uncontroversial, but there is a term thrown around the wargaming hobby from time to time, which elicits a wave of varied responses whenever it is raised. It might make you feel a sense of dread, of defiance, or mere dismissal, but it is one of those things that everyone in your club or online group will have some kind of opinion on: the ‘greying’ of historical wargaming.

Kevin Pierce

If, by some miraculous coincidence, you have never come across the term before, it refers to the population of historical wargaming getting older with each passing year without a new generation coming along to take ownership of the hobby. It is easy to see where these anxieties come from; just recently I visited the Phalanx show, in St.Helens and in doing a very hasty and imprecise study of ‘just looking around a bit’, I noted that 35-year-old me was likely below the mean age. There is nothing wrong with that of course, and with every passing year I am catching up with that mean age anyway, but if you're the kind of person who frets over where those fresh-faced newcomers will come from, it is easy to imagine that scenes…

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Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy (Digital) - 1 Issue, WSS 127

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