Warhammer 40k Fifth Edition: Fun 1, Women 0

Since the last time I wrote about this it ended up on Digg and people thought I had something against the game itself, I just want to begin by saying that I think 5th edition is the best so far. Instances where there used to be two or three minor variations on the one mechanic – weapons that used the flamethrower template hit everything they touched, but weapons that used the circular blast template could miss things they were only partially covering if you rolled a 3 or less, for example – now use the same rule every time. It’s also much less arbitrary and more intuitive, so, for example, rather than having to work out whether a unit is visible by using tables and height categories, you simply look from the perspective of the attacker and decide if they’re sufficiently obscured or not. Changes like this mean you’re forced to cooperate with your opponent rather than play purely to win, which is going to be a problem in competitive tournaments unless they start giving every table its own referee, but will also make friendly games faster and easier to manage. It’s become less competitive and more role play-like, with the emphasis on playing with people rather than against them. This is a wise move, since the creative, world-building aspect has always been the primary drawcard, not the mechanics. The artwork is beautiful, ditching the remnants of the older “embarrassing, self-consciously gritty comic book from 1993″ look and turning into William Hogarth meets Heironymous Bosch.

Good. Right. Cocks.

1. “Feminazis have ruined my language”.

As I first wrote about here, then put marginally more effort into writing about here, Games Workshop’s material always refers to players using masculine pronouns, which is a problem in the basic sense of “being alienating”, but also has the knock-on effect of reinforcing any prejudices against women gamers held by players. Since other systems have taken to using gender-neutral pronouns like “Their”, alternating between “He” and “She”, using “He or She”, or using “He” but including a disclaimer explaining that it’s purely for convenience and you shouldn’t read it as exclusionary (yeah, thanks), could Games Workshop possibly take the hint in the new edition…? It’s been four years since the last one, and in that time they’ve become more mainstream thanks to the Dawn of War PC game and the upcoming Warhammer Online MMORPG, so could they have broadened their horizons to include the other half of the human race…?

Well! Imagine my surprise when I open the new rulebook and discover – hey! – your opponent is actually referred to as “your opponent” rather than “he” in the introduction. Oh God, they actually bothered making an eff — oh, wait, it’s only in the introduction, and the rest is the usual sausage-fest. The next edition it due out in 2012, coinciding with the end of the world as predicted by the ancient Mayans, so even if they do fix it up next time, their redemption will be short-lived. ALL HAIL THE COMING OF THE BLACK SUN.

2. I see girls, driving me cr-cr-crazy.

I was involved in a Dungeons & Dragons group throughout high school, around the time the game had decided to reinvent itself for the new millennium, Nostradamus permitting. None of us had been playing long enough to give a toss that Orcs could be Paladins now, but what did make us uneasy was that the new books and magazines depicted women playing the game. Whether it was insincere tokenism or not is beside the point, because the simple fact of their existence meant we lost our safety net; there was no longer a guarantee that our feelings about women gamers would be validated by the material. To go from total invisibility to the elephant in the room is a huge step forward, even if it’s only the first of many.

The last edition of Warhammer 40,000 didn’t do this, and the new one doesn’t either. Granted, the people depicted playing the game are the design team it rather than people specially-selected for the photoshoots, but women are still nonexistent. What’s worse is that, aside from the images of people playing, there are photographs of hundreds of gamers taken at tournaments, stores and painting contests, but there’s not a single visible woman anywhere. Could they not have found one? A substantial number of award-winning modellers and painters are female but, again, you wouldn’t know it from the book’s coverage of the modelling and painting aspects. A while back I interviewed Victoria Lamb, herself an award-winning modeller and painter who got her start with Games Workshop products, and she considered this kind of representation to be a bigger issue than the use of male pronouns:

The lack of female hobbyists visually is probably more of an issue for me. Surely if the promotional photographs in mainstream publications showed a gender balance of participants, more women would feel inclined to be interested in the hobby?

Our next chance to find out is in FOUR FUCKING YEARS.

3. Gunnery nunnery flummery.

How about fictional women, though? Warhammer 40,000 has always been unusually strong in its depiction of female soldiers, giving us women who are, like the men, old, scarred, fat and muscular. But it doesn’t depict them very often, either, which is, aside from the usual objections, directly contradictory to the background universe we’re presented with. We’re told over and over how desperate things are for humanity, that their empire has gotten too unwieldy to control, and that they’re not so much struggling for survival as refusing to die out quietly. So… where are the women in all this? There’s obviously no problem with them being soldiers, because we see them occasionally and nobody seems to care, but… we see them occasionally. Where are the rest of them? They’re not working behind the scenes as scribes, aristocrats or priests, because we hardly see women in those roles either. And this is a shame, because when they do bother depicting women, they look like this:

Rather than this:

The militant nuns depicted above, however, end up being ignored by the new edition almost as badly as non-fictional women. In the previous edition, they got their own section of the book, just like all the others. Here they… don’t. Other armies get multiple full-page colour paintings, maps, reports of their famous campaigns, an explanation of their command structure, a detailed history and multiple-page miniature galleries. The Sisters get… about one hundred words, a small black and white picture and half a page of painted miniatures. Anybody not aware of the background already is going to be mystified by why these people rate a mention at all, surely? Alien women feature more prominently, and when you consider that at least half of the background material is entirely about humans, this is sad.

4. The Hunt for Red Orktober.

Where it does go right is in its use of fantasy archetypes to represent aliens. It’s doesn’t make a hash of “alien races” because it works in terms of folklore, where monsters are symbols rather than attempts to create a plausible culture. So Orks (with a ‘k’) aren’t weighed down by attempts to reinvent them as noble or put-upon, they’re just monsters who represent things that are angry, loud and stupid. I’ve seen this approach called “fantasy racism”, but I’d argue it’s not, provided you do it right, because the monsters are just there to represent an aspect of human nature rather than people who look different. When it goes wrong, you end up with the Trolls in World of Warcraft: They’re backward, savage and superstitious. Well, duh; they’re trolls. But then the designers decide that they’ve got to give them a “culture”, and come up with… one which explicitly equates them with black people. Ah. Where it doesn’t so much go wrong as totally miss the point, you get people trying to come up with a rational, biological explanation for dragons to horde gold, or Godawful Doctor Who stories about bull-headed robots in space-labyrinths.

5. Summary.

I’m sorry, I am, but this is even less inclusive than the last edition – it’s not deliberate, obviously, but that just proves that they aren’t paying this aspect of design any attention.