A Retrospective The World’s First Ever Academic Warhammer Conference
Warhammer, a tabletop miniature game born back in 1983, has reached a new level of popularity. Not only has the game, and the franchise built around it, seen interest from the likes of actor and Hollywood’s number one nerd Henry Cavill who is set to guide the franchise into its first outing in to film, but it has become a backbone of the British economy (especially amongst the backdrop of a post-COVID and post-Brexit landscape). Games Workshop, the British manufacturer of Warhammer, is set to be promoted to the FTSE 100 (the UKs best known stock market). Now the game has also caught the attention of academics on a larger scale. At the end of September, the first Warhammer Conference was held in Heidelberg with the participation of CAPAS.
It’s safe to say that no longer are Warhammer Age of Sigmar and its sci-fi equivalent Warhammer 40,000 underground hobbies for fanboys who enjoy the aspects that made the game so popular: crafting, hobbying, painting, building, strategizing, and, most importantly perhaps, playing beyond the confines of childhood. Now, on the other hand, the hobby enjoys multiple modalities and formats such as videos and short films, games, anime, comics, and books that truly make it the pop culture relic and wide-reaching franchise it has become, not to mention its darkly dystopian themes of techno theocracy and necropolitics—a term introduced by the South African historian and political scientist Joseph-Achille Mbembe—speaking to the apocalyptic tone of the time. Despite said popularity, economic impact, and thematic relevance, Warhammer has more often than not fallen prey to a kind of academic classism that decides what and what is not to be studied on a “serious” level.
Warhammer Conference, organized by Mike Ryder (Lancaster University), Thomas Arnold (Heidelberg University), Michael Dunn (CAPAS, Heidelberg University), and Philipp Schrögel (CAPAS, Heidelberg University), aimed to contend with said classism and hoped to change it too. On Friday 27th and Saturday 28th September 2024 Warhammer Conference took place at Heidelberg University, and the reception went beyond what any of the organizing committee could imagine. Academic conferences aren’t always very well attended, especially in the humanities, but the large number of talks (upwards of sixty talks over two days) as well as attendees—and additionally submissions which were upwards of eighty—was staggering.
Reappraisals of the reception around a multitude of what were once considered fringe formats such as comics, graphic novels, and gaming have led the way for tabletop, RPGs, and board gaming—as well as the imaginary universes upon which they are based—to begin a similar sojourn into critical acclaim.
The presentations were particularly varied, all of which have received equally impressive traffic on the conference’s YouTube channel, especially certain talks with almost 3,000 views and the Keynotes with John Blanche, one of the original concept artists behind the now nearly household subgenre of Grimdark, and Games Workshop Black Library author Victoria Hayward.
Approaching the subject with a transdisciplinary lens made sure that although the overarching theme of the conference was focused around a single franchise, the individual topics were deeply diverse.
From the obsession with fascistic tropes and so-called “bolter porn,” the classic Tarantino argument of the necessity of violence or the fetishism of gratuitous violence, to the impact of medievalism, and gaming as a safe space for the queer and LGBTQIA+ community (albeit one that is ultimately also riddles with problematic gatekeeping), Warhammer Conference attempted to contend with this tension and cover gargantuan ground.
Appearing in news outlets both in and beyond the hobby space such as Polygon, PC Gamer, The Conversation, Goonhammer (who notes that “there is no reason for a conference tote bag to go this hard” so props to our designer Ute von Figura and, of course, Dürer), and even German national radio and various podcasts alike, it’s a suggestion that the conference also garnered significant attention outside the immediate realm of academia as well. Maybe it’s time to start taking this particular pariah of pop culture a little more seriously after all.
