Consimworld bitch thread

As someone who is very interested in wargames, I read consimworld. However, I hate it. Sometimes my hate gets so strong I have to vent about it---thus why I've created this thread.

My current irritation is the fact that I have involved myself in a hobby dominated by 55-75 year old conservative white men. ESPECIALLY the posters of consimworld, who are older and considerably whiter than even the old white bread crowd on boardgamegeek or here on Fortress: ameritrash. It bleeds into anything discussed on consimworld---there is no risk taking allowed in counter layouts, there can be no major changes to ancient rules laid down in the 1970s era by Avalon Hill. Things have to be done the same way for reasons trotted out as reasonable. But in my opinion a good deal of the objections are not brought about by reasonable things like "usability" or "accuracy" but instead are just comfortable to people who fear change. A lot of it, not all of it of course, I don't mean to paint with too broad a brush, is just driven by this irrational fear of the new.

It's bad for the hobby which despite itself I do like---who the fuck wants to play an ugly game about one of the same 5 world war 2 topics that 55-75 year old white men like to play? With graphics that can't change because they're so fucking "usable." It makes me angry. I hate it.

This was all brought about by some knee jerk hatred of some counter scans from an upcoming game (on a great, ungamed topic, to make it worse). They're from an artist that hits or misses. But for most of these posters, they want ASL style ugly, terrible, intimidating counters. It's what they're comfortable with but they can say it's for tradition, it's for usability, it's for yadda yadda yadda. These are the same fucks who wouldn't let the COUNTER STOCK for ASL change---all ASL products have to be printed on a different counter stock than virtually every modern game. Again, totally reasonable reasons were trotted out for it, but the real reason is that I somehow got myself into a decrepit hobby filled with scared old men.

I wonder if we read the same garbage in the MMP folder today. My conclusion was pretty much the same--a bunch of old white guys not realizing how much they're embarrassing themselves.

I hear you Gary. Consim World itself is an unwieldy relic of a by gone era. Why isn't it upgraded to a more useable, intuitive, and functional layout? Beats the fuck out of my.

However, I'm sort of missing the connection to being a white male and the piss poor quality of Consim world in your post.

I abhor that racist double standard. It's bullshit and by association so is your entire post. If you were to make a statement like that about any other racial or ethnic group you'd probably be run out of town on a rail if not suffer a personal visit from Matt Loter.

I don't know what racial category you fall into nor do I care. Your opinions on board games I read with interest. Your opinion on the good or evil of your target ethnicity...fuck that.

At Winter Offensive a couple of years back this discussion came up and the one guy in the publishing realm that was standing there said they needed to sell to their market because there's no opportunity to land a significant number of new players. He went so far as to say it's not merely "about World War II" but "about East Front World War II." That's where the sales are.

I'm going to be honest with you -- I think Consimworld shares much of this blame because the site is impenetrable to casual viewers. If you stumble across Richard III on another site or in a game store you're not going to be able to find it in CSW if you're able to discover CSW at all. Google is locked out and the menuing and internal search are worthless. It's an accessible game. The general public could generate new sales if there was an opportunity for the deeper discussions to be discovered.

Unfortunately it continues to be the dominant discussion site for most (virtually all) serious wargames. So it captures the bulk of the quality content and is undiscoverable to all but a very insular group of potential buyers. Those buyers have the publishers by the short hairs because they're the only ones in a position to consider preordering.

It's simply two problems in deadly embrace with each other.

S.

Lots of internet warriors on CSW with waaaay too much free time. It seems at times the wort offenders are designers and publishers. Perhaps if they posted less and worked on their games more, they would suck less. Just sayin'.

On the other hand I do understand why ASL is still printed on the old brown cardstock. The new white core wouldn't match the old stuff and ASL collections are quite spendy to assemble. Really though MMP has demonstrated no ability whatsoever to reprint the entirety of ASL in a new format. Hell they can't even keep the core materiels in print.

All is not lost though. Depite the crying of the old farts, wargame presentation is moving along. The new L2 Breakout Normandy was gorgeous and Sekigahara was really well done too. Now if we could just get Angola...

Sagrilarus wrote: He went so far as to say it's not merely "about World War II" but "about East Front World War II." That's where the sales are.

I just made this point to someone in a chat the other day--it's so hard for non-standard titles or games on lesser-known conflicts to get to market because of the insatiable demand for East Front WWII. Maybe it's a Baby Boomer thing, I really can't begin to speculate. I guess I don't particularly blame companies for being hesitant to step out of their lane when they know they can get one of the old standby designers to crap out another hex-and-counter EF game that will hit its preorder number in a matter of days, based only on the name of a battle and a one-line description.

Huh, I would have guessed the battles in Western Europe would be where the sales are, if only because U.S. troops actually fought in many of them. Learn something new every day.

I haven't played a true hex-and-couter wargame in probably 20 years (as the above statement proves, I suppose). But Gary Sax has nailed the essence of it, from everything I've seen — stubborn dinosaurs too slow and stupid to accept change. And soon to be extinct.

Hi, my name is Simon and I'm a 26 year old bohemian vegan commie wargamer.

I play enough war-games to want to use Consimworld, but every time I've tried it I've found the interface so terrible I've given up. And I used to be a web programmer who worked to renovate bad user interfaces so I've used a few dreadful one in my time, but CSW is the worst I have ever seen.

So I never got far enough to be annoyed by the arch conservative clientele. Perhaps I should be thankful.

Schweig! wrote: Hi, my name is Simon and I'm a 26 year old bohemian vegan commie wargamer.

You think that saves you? Shut up, cracker.

We have a couple of these threads lying around. It's so funny that the bile just seems to build up and up until someone can't take it anymore and it spews out all over the place here. Didn't Dogmatix have one of these like a year ago?

It's a niche community served by a niche website. Nothing new there. Every tried to navigate Twin Galaxies ? What a shit pile that is. It's no CSW, but it's bad given the potential audience.

I posted about MMP's holiday sale too--I got an email that had a PDF that had a link to... MMP. When I emailed a reply that that seemed odd, they told me to go to the website on the holiday. O. K.

All these wargamer guys still think it's 1977, they are still in the wood-paneled basement with the horrid orange carpet. They pull the tab on a soda and move another chit towards Minsk.

Is there a reason they don't just upgrade to a proper usable forum? is it that their oldtimers have learned to use it and like it and dont really care if no one else can, is there some other technical reason its like that?

I too would love to participate and learn more there but I'm fucked if I'm going to waste a single millisecond on that pile of shit UI that is the forum there (and this is coming from someone who's got a fairly low tolerance of the modern day trend to be unwilling to invest any serious time in learning how anything works)

I play a lot of wargames, they're kind of my thing, and one thing I would say about CSW is "Fuck CSW". It's full of fat old men that think the Tea Party is really cool that are posting in their club house, it's one big unhappy circle jerk. Bitter fuckers posting in the one place where they can get any kind of validation. I'll read CSW periodically, game designers post there more than BGG, that's where I'll go for game release info. The CSW regulars are the assholes that give wargaming a bad name. Interestingly enough the site's owner is a nice guy.

You know what ruined wargames? Colour! If it doesn't have a pastel chit with a black silhouette it's not a real wargame! And paper maps! Don't get me started on mounted map boards. < etc, etc until /rant by falling asleep >

Is that the sort on consimworld?

JoelCFC25 wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: He went so far as to say it's not merely "about World War II" but "about East Front World War II." That's where the sales are.

I just made this point to someone in a chat the other day--it's so hard for non-standard titles or games on lesser-known conflicts to get to market because of the insatiable demand for East Front WWII. Maybe it's a Baby Boomer thing, I really can't begin to speculate. I guess I don't particularly blame companies for being hesitant to step out of their lane when they know they can get one of the old standby designers to crap out another hex-and-counter EF game that will hit its preorder number in a matter of days, based only on the name of a battle and a one-line description.

Ok, now I have to go and find the ultimate example of this situation. There was a long, angry letter [undoubtedly originally typed with a Selectric on carbon paper] in one of the ASL Annuals decrying Avalon Hill's "wasting its time and resources" creating an ASL Pacific theater module. According to this gamer, ASL should *only* cover ETO--and the bulk of it should be EF. It was an absolute classic bit of hardcore hardware fetishist nerdrage.

The strangest part of this phenomena to me is that, for how much some publishers SWEAR that East Front is the Alpha and Omega, GMT, who certainly aren't dumb about their customer base, hasn't bothered to reprint the 3 major modules in Vance VanB's EF Series and I don't think they're anywhere near their reprint numbers. It would be nice to get a combined Army Group Center/Typhoon module, but I'd be happy with just paying MSRP (instead of 3x) to get my paws on the "big boys" in the series.

Ultimately, I lump all of that sort of shit along with the fear of PBEM tools under the heading of "Disciples of Simonsen." Those publishers driven to try to recapture the "glory days" of Dunnigan and Simonsen [though Red gave us some of the most brutal maps--Sorcerer's electric pink may take the ultimate prize--in the history of offset printing] will always be held hostage by the current CSW demo. It's no surprise to me that Decision, L2, Clash of Arms, and Avalanche seem to be stagnating while GMT and some of the smaller publishers seem to be moving the ball forward. There seems to be growth on the European side too, but it may just be that the topics of interest to their customers are different but just as stagnant. Vae Victis seems to cover lots of different stuff, but perhaps it's not surprising that the first games they publish as "deluxe" editions were covered Napoleonic campaigns and 2 (Operations Marketgarden and Overlord) of the 5 big WWII topics. Only the Crusades folio was kind of out of the ordinary.

MMP believes it knows where its bread is buttered in terms of sales. I can understand that though I think it's a bit shortsighted. What I find to be a shame is that someone like Starkweather, who has a line on the Japanese market couldn't generate more traction for some of the interesting games coming out of that community. I recently went on a big hunt for the original Japanese game that was supposed to be released as Samurai Lords before MMP pulled the plug. IN that hunt, I came to appreciate the weird duality of their wargame market. Feudal Lord/Samurai Lords is much loved but it also appears to be a big, somewhat turgid throwback to SPI's heyday (not surprising since the game was published in the early 80s, I think). In addition, Sunset Games and Sim Journal have made careers out of re-releasing games originally published by SPI, XTR, and the like with little more than updated art [though that is, in and of itself, most welcome].

However, right alongside that those games, they've done some really interesting shit--e.g., Feudal Lord was recently updated into what appears to be a streamlined, card-assisted game that looks like it captures all the same flavor with a quarter of the rules and process overhead. There are at least a half-dozen other "Storm Over..." games, including some REALLY under-gamed topics like Port Arthur that all appear to have the potential to be as good or better than the Stalingrad entry--and might even generate the sort of crossover with "Wareuro" gamers that turned Twilight Struggle and Combat Commander into "games that allow us to take risks with our checkbook" for GMT. I'd *love* to see more of these games (47 Ronin is one I REALLY want to get a rules tranlsation for; I love the topic and the game looks cool as hell) get translated and I applaud Starkweather's efforts in this area. Unfortunately, even without the CSW echo-chamber, it seems MMP will always be skittish about games outside their "core competencies." With C&C:A/N, Combat Commander, and the Twilight Struggle-type games supporting a healthy bottom line and some other crossover hits like Dominant Species, GMT certainly appears to be more inclined to take some risks on this kind of stuff--even if Seikigahara did seem to sit for quite a while.

I do wonder if non-WWII IGS titles would find greater acceptance and higher sales if they were published by GMT. I get the sense that the number of casual wargamers/"heavy strategy gamers"--folks who prefer BGG over CSW for their gaming info--are starting to see GMT, not as a "wargame" publisher, but in the same vein as the "classic" hobby game publishers like Mayfair, Z-Man, and Rio Grande. While I suspect GMT was a bit hesitant to push Seikigahara into the print queue thanks to the "non-standard" subject matter, they *did* take the risk and sure seem to have been amply rewarded with brisk sales in response. I wish there was a more concrete way of proving this, but I certainly believe that this game's success was driven far more by interest among the BGG crowd than the more traditional wargame customer. MMP, on the other hand, is widely perceived as a company interested only reaching in those customers who think Arkham Horror would be more accessible if only the monster tokens used NATO symbology and the maps were printed on 7 22"x36" sheets of glossy paper. Even if the games themselves might be of interest to non-CSW gamers, many of those folks are clearly turned off (and, often vocal about it) by the stubborn clinging to a vintage 1980s presentation.

I consider myself a decent example of this phenomenon. When I got back into the hobby a few years ago, I got turned on to Twilight Struggle because it was a Top 10 BGG game--which meant to me that non-wargamers clearly weren't intimidated by it--and because it so clearly wasn't designed by someone slavishly wedded to the "wargame style guide" developed by SPI and Avalon Hill 4+ decades ago. Though I hadn't bought a new wargame since my day-of-release purchase of Avalon Hill's Hannibal: RvC, I did periodically lurk CSW. It was like putting on a favorite sweater--there was comfort to be found in knowing that the hobby couldn't be dead if the same old arguments and games that dominated my highschool and college years were still being hashed out. Stumbling onto BGG and Twilight Struggle shocked me because it was clear that something very different was going on. Had I just stuck with checking out games from companies like Clash of Arms and MMP (a name familiar to me since I had been very interested in ASL when first released and continued to dabble here and there over the years) and lurking the hex-n-chit-related newsgroups and websites, I'd still be convinced that the hobby had hardly evolved from what I found in my tattered copies of Avalon Hill's Arab-Israeli Wars or GDW's Europa series monsters.

(Hell, I feel much the same way about American politics. My pop and I have had this conversation a lot; as he likes to point out, "the political conversation will be a perpetual rerun until the Baby Boomers like me finally die off. Shame you weren't born a bit earlier so you could have at least participated in the first go 'round since you're still talking about shit we argued about in 1970. Hope your kid gets something more interesting down the road...but you're just fucked." )


@ repo: Good effort on that flame [if that was the intent], but I can't see how making a statement about the demographic equates to a racist double standard. Finding folks who are anything BUT middle-aged (somewhat broadly defined) white males in the public parts of this hobby niche--cons, clubs, and message boards [since if you've been to either of the former, you've likely met a good number of the is folks active in the last]--is just tough. I live in one of the more diverse metro areas when it comes to the intersection of affluence [which gaming pretty much requires] and race and, while the Euro, CCG, and even non-historical miniatures groups are a pretty good mix of race and gender, the wargaming clubs (and I'll throw in things like historical minis) are lilly white and it certainly appeared (it's not like I polled folks, so I'm not at all certain) that anyone under the age of 25 or so in attendance was a blood relative of one of the other folks. Hey, I'm glad to see younger gamers involved with pushing chits, but it doesn't seem to lend itself to diversity of opinion or taste.

As for the conservative part--both in terms of politics and in general tastes, it absolutely permeates Consimworld. And, unfortunately, a good many publishers cater *only* to the activist element of that site; they've stated it time and again in various fora.