Reflections on Revisited

Almost five years on the Revisited Project (such as it is) is well and truly dead. Why? Failure to cross-pollinate.

In any project like this you've got to keep things fresh. You have to loosen the reigns and examine things from multiple perspectives. There has to be a lot of honesty and a lot of caring. Not everyone is going to play for the same reasons and not everyone is going to enjoy the same things. A lot of people are going to disagree at times and a lot of compromises are going to have to be made. It is how anything like this goes.

However, what happened to Revisited was that inside its walls there became space for only one kind of 'ideal' gamer, a single kind of super-gamer who enjoyed games in a certain way and played them unto a certain end.

Revisited started out with many types of players. Some collected huge armies, some developed super lists, others made terrible units work on the table despite their rules. However, as the super-gamer ideal was developed some players found themselves left behind, branded 'immature,' 'unfocused,' or basically 'inferior.'

At first it was certain non-competitive types who left. After all, the only thing we did was run tournaments and tool up ever more powerful lists. Then the truly competitive types left. This was a natural result of 'narrative-only' gaming coming in.

At first people believed that the group could continue on. This was especially because the less 'serious' gamers were the first ones to leave. It was believed that now that they were gone the gaming would become more focused.

Instead it became stale and unexciting.

Without them it became not only decreasingly fun but also increasingly hollow. After all, when all the lists are perfected cookie-cutter one trick ponies or the games are about telling a 'story' (i.e. your choices don't matter anymore) its all becomes pretty boring. The 'challenge' of gaming was forgotten in favour of who had the bigger win-streak and the narratives became linear and predictable as to not demand emotional control out of anybody.

All of this could have been fixed with better rules-writing right? I mean it was the fact the game wasn't good enough right? No. The problem was us. Gaming isn't about making you happy at the expense of everyone else. It isn't about 'your' collection, 'your' list and 'your' win-streak. When you forget the person at the other end of the table you kill the game. We forgot what gaming was all about and forgot what we had started all of this for.

If at the beginning we hadn't been so narrow-minded things could have been different. Maybe we would  have not driven the 'casuals' away, added more members to our group and not destroyed things for ourselves.

In the end GW wasn't the problem, we were.

Whilst the story of the people inside the group is not over yet, the story of Revisited most certainly is. With four members gone, three of which who have given away most of their collections and smashed the rest (with hammers mind you, plastic Ork titan heads are surprisingly resilient I will tell you), the story of good old-fashioned 40k for us as a group is over. Even if a new project was started by the survivors it would be Revisited in name only and nothing else.

The glory days of 'tabletop wargaming' are over for us. Now we have to each look hard in the mirror and  ask what kind of people do we want to be: boys just out for our own fun or men who look out for each other even if it costs us the game.