SerpApi.Org
A family trip to Canterbury proved to be unexpectedly momentous for Mike Ryder. Aged 12, it was the first time he discovered Warhammer.
“We were going down a back alley and encountered this weird, interesting shop with vivid signage,” he says. “In the window, there were all these really cool displays, like fantasy and science fiction models. It captured my imagination.”
The family, at Ryder’s insistence, went into the shop and took away a catalogue, which the youngster later pored over in the cafe in British Home Stores (BHS).
Over the next few months, Ryder diligently saved up his pocket money – £2 a week – in order to buy a £50 starter set from a shop in Broadstairs, Kent, which his grandma took him to. “And that, really, was the gateway drug into collecting models and getting immersed in the lore,” he says. “It all grew from there.”
Today, Ryder, an academic and lecturer in marketing at Lancaster University, is fully ensconced in the world of Warhammer, a tabletop miniature wargame created in 1983 by Games Workshop.
The 39-year-old has hundreds of individual Warhammer models – fans collect, build, and paint model armies – mostly stored in a shed, with a select few on a special shelf in his house. These rotate according to Ryder’s current tastes – “I almost feel like a museum curator,” he laughs.
He is a fount of knowledge on the hobby, explaining to me – a layman – in detail the distinct universes: Warhammer 40,000 (sci-fi) and Warhammer Age of Sigmar (fantasy).
He favours the sci-fi faction and says that, although he’s a “professional geek” (his PhD is in science fiction), he’s still “a little bit closeted” about his love of Warhammer, despite noticing a change in society’s perception of nerds over the last two decades.
“Being geeky is now cool,” he says. “I think that’s opened up the world of Warhammer to whole new audiences and people are more open to doing stuff like this.”
But what actually is “stuff like this”? Well, it depends. One of the things Ryder most enjoys about Warhammer is the numerous entry points to the hobby: fans can collect, build, paint and play with the models. But they can also read Warhammer books, play Warhammer computer games and discuss Warhammer lore on community forums.
Ryder, for example, loves painting the models, but doesn’t play games as much as he used to. For him, painting his inch-tall armies is a form of therapy, and he spends three or four hours on them a week. “I tend to sit and paint stuff on Sunday mornings as my quiet relaxation mindfulness time.”
It’s good for his mental health, he claims – adding, as any good academic would, that this is actually backed up by recent research. A paper, published this year by Tara BM Smith PhD, looked into whether Warhammer miniature painters achieve a flow state (a state of being completely absorbed in an activity), which, in turn, benefits their mental health. The research found that miniature painting was meditative, meaningful, and, indeed, good for participants’ mental health.
Of course, the world of Warhammer is not without its challenges. “There is a bit of a ‘manosphere’ problem,” says Ryder, referencing the toxic behaviour and harassment of women that has occurred on some Warhammer online forums. He does posit, though, that this might be an “issue with the internet” rather than with Warhammer itself, and is quick to tell me he has noticed “a massive growth in female gamers and female hobbyists” recently.
He makes an annual pilgrimage to Warhammer World in Nottingham and says “anecdotally” he’s seen a change in the clientele. “You’re seeing more families there... [Plus] women and girls interested in the cool models.”
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But the hobby has also, he claims, had an issue with the alt-Right. By its very nature, Warhammer is bleak. “There is only war,” says Ryder, by way of explanation. He adds that the term “grimdark” – used to describe settings, stories and universes within Warhammer that are especially dark, violent and morally corrupt – originated from Warhammer 40,000, which had the tagline: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.”
For some, the notion of “grimdark”, a world where there is endless suffering, totalitarianism and rarely a happy ending, is taken literally. So much so, says Ryder, that Warhammer creator Games Workshop has had to make it clear that it shouldn’t be. “This hobby is supposed to be dark,” says Ryder. “But we are welcoming and inclusive.”
To that end, Ryder co-founded the world’s first Warhammer conference last year. “I’d been quite surprised for some time that Warhammer wasn’t really something spoken about in academic circles,” he says. Keen to change this, he reached out to Dr Thomas Arnold, a philosophy professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany who, he discovered, shared his hobby.
The pair got chatting and decided to “test the water” to see if there was much interest. Together with the help of of colleagues from CAPAS (Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies), they launched the conference at the University of Heidelberg.
The response was incredible. “We’d have been happy with just a dozen people sitting in a room for two days chatting about the philosophy of Warhammer,” says Ryder. “We had more than 70 applications…and accepted more than 50 papers to be presented over the two days.”
They even had attendees fly in to join them from America and New Zealand. “We had such a diverse range of speakers,” says Ryder, proudly. “There were physicists, philosophers, linguists – we even had an epidemiologist. Plus, we had contributions from school teachers and even a military pastor who had used Warhammer to help veterans suffering from PTSD.”
The conference was such a success that a second – even bigger – one went ahead in September, and a third is planned for next year.
The fact that Ryder’s love of his collection has bled into his professional life is evidence that there’s far more to the hobby than physical objects in sheds or on shelves.
In fact, although there are Warhammer fans online who, according to Ryder, boast of having many thousands of pounds’ worth of models, Ryder himself finds it almost impossible to quantify the value of his collection. He says he has to consider, for each model, the monetary cost, the time spent painting it, and the emotional value it holds. While he estimates he’s spent around £7,000 on his collection over the years, to him it’s worth much more.
And though he has, at times, spent large sums of money on Warhammer (he once, for example, splurged £350 on an Acastus Knight Porphyrion to celebrate completing his PhD – “That was a one-off treat for myself”), the things that are of the most value, to him, are the models he got when he was a teenager, right at the very start.
“If I were to sell one of those on eBay, I’d be lucky to get £15,” he says. “They aren’t particularly well painted, but I would say they are, for me personally, worth the most.”
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