"[It is] voyeurism embellished with footnotes."

Robert Skidelsky

Lord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.

Skidelsky was born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria. His parents were British subjects, but of Russian ancestry. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, but released in exchange for Japanese internees in England.

To the best of my knowledge Skidelsky has never visited a wargames convention, his on-line biography is certainly silent on the subject.  Yet he described a convention’s essence wonderfully in the quote above.

Wargamers at conventions are thrice damned as voyeurs. We gain an unseemly pleasure from the actions and reactions of toy soldiers on the table top, doing what many of us would (thankfully) never do.

Then we meet together to ogle through breath-steamed glass at the delights of finely cast miniatures (and I don’t just mean GZG’s “Gentlemen’s Collectables”) painted and presented for our pleasure yet tantalizing out of reach (of our bank accounts or brush skills, it matters not which).

And conventions hold a third voyeuristic attraction, or at least guilty relief, that we are not as fat/ old/poorly dressed/ unhygienic as many of our fellow gamers.

So as the show season in the UK once again gets into swing, we lead-addicted degenerates emerge once again to pursue our vices up and down the country.

See you there.

Field trip season has plagued my game design output since my last blog. Tracking dog biscuits as they float downstream does not put me in the frame of mind to consider the finer points of rules design. Fortunately my good friend and co-writer Mike Baumann has just sent me the 3rd version of his soon-to-be-published Pulp Sci-Fi Dick Garrison rules. I look forward to playtesting them over the Easter break.

Matthew Hartley
March 2010