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“But then I sigh, and, with a piece of Scripture, Tell them that Gods bids us do good for evil: And thus I clothe my naked villainy With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ, And seems a saint, when most I play the devil.” William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of King Richard the Third (King Richard act I, iii) William Shakespeare has been a good source of villains, or if you are of a Jungian persuasion, villainous archetypes. We all like a good villain on stage or screen. Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham stole the show in the otherwise dubious “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”. Perhaps Robin Hood is were it all started to go wrong, the hero is after all merely a mythologised villain, stealing from the rich (because the poor have nothing to steal) and bribing the poor to keep him hidden. We took a dim view not so long ago of our elected representatives stealing from the tax payers and redistributing wealth to poor misunderstood purveyors of duck houses and moat cleaning services. I don’t recall anyone praising them for this particularly piece of redistribution. Personally I blame the schools. My wife tolerates my hobby. As long as it is conducted in the shed (it’s a big shed) and “guns and bombs and dead people aren’t left around the house”, I can do much as I please. She drew the line however at toy soldiers and weapons for my now 5 year old son. For him the world would be a blissful arcadia of country walks, pony rides, ice cream and football. But then he went to school. The village school is an excellent institution, staffed by a dedicated and far-sighted team intent on fostering excellence in their charges. They also did a terms unit of work on pirates. My erstwhile innocent now thinks drinking rum, burying treasure, swinging a cutlass and making fat boys walk the plank is an acceptable, nay desirable, career choice. Wargamers are just as culpable of making thoroughly bad people look good. Blinding oneself with the (alleged) combat efficiency of the Waffen SS is only at the expense of ignoring the horrors they perpetrated. Taking a morally neutral or post-modern view of the actions of those we represent on the table top, or worse, shrugging our soldiers and lazily saying “it’s just a game” rather misses the point. If we are to learn anything from studying the past then surely it is the errors which are not to be repeated. As I write this, Wessex Games have been the victim of piracy with a number of our PDF’s rules sets appearing for free on download sites. Most of our rules cost less than a Happy Meal at McDonalds, and all our “profits” are ploughed back into new sets or moulds for figures to support our sets. The exception is when we offer a set of rules and donate proceeds to charity, as we did with our recent Aeronef supplement. Lame excuses for this theft do not carry weight. We are not big companies (not that it would matter if we were) and those who steal from us are not Robin Hoods helping the poor. Theft is theft and it makes us less able to do the things we want to do as gamers writing rules for gamers. As a hobby we should not be condoning, supporting or indeed mythologising this villainy.
Matthew Hartley
May 2010 |
