Sunday Sermon: WAAC vs FAAC

Who the feck brought the tank to the pillow fight?!?!?

Or just shut the f@$% up as I tend to utter when I see such titles! So after my first Sunday Sermon I had an email off of a concerned gamer saying that my first Sermon wasn't full of enough fire or brimstone. Apparently on the Sabbath we all have a deep rooted need to be terrified by tales of eternal damnation, fire, torment and hell, with no hope of restitution. Unless of course you repent your wicked ways! So am I going to do the fire and brimstone thing? Yes! Look I've well and truly had it with this bloody hobby's need to split everything into two camps. Pro or anti Games Workshop, Privateer Press vs Games Workshop, you know the binary arguments we tend to get when simpletons are given a computer and access to the Internet. Or my particular Bête Noire, the blisteringly annoying need of some people to split all wargamers into two distinct camps, WAAC or FAAC. There is not much in life that can be split into such stupidly simplistic binary arguments, even less so where human behaviour or attitude is concerned. It's not helpful or even insightful in any way shape or form, and it makes people sound dumb.

Seriously Bob why do you keep inviting that WAAC ass hat to your pillow fights?

For those of you who are gloriously oblivious to this lazy and totally false method of classification I shall explain the terminology for you, and sorry for introducing you to it. WAAC stands for Win At All Costs, meanwhile FAAC stands for Fluff At All Costs. Yeah it already sounds stupid right? I mean those two statements represent such extremes within the hobby that it's highly unlikely that any of us fit into such narrow categories. So people should stop trying to shoehorn us all into these two camps. Normally I'd let such silly and childish discussions pass me by and actually get on with enjoying the hobby I love so much. However, of late I've been accused of being both a WAAC gamer and a FAAC gamer, actually in the same discussion. The two idiots then proceeded to have an argument about which one I was. Apart from the fact that not both statements can be true, and that both sound like some made up shady intergovernmental agency. Also not to mention that they are totally lame descriptors of who I am as a gamer, it really annoys me that gamers feel the need to break everyone down into two bland groups.

But let's take a more detailed look at what both terms imply about you, if you are labelled as such:

What a typical WAAC gamer looks like apparently

WAAC: Win At All Costs actually started life as a way of discussing certain unpalatable military practices or actions. Later it was used to describe particularly brutal business practices, it also crept in to sociological and psychological discussions about how western societies, in particular the USA were heading. Parents teaching the importance of winning over all other things no matter what the cost, be it via playing hard, cheating or whatever. I'm not going to go over 20 years of academic research into the phenomenon in broader society, suffice to say it is universally regarded as the root of many of societies ills, and apparently we can thank the 80's, Regan and Maggie Thatcher for it (well according to some). In terms of wargaiming it's used invariably to describe people for whom the hobby is only about winning. People who will try to 'break' games, or outright cheat. Assholes who do nothing but whinge over the other side of the table while deploying the same tactics they're crying about and then some. Trying to distract you, maybe even making threats of violence and throwing their weight around in an attempt to intimidate you. Have I come across many people in my time who would go to any length to win a game? Yeah one or two, but in 27 years of gaming I'm going to say they're the rarity and certainly not the norm.

What a typical FAAC gamer looks like apparently

FAAC: Is a retort used by many people who have themselves been accused of being WAAC gamers. Yes, the community seems to have produced a contrary position with, which to tarnish the reputations of the remaining gamers not yet stigmatised with the WAAC tag. So we get Fluff At All Costs. You'll be pleased to know that this doesn't have it's roots in wider society or academic research. No this is purely a hobby related invention that us gamers have generated, so sadly it's bound to have even less relevance to reality. It's used to denigrate those people who seem to take pleasure from the background stories that are created to provide a backdrop for our gaming activities. At it's extreme it's used to insult people who think that the game on the table should be an exact representation of the stories they read. People who think the game should be some sort of story re-enactment as opposed to an actual game, sort of a co-operative narrative device. I'm going to say right now that I have never come across a single, pure 'fluff bunny' as many call them. I've found people who love the stories and theme their armies accordingly. People who paint the right logo's on their tanks from their favourite novel or historical figure etc. but they all know it's a game. Most will try and make elements of their 'fluffy' lists competitive, even if the over all theme isn't optimal. I'm going to say I don't think the pure FAAC gamer exists. If they do, I'm going to say they're even rarer than the WAAC gamer, and they're as rare as rocking horse s%*&!

It's an utterly pointless form of dichotomous classification, as well as being terribly inaccurate one to cast over the vast swathe of wargamers out there. Would any of you like the complex intentions, motivations and thoughts you have reduced and distilled down to such a stark form of categorisation? I doubt it, so why do others feel the need to do it to their fellow gamers? Apart from them being complete and utter w@%&£$? It didn't really bother me when these w@%&£$ were primarily confined to certain message boards dedicated to Games Workshop games, and to a lesser extent Privateer Press games. Nope, then I was able to write it of as a quaint byproduct of those game systems... but sadly the infection has started to spread. I think part of this is due to the large numbers of migration we're currently witnessing away from Games Workshop to other systems, and certain gaming 'hang ups' are coming with those refugees. I first saw it infect discussion on Malifaux, then it filtered into Kings of War, which if I'm honest didn't surprise me. I wasn't totally surprised to hear it filter into discussion on Spartan Games products too, I will however be concerned if I see it mentioned in the same breath as Infinity.

Ask yourself this question, when you set up to play a game do you want to win? Not whether winning is the only thing, or most important thing, just simply whether you want to win. I think if you're all honest, barring the odd occasion, we all want to win. For some that will be more important than others, but we are all innately programmed to have a competitive edge. We might choose to compete at different things, best painted army, best conversions, best list, best on table tactics... whatever! We all like to win. It is very rare though that this desire to win becomes all consuming and could be fairly described as an obsession that the monicker WAAC implies. We're talking about a serious psychological disorder here people, so next time you think to call someone WAAC think about it for a second. Is the person you're about to label actually just a competitive person? Maybe it's just that they're better at the game than you? Hell yes, it might not be fun to play against them, have you just considered the very real possibility that what you think is a WAAC gamer is simply as asshole?

Take that you WAAC mother f@$&er

Conversely just because I like reading Black Library novels and have a man crush on Drizzt doesn't mean I'm a FAAC gamer. The fact that I often paint my armies to represent certain fictional characters doesn't mean I'm a fluff bunny either, or some totally inept fool who knows nothing about winning games or playing hard ball. Just ask my regular opponents if I'm anything but competitive. No it means I'm a rounded person, with shock horror multiple facets to my personality. I'm way more complex than these two simplistic bloody positions thank you very much, and I'd guess the vast majority of you are all way more complex than that as well. So I'm going to introduce the concept of normal distribution, sometimes referred by geeky types like me as Gaussian distribution. It's a continuous probability distribution that actually produces what is known as a bell curve on a graph, a bit like, well no, exactly like this:

It might not please you to know this, but sadly the vast majority of us are normal

As you can see the majority of any population will fall within the two central columns, or blue sections, 68.2% to be precise. The red sections add a further 27.2% onto the total bringing the population up to 95.4%. The two extremes of any population are normally mathematically small in comparison, totaling 4.3% of total population. However, I'm going further, I'm suggesting that so called WAAC and FAAC gamers are so bloody rare that they fall outside of the standard deviation range and are outliers, sitting in the complete extremes on this graph. They're not even represented on the graph, they sit in the remaining 0.3% of the population, statistically insignificant! Just like any chuffing idiot that deems it necessary to use those bloody terms to describe all gamers, or even most gamers.

Anyone who therefore tries to break the entire hobbying population  into these two categories is guilty of the sorts of crass oversimplification that are normally reserved for religious observations and explaining things to toddlers. We're not any of us toddlers, and hopefully our intellectual capacity allows us all to think beyond such simplistic dichotomies. But, more importantly I just hope we're all far too smart to ever think we're able to give others accurate labels, no mater how detailed or how many stratification's any labeling system has. I was once told that we label things to try and make sense of the world. The exact same person then told me in the next breath that the world still made no sense no matter how many labels we gave things, and as such we should just stop labeling things. I think he had a point and as far as trying to understand something as diverse as human bahaviour or motivation, and indeed our hobby with such simplistic labels is a very difficult thing to do. Besides how would it enrich any of our experiences if we could? I don't think it would, so why bother? There are just people you like gaming against and people you don't, maybe even people you're indifferent too!

Let this article serve as a warning to all those out there who think that binary arguments and classifications have any relevance to real life, they don't. They only serve to show how utterly piss poor your understanding of a situation or topic actually is. So if you too are fed up and pissed off with people using such simplistic arguments within our hobby then follow my example and use maths to win the argument. Most people are scared to death of maths, and quite frankly don't understand it. I've found that the use of maths such as standard deviation, population maths etc is normally enough to get these people to shut the fuck up! Such stupidly crass classifications have to be challenged wherever and whenever we find them because it has a stupefying effect on the broader hobby and just clouds everything for the vast majority of the sensible gamers out there. That's you guys who read this blog, I believe all good gamers have a number of solemn duties:

1. To promote a healthy hobbying attitude and not be exclusive or superior but welcoming
2. To introduce new people to the hobby and experienced gamers to new product
3. To tackle falsehoods within the hobby wherever we see them

It's not a big ask of most of us I think, I'm sure the majority of you on here will be doing them already without even realising it. Peace out!

Ps. Winners look like this, do you want to be like this?

PPs. I've had an email off of a friend informing me I've been more anti-WAAC than anti-FAAC, so here, do you want to be a fluff bunny?