The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play

Abstract

Games Workshop is a juggernaut in the world of tabletop games and miniatures with a long history and near total market dominance of the wargaming industry. However, over the last decade Oldhammer, a game and hobby community, has sought to contest this hegemony by rejecting Game Workshop’s 21st century games, miniatures, and aesthetics in favor of an attempted return to an earlier vision of the Games Workshop hobby and an accompanying possibility of alterity. We explore how Oldhammer uses memory and craft to return to the conditions of possibility which allowed for other possible tabletop futures and even the potential for resistance. In doing so, we draw on theories of memory, craft, and nostalgia to show how Oldhammer, however imperfectly, contests corporatization and control.