Welcome back once again to Mayday, Miss Marcy!, this week brought to you by the letter T for Thursday! But never fear, no matter what day it is, I’m always here to deliver the answers to your questions exactly when you needed them, as long as when you needed them is the day this is published. I’ll keep a light on for you and your questions, so never hesitate to send them our way.
And, how do you send us questions, you ask? Well, you can do so in a few ways!
Are you interested in having your questions answered in this column? Well, have I got news for you: You can indeed do that, by following the directions below:
Marcy@goonhammer.com
With the subject “Miss Marcy: ”
You are also able to leave comments on the article, as well as use the Discord bot command if you happen to be a member, meaning you now have THREE ways to give me your questions to answer! And now, on to the questions!
Last week we discussed varnish, the color pink, and teaching games (incorrectly). This week, we’ve got three new questions for you to feast your eyes upon, so let’s get down to it!
Don’t Let Anyone Ruin Your Day But You
Dear Miss Marcy,
I love being part of tabletop communities and I’m a member of a couple more niche ones, so I don’t exactly have much “selection” when it comes to finding players.
If there’s anything I find I can count on when a new edition or expansion or what have you comes out, it’s that I’ll be excited and a lot of people will complain. A lot. The negativity that surrounds gaming can be suffocating and really drag down the experience. I find I have to close off social media to avoid getting all melancholy and games often come with a hefty dose of bitterness about changes.
Is there a healthy way to approach this topic? I don’t want to complain about complaining, or alienate the few players I know, but sometimes the atmosphere of gaming spaces can feel utterly depressing. I hear my partner’s spaces for other hobbies so effusively positive and in love with what they gather over, and I long for the same.
Sincerely,
Positivity-Parched Gameplayer.
Dear Positivity,
This is a more pervasive topic and situation than it might initially seem. Many hobbies suffer from people whose hobby is hating the hobby, specifically anything that changes, challenges, pushes, or otherwise tries to create new spaces or experiences in the space. Gaming in all variations deals with this problem consistently, because positioning oneself as a curmudgeon, true fan, “old” vs “new” fan, or any other ability to establish some sense of knowledge or authority in a space becomes a hobby in and of itself. The secondary problem, as you mentioned, is that confronting it often leads to conflict, which can have the effect of detonating a play group or other avenue for your own interaction with the hobby.
However, it is worth noting that these types of people do this because they want to be miserable. There is a difference between venting grievances and concerns and non-stop negativity, and it isn’t really as hard to notice as it seems. If people are simply just being negative and bringing the mood down, they aren’t venting, they want you to be as miserable as they are, or assume that you ARE as miserable as they are, because you haven’t said anything to the contrary. Insular cultures like this grow and fester off of this negativity, and while it may be a controversial hot take, male dominated spaces (like gaming) have this problem in spades.
Your question asks about social media, and I think you already discovered the problem: You need to avoid social media. Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook etc. groups devoted to gaming very frequently trend towards insularity, and you are unlikely to encounter these people in the same way in real life. In real life, you can also have better control of what you say and do and hear; if someone is being too much, it is far easier to say “can we please talk about something else,” or “I don’t want to engage with this,” or “shut up” (maybe not the last one). Online makes this harder because it is vastly more complicated to control the narrative.
As a final note, I encourage you to look for new groups to check for information or share your hobby with. If your primary social online outlets are straight male dominated, consider looking for some groups that are a little less that and see if that helps give you some more positive and diverse output. It is also helpful to just remember that you are in control of your own mood and your own interactions: if going on Reddit (or wherever) makes you unhappy, stop going there. You can find that information in other places without having to wade through the waste.
Winning Mindset Ticket
Dear Ms. Marcy,
I’m struggling with a defeatist mindset in competitive 40K, and I’d love your advice. I play Imperial Knights, a faction I adore for painting, lore, and gameplay, but I often feel like I’ve lost by Turn 2, even when my opponents disagree.
The feeling usually hits after the opening exchanges, when models start dying and my plan gets disrupted. For example, if I commit firepower to kill a key enemy unit and it survives, I mentally spiral, assuming the game is over. I usually play with friends I know from outside of just 40k and they do their best to help me move forward but it doesn’t work.
Now I’m signed up for a GT in two weeks. I registered for fun a couple of months ago, but I’m considering backing out because I don’t want my early discouragement to ruin my own enjoyment and I’m worried conceding too soon will cheat my opponents of a game along with taking a ticket from someone who would have a better time than me.
Thanks for your help,
A Confused Potato.
Dear Potato,
A losing mindset can be a death knell to your own hobby enjoyment in a few ways. The most important is that it prevents you from analyzing the game and understanding it better, instead blaming your supposed losses on something else, and also clouding your judgement. If you believe you’ve already lost the moment you start, you’ve already closed off your mind to understanding the game state beyond “I lost, may as well just pack up and go home”. There’s probably a larger reason for thinking this way that I’m not able to diagnose through an email, but you don’t really explain why you tend to feel this way. Is it because you are so enamored with the Knights that taking hits and unit losses brings you out of their supposed “power” in your mind? This may sound a little odd but follow my logic for a moment: If you are really, really into Knights, and one of them gets blown off the table, it breaks your illusion that they’re huge, nearly impervious mechanized war machines. And, also, the fact that Knights don’t have quite as many units as other armies means that one loss looks a lot more visibly noticeable too.
What I can tell you is that I don’t think you should back out of the GT. You are aware you have a problem, and the problem is mental and related to your mindset, which means it can be addressed. But you will have to try and figure out what makes you want to give up, especially when your opponents tell you that you have not lost; even if they are being polite, that likely isn’t the actual case, and it sounds like you play, or perform, fairly well. The line “it doesn’t work” does tell me that you seem to get into this mood and then refuse to get out of it, seeming to me that you spiral and think that they are just patronizing you. As politely as I can say this, you really need to think about what you are doing to other people when you get like this. Your friends are indeed trying to help you see that the game isn’t over, but they’re also trying to salvage the time they’ve devoted to playing the game, which when you get like this means either you give up, and the game is over (and a waste of time), or they have to coach you out if it (which eats up time).
Without knowing the root cause of your mood spirals, I would say the best tip I can give you is that you should keep in mind that you are playing the game as part of your hobby. You enjoy modeling, painting, and reading, but playing is a component too. If you are ruining it for yourself every time you play, you either need to stop playing and find other ways to enjoy the hobby, or you need to address and confront why you get so upset. If it is because you feel you are ‘weak’ and under performing the Knights, then you need to separate the lore from the game a bit more. And if it isn’t that, then it’s going to take you some time to address it more fully. I encourage you to go to the GT and to try to think of, or develop, coping mechanisms to avoid the behavior when you play. If you do end up going and it repeats, then I think the GT should serve as a breaking point: will you continue to act this way and play the game like this, or will you change? And what does that change look like?
Writing About a Hobby for a Living? In THIS Economy?
Dear Miss Marcy,Lately I’ve been seriously considering trying to break into writing about wargaming and hobbying on the internet. One of my favourite things about wargaming is sharing hobby tips and advice with less experienced modellers online, to help them build their confidence & learn new skills. I’ve also got a background in cultural anthropology and I feel like I’ve got an article or three in me about ways wargamers can use the hobby to learn more about real history and cultures from new perspectives.However, I want to make sure that I’m making useful content for my fellow wargamers! While I’ve written for the internet before there’s a lot of AI slop and bad takes out there, and opinions are like D6s; every wargamer’s got a hundred or so stashed away somewhere.How can I work out if I’ve actually got a perspective worth sharing, and make sure I’m writing about stuff people actually want to read?Kind Regards,Has Tips, Will Travel.
Aside from telling you to consider pitching your ideas to our email, I think you are coming to a point that many people do, which is: “I love this thing, how do I get other people to love this thing the same way I do”? Which sort of goes hand in hand with “let’s start a podcast” in terms of energy, the biggest problem is often not that you don’t have anything interesting to say, but that writing about a hobby becomes either your “job”, or the writing becomes the hobby itself. Writing is complicated and hard, harder than it seems in most cases, which is why you see so much contemptible AI slop and clickbait; why worry about craft when you can just ask an AI to plagiarize something, or get a few clicks by getting a title that makes people look at something without substance.
The third problem, though, is finding and establishing an audience. The age of the blog isn’t exactly over, but it is very diluted. Your writing has to be viewed as something you don’t mind devoting hours to without possibly getting more than 10 people to even look at it, and if you do want to get it published somewhere, you’ll need to go through the process of submitting pitches, shopping around your ideas, producing manuscripts, and then dealing with editors and publication schedules. A lot of this very quickly sucks the fun out of writing, turning it into “work”, not “play”, even if you aren’t getting paid. That doesn’t even touch on some of the interpersonal issues you can run into when it comes to writing and content creation if you aren’t working entirely on your own.
If you truly do want to write about it and feel like you could share that writing consistently with people, well, as I said before, you know where to find us. However, I do want to say with some honesty that we get a lot of pitches and a lot of people that “want to write about their hobby” show up, write one article, and then vanish. My honest thought about this is that they don’t realize how much “work” it actually was, or, once they made their one big article they wanted to make, they didn’t have anything else planned and just sort of fade away. Aside from contacting us, a blog is still a good option. Make a few posts, see if you enjoy writing and updating it, and if you get it to be regular, then that’s great! The second hurdle is finding an audience, or being comfortable with that audience never materializing. A lot of content creators burn out because they feel they aren’t making what “people” want, but you have to make what you want. If other people come to check it out, great. But unless you are putting everything on your writing for your financial future, remember this is an extension of your hobby, and if you aren’t having fun, don’t do it.
