The idea of representation in games, particularly Wh40k.

[AranaszarSzuur]

Noticed it when watching Snipe and Wib a lot. I find it sort of bizarre because to me it was always about me as an artist or a reader, not me identifying with characters. Like to me, miniature wargaming is very objectifying hobby. It's about creating and using these miniature objects from a sort of godlike perspective.
Not to mention that any character that would represent me would be unplayable due to abysmal physical stats XD . Snipe seems to be some kind of a R.E. Howardesque character, though, as she's apparently a muscle girl and a boxer. Maybe it somewhat blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.

And tying it to the Oldhammer theme, since back then armies were smaller, did back then people commonly think about miniatures as of representation of themselves? Or is it some kind of a marginal thing?

 

[symphonicpoet]

I've probably always written my friends and family (and indeed myself) into my stories. And miniatures gaming is another kind of story to me: a tiny theatre of sorts. My first models were trains and airplanes, and I always wanted to write my friends into that too. I briefly had a railroad named after my dad's favorite road, a couple of childhood friends, and my great grandparents' home town. When I started playing 40K my first chapter made reference to my grandfather's unit from WWII. (He was in the 1st Marine Raider Batllion, so . . . Imperial Marine Raiders it briefly was. They even had a skull logo in real life. Very metal.) These days I rename my friends, but they're still there. Jean Kingbird with her colorful hair is January "Colorado" Rex-Avis and her son Aaron Z.is Arthur Zanzibar Rex-Avis, for instance. A friend who goes by Stan Dandeliver online is Sir Stanley Ursaline Drakemore, Royal Order of the Flowering Lamp. (ROFL, or the Lamplighters, informally.) And yes, I think of my avatar here as a sort of miniature me. I don't really look especially like that. He's heroic and dashing and handsome . . . and very well armed. But I do sometimes dress a bit like that. And the general coloration is close enough. It does mean I tend to play systems where folks don't "die" very much. (Who wants to risk their friends ending up dead in their story?) So . . . yeah. I "personalize" my miniatures. Or miniaturize my peeps might be a better way to put it.

 

[Eric]

For me I don't think I ever thought of the models as representations of myself or friends. I find Fantasy and SciFi are much more about pure escapism so I'm not sure I'd actually want to tie them back to my reality in any way. I expect some RPG characters I've had integrated some of my personality traits despite my best efforts. Wargaming I don't think so and I don't know what it says about me given that my Fantasy armies back in the day were Undead and Orcs/Gobbos! In general I've always much preferred the GM and world building aspect of the games, and I'm not sure I should explore in too much depth why the god character is the one that I gravitated to and associated with!

 

[Plaiecivile]

I used to play a lot of Warhammer Quest and there was that specific barbarian I had modified from a metal maraudeur which had the exact equipment my character was usually wielding. I think I played this character for over 4 years until he became to strong and became the enemy to our other games. I guess he was some sort of an idealized version of "what if I was a barbarian" from my teenager perspective back then.

For sure, anytime I would use it in warhammer fantasy as a chaos champion, we would always joke around when he would die or flee and because I would impersonate him giving commands and insulting the other champions in units facing him.

I could say the same about my friends back then, where the one playing the dwarf actually had a dwarf army and so on. That was a lot of fun!

 

[Outsider]

I remember when I was young I liked the idea of having some miniature as a representation of 'yourself' albeit in a fictional context, basically an avatar in which your will was present in the world, but not neccesarily reflecting yourself either in personality or appearence or such. After all, a 12 year old boy could hardly be represented on the table by a grizzled warrior noble or a dark champion of the Gods. I never really did anything with it though, mostly due to being more enarmoured with the setting and the general concept itself and lacking any real means with which this could make more contextual sense. I didn't play any campaign games and it's hard to try and project yourself into a fantasy world when your opponents just wanted to play Meeting Engagement tourney style over what terrain you could scrape together and put on a classroom table for an hour and thirty minutes. The fancy came back with Mordheim and such, but again there were stronger concepts to base forces and characters on than just being me. When I did roleplaying I expressly tried to avoid making characters that were just me but as a fighter or a wizard or such (and not just because I haven't actually played a lot of fantasy RPGs, enjoying SF stuff more in that field) as to better adopt a role and take on a new personal roleplay wise.

 

[daddyorchips]

when i was a kid i liked to have imagined-me as a character... whether that was ork me, space wolf me, chaos daemon me, high elf me, etc etc. as a grown man in his 40s i would never do anything like that, of course.