In a 2025 post courting retail partners, Games Workshop boasts of their range of 14 different miniature-based ‘games systems’ (GW 2025); the post also mentions how their hobby materials (e.g. Citadel Paints) are the ‘ideal complimentary product’ to said games.
Here, I argue that GW is wrong: this hobby material isn’t merely complimentary to, but in fact partially constitutive of, an additional Suitsian game (Suits 1978, 2023).
I begin by explicating Suits’ account of games, where ‘playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ (Suits 1978: 43). For Suits, playing a game requires (i) a prelusory goal, an end that can be understood and achieved outside the game; (ii) lusory rules, which permit inefficient means while also forbidding the most efficient means of achieving this goal; and (iii) a lusory attitude – one must accept rules because you want to engage in the activity of pursuing the goal in the restricted way.
Next, I indicate how hobbying often satisfies these criteria. For example, a hobbyist’s prelusory goal might be to have a miniature that looks like so. Their hobbying activity will be governed by rules that permit less efficient means (e.g., use specific painting techniques to produce the desired mini) while also prohibiting more efficient ones (e.g., don’t just buy/commission a painted mini). Finally, they accept the challenge of behaving according to these rules because they value the activity that makes it possible – i.e., they have a lusory attitude towards the hobbying. Hence, hobbying itself is often a Suitsian game.
Finally, after briefly dismissing some objections, I conclude by highlighting several goods that hobbying might deliver which are distinct from any created aesthetic objects. Specifically, following Nguyen (2020), I articulate four categories of goods – intrinsic striving, extrinsic striving, intrinsic achievement, and extrinsic achievement – instances of which hobbying can (and often does) deliver. This helps explain why many hobbiests are happy to “play the hobby game”.
The upshot is that, frequently, hobbying itself is a game. Two knock-on consequences are that (1) GW mis-counted the number of games they sell, and (2) those of us who only hobby are “playing” Warhammer too.
Author bio
Nathan Wildman is associate professor in the Philosophy Department at Tilburg University. His work spans metaphysics, logic, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics. He is especially interested in issues concerning fiction, digital aesthetics, and the foundations of modality.
