As the setting of Warhammer 40, 000 has matured it has presented the threat from within as its most insidious threat. Cross-media stories have been told about the Inquisitions work against such threats. Given the quasi-religious setting the insurgencies that are featured in the game and lore are primarily based around cults, either ‘chaos’ or ‘xenos’. Such themes have been explored primarily in the fiction of the WH40k setting as well as the main game and the related roleplay games and similar licenced IP.
In the iterations of Warhammer 40,000, since the introduction of the Crusade rules it has been possible to play a series of linked game following a Genestealer Cult army as it takes over a planet and then a system.
My main PhD thesis looks at the representation of counterinsurgency in games; this presentation will take the opportunity to examine this how insurgencies have been modelled in a fictionalised setting and what parallels can be drawn to real life examples. Using the lens of the theoretical body of work on insurgency (Mao, Guevara, Marighella) and counterinsurgency that grew after the Second World War (Thompson, Nagal, Trinquier, Galula). The tactics that have been illustrated in the fiction may seem extreme and at odds with the prevailing modern thinking on COIN practice, but parallels can be drawn. Furthermore, distinction will be drawn between the fictional narratives/ lore of the game and the implementation of the background in the tabletop game in terms of the mechanics and representation. The dialectic between the two is notable as what is modelled in the tabletop game is very different, in terms of statistical likelihood of a given event happening and its frequency in the fiction.
Author bio
Pete Sizer is a PhD student at Bath Spa University looking at how representations of guerrilla warfare in counterinsurgency has been modelled. A gamer for over 35 years he hold a BA in History and an MA in Military History.
