The world's first academic conference dedicated to all things Warhammer
“There can be daemons in a secular cosmos, Garviel. Just as long as we understand the use of the word.”– Warmaster Horus, Horus Rising One of the primary contributions of Bruno Latour’s scientifictional text Aramis, Or the Love of Technology, is the methodological conceit of allowing non-humans to ‘speak’. This method of generalized symmetry gives …
This presentation argues that Warhammer 40,000 is best understood not as a fictional setting but as a governed techno-social system: an environment sustained jointly by industrial production, rules governance, publication rhythms, narrative canon, and audience interpretation. Mould tooling, codex releases, balance dataslates, campaign books, and fan discourse are all constitutive elements of the world.
Paradox and hypocrisy are endemic to all of Games Workshop’s worldbuilding. They form a central tenet to a world where a player can inhabit any contrasting viewpoint with their choice of allegiance and collection. To unravel these ideas there is no better place than Noah Van Nguyen’s Godeater’s Son, a novel which perfectly encapsulates Age …
The Chaos Gods represent the most consistent characters across Warhammer properties, acting as dark manifestations of the latent desires and fears of humanity as a species. While some of what are considered the cardinal sins of theologies worldwide can be mapped with relative ease onto these deities, greed, or avarice, presents a trickier conundrum. Arguments …
Warhammer 40,000 was not built in a cultural vacuum. Games Workshop emerged in late-1970s Britain, a milieu shaped by occult revival, chaos magick aesthetics, and the Law/Chaos cosmology of Michael Moorcock’s fiction, and the fingerprints are everywhere: the Warp as a metaphysical plane mapping onto esoteric conceptions of the astral or the collective unconscious, the …
One of the more striking factions in the Age of Sigmar are the Flesh-Eater Courts, an army of ghouls and cannibals that surge forward in a naked mass of flesh, claws and teeth, lorded over by their vampiric rulers. Beneath this simplistic appearance is a deeper system of viral mass delusion, where the ghouls see …
The Orkish language in Warhammer 40K is a stylized linguistic construct designed to reflect the cultural and social traits of its fictional speakers. While not a fully developed conlang, Orkish is characterized by phonetic distortions, syntactic simplifications, and a lexicon heavily influenced by Cockney speech patterns, particularly those associated with football hooligan subcultures. This study …
This paper offers a depth-psychological reading of Warhammer 40,000, in which the setting is interpreted as a modern myth that dramatises and literalises the central tension of the Western tradition, stretching back to its Grecian origins. I use Camille Paglia’s discussion of the Apollonian and chthonic to argue that Warhammer 40,000 symbolically represents the Western …
The presentation addresses the connection between political power and somatic modifications using the example of the monarchy (Imperium of Man) from the grimdark Warhammer 40k universe, which raises the question of the nature and extent of political control over the human body and its use for the purpose of power projection which corresponds to term …
This research presentation explores how videogame communities mobilise to save their favourite games from becoming lost to history using the example of The Return of Reckoning (Return of Reckoning, 2014) as a case study. The key aims are to position live-service games in current games preservation theory and then unpack how the ‘fan-developers’ preserved Return …
Warhammer 40,000 (40K) is the most popular miniature wargame. While gameplay is a large part of engaging with Warhammer 40,000, the miniatures are often bought and painted. These painters spend hours painting the models in deep concentration. Drawing on interviews and journal entries of a participant study of 14 painters over a six-month period, this …
My investigation focuses on the wargaming miniature model as a media technology, defined both as experience technology and as technology for media production. For this purpose, I will briefly introduce a multidisciplinary view of technology currently under development in the MIT (Multimodal and Intermedial Technologies) project at the University of Oulu. This perception of technology …