I have had a White Dwarf subscription for eleven years, but when it came up for renewal two months ago I let it lapse. "Why?" you ask. Well, it wasn't that I could not afford it, it wasn't that I'd given up Wargames and didn't want a quality gaming mag anymore and it wasn't a political protest against the exceedingly large number of trees which must go into each issue of this rather robust magazine.
The simple fact is the White Dwarf has gone down the gurgler.
Let us examine the magazine in question; White dwarf is the monthly wargames magazine of Games Workshop (for those who didn't know and have stumbled over here from the SF models sections of the site), it's usually about 120 pages long, costs $11 AUD, is very bright and colorful and a complete waste of time. It wasn't always thus, but it seems to have been that way for some time now.
So what is the problem with it? Well, there are several. The average issue will contain one major release for one of the three Game systems GW produce (Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000 and Lord of the Rings), and the magazine will be almost entirely devoted to that release! Recent issues have been obsessed with the release of High Elves with the result that Warhammer 40,000 gamers and LOTR players get one or two articles each. This is a bit annoying as you still pay the same $11 but you get perhaps ten pages.
Then there is the sheer uselessness of the information. It's often patronizing to read as the magazine's target audience is now the younger gamers. (I feel I must point out that most members of my games club are University graduates or students, with a sprinkling of VCE students and the odd middle-aged man.) A lot of column space is spent repeating something said in another issue, and sometimes entire chunks of text are lifted from Army books, Rule Books and Codexes as if the writters have gotten lazy.
Then there is the enormous amount of space devoted to a recent innovation: showing pictures of EVERY component in EVERY plastic kit they release and then telling you how to assemble them and paint them. Now I do not know how many people bought the new Empire spearmen regiment, but I expect it was not EVERY reader of White Dwarf, so why does EVERY reader need to know how to build them? More importantly, why are the instructions not in the box?
Another peeve is the painting sections. These always take the form of 'How to paint or latest hideously expensive special character model' articles, which explain in painstaking detail over numerous pages how to paint a figure. Okay, we need to know how to paint, but wouldn't it be better to teach us techniques which can be used on anything that telling us exactly how to paint Boromir? (Since they have released everything they can think of for the LOTR movies already the LOTR section is very frequently dedicated to showing us all how to paint Boromir, again.)
Battle reports are a key feature of White Dwarf. They show us how the games play and they give us a feel for the forces used. A good battle report can make you decide to buy an army. Unfortunately, the last good battle report I read was about five years ago. There days the narrative element of the game (the most enjoyable and readable part) is suppressed in favor of a blow by blow description of the dice rolled and the rules used. It's very hard to read, you need to understand the rules to understand the text, and it's incredibly boring. The fact that accompanying maps are no longer included in favor of photographs of the table with the occasional arrow to show movement makes it even harder to follow.
Lastly, the tactical articles seem to be repeating the same thing over and over. This is not such a problem as I have been reading for eleven years and there is only so much you can say about tactics before you repeat. Obviously, I've read similar articles before, but other readers will not have done so.
So how does the modern White Dwarf stack up against it's older counterpart? For me, the peak of White Dwarf occurred around Issues 220-250. I can't really pick a peak issue, but around that stage seemed to me the best. (My all time favorite issue is 190, the first one I bought, but the magazine did improve from that point. My love of 190 is purely sentimental.)
What was so good about those issues? Well, they gave each game about the same amount of attention. You didn't get whole issues devoted to Space Marines or some new expansion for LOTR which finally introduced rules to cover all the singing going on (actually I'd probably read that one...) The text did not talk down to you, you never felt patronized, and no matter what you played, you got your fair share or column inches.The magazine used to include articles about the history of the various universes rather than just rules and 'look how cool this new mini is!'. If an article on making terrain was present, it would teach you useful techniques and tell you were to get cheap materials, a far cry from the modern 'buy our product, glue it down, worship the niftyness' approach. They were not always trying to sell thier porducts, it was a magazine about a hobby which thier company happened to supply, not an attempt to ram thier products down your throat.
And the battle reports were fun! You could follow what was happening, they were often told from the point of view of the combatants, or as the story of the battle, not the story of the players and rules.
Lastly, Mike Walker's irreverent articles appeared around this time. Mike Walker, for those who do not know, is a Wargamer from Wiltshire who was often asked to write articles on tactics and how his club played Warhammer. He did this with humour, gusto, and more foot notes than strictly necessary. Even if you didn't play Warhammer (and at that point I didn't) it was always great fun and very entertaining reading. The legend of 'Alan time', the important debate over who would win in a fight twixt Snagglepuss and Scooby Doo, and the world's first comparative chariot test drive all came about in his columns. These days, the magazine takes itself very seriously indeed, no one tries to inject a little humour. I mean, we are grown men pushing around toy soldiers for glod's sake, it's a situation filled with humour!
I miss the old White Dwarf and I want it to come back. The new magazine is nothing more than an expensive and colorful advertising campaign that I pay for but which is not aimed at me. I'm not gullible enough to fall for it's heavy handed tactics, I'm not interested in entire issues with only five pages out of over a hundred which are relevant to me and the internet can provide me with everything I actually need to know, as opposed to the GW party line.
So I've stopped buying White Dwarf, and honestly I don't miss it. If GW raises the magazine back to it's former glory, I'll start buying it again, but honestly I've been telling myself it can't get worse for about five years now, and it always does.
White Dwarf goes down the gurgler.