Sunday Musings - Hobby Who Now? - By Guest Writer Darren Burrows

This week, we welcome Darren from the Fluffenhammer Community to step in to write a Sunday Musings. If you have any interest in having a go, please let me know

-Adam

I was mid way through one of my sporadic hobby sessions, where I get an idea and can’t relax until it’s done, when I realised I lost my UV torch for some resin work I needed to do. Alas. It was nowhere to be seen - since my desk is a mess of half finished projects, abandoned ideas, minis that I put to one side due to decision paralysis or just plain old boredom. I figured it may be time to clean up a little to see if I could find it. 

Instead. I accidentally embarked on painting every single heresy mini I own. 

And the torch? It was plugged in elsewhere in the room. 

My normal yearly output is maybe 40-50 minis. If I’m lucky, rather than the 130ish I’ve just slammed through in 3 months. Not because I spend a long time on minis. But because honestly, I have a job, I have chores, I have obligations and other hobbies. 

All this to say. I’m probably not the typical hobbyist. But then I find myself asking. Who is? Or more accurately. What is? 

If you spend more than a few minutes on social media with enough of an interest for the algorithms to push hobby and hobby adjacent content into your feeds you’ll have seen many of the same things I have - gorgeous permanent painting studios, wall mounted displays, stunning desk organisers, massive wet palettes, high end lighting… being a hobbyist has honestly never been better in terms of the broad range and choice we have open to us and considering I cut my teeth building airfix kits as a nipper in the 80s? I’ve got enough skin in the game to remember how things used to be.

At the time of writing, I’ve just backed yet another Kickstarter for hobby tools.

We’ve all been here. A company creates a polished campaign around a genuinely good product, wraps it in slick photography and carefully chosen language, then feeds it through YouTubers, Instagram painters, TikTok creators, and hobby influencers until it quietly follows you around the internet.

This tool will solve that problem you didn’t realise you had. It will streamline your workflow. It will make hobby time easier, cleaner, more organised, more efficient.

This time will be different I think to myself and I slam the “back now”. Dreading it, joining the other tools that sit to the side of my desk, buried under projects, becoming another surface. Or just never quite fitting my workflow. 

Of course I choose the higher tier. Like most Kickstarters, it’s framed as the smarter purchase, better value now, more extras, more incentives, more reasons not to pick the cheaper option.

Luckily. This time. I actually know it will be different. 

Since it’s an improved version of a product I use whenever I pick up a brush thanks to it being the only tool to survive the mess and chaos of my desk and thanks to the fact that the creators have been actively engaging with their community to find what actually works  and solves their problems rather than just what looks good in advertising. 

But I have plenty of other products that are just gathering dust. Or serving as place holders for ill fated projects that I cannot bring myself to finish. Or in the worst case, became landfill due to being entirely unfit for purpose. 

By this point you may have noticed a certain edge creeping in, partly aimed at myself and my own habits, but increasingly at the wider ecosystem we as hobbyists exist within.

I’ll say it again: we’ve never had it better in terms of choice, tools, access, and sheer availability. The hobby has become richer, broader, and easier to engage with than at any point I can remember.

But I increasingly find myself wondering: at what cost?

——

As I’ve said, the Kickstarter I backed? The company seems to listen to their community. I’ve already seen a shift in how they advertise based on use case feedback from myself and others like me. 

They’re realising, slowly at first, but more quickly now that the perfect set ups you see online are rarely if ever indicative of the lived reality of millions of hobbyists. 

Many of us likely have, at best, an optional set up - we set up and collapse when we have the time to paint, we squeeze into whatever space is open to us, we hide in small under stairs cupboards, or cold and draughty garages, or… if we’re really lucky - have a spare room that pulls several uses - a sofa bed or bed in one corner for when friends or family visit. Maybe a computer used for work. And possibly a small bit of space set aside for painting, letting us leave things permanently set up. 

In some cases we can expand that to include storage units, or for those who are using more portable set ups we get lucky and can spend money on a high end portable storage solution that holds our entire hobby lives. 

The Facebook comment wars over the benefits of one hobby nipper over another are usually civil, but often break into small periods of rambunctiousness as someone points out that as great as godhands are they’re very expensive vs other options and not so much better in their opinion. Or why GW pots suck and dropper bottles are supreme and on and on. 

Arguing about the hobby or the tools we use has become as much a part of the hobby as picking up a brush and actually putting paint on plastic. 

And at this stage it’s really not surprising. The hobby has evolved and expanded. A lot. No longer the preserve of the quiet nerdy kid who loves planes, or who likes fantasy settings or futuristic wargames, but increasingly now also the domain of A list Hollywood celebrities, politicians, hugely popular influencers and more besides, where it's discussed on panel shows such as Graham Norton - albeit still with a slight modicum of snark, because while the thing we love has become normalised, it can’t be ‘too’ normalised. Certainly no longer the niche, where you used whatever you could get your hands on that happened to sort of maybe work. No, now where the biggest player in the market is selling branded video games, partnering with action figure and cosplay companies or plushie makers and even the likes of Weta Works. The hobby is less a “mere” hobby and more a lifestyle. 

That’s not to say that any of this is a bad thing. 

Painters are advertised to, for the painter they feel they want to be, rather than the painter they are. We’re given myriad apps and websites to support our games. Countless storage and display options to hold our collections safely or show them off proudly as well as getting them to venues where we may have a game or two. I’m not complaining. I have literally never had it better. But I cannot help but feel that much of this is not truly reflective of the reality that many of us exist in. 

Yes. The pristine desks we see in the adverts look incredible. And the same for those we see in the background of YouTube content creators. But for many? They’re aspirational. The thing we could have if we spent a bit more. Or had the space. Or worked in a less messy way. They’re reflective of the hobbyists we want to be rather than the hobbyists we actually are. And that’s…fine. It’s good to have an idea to aim at. It’s good to have inspiration for how things can be. But we do need to remember that what is prevalent online, in slick social media campaigns or painting YouTube videos is not indicative of the vast majority of us. 

At some point, the hobby stopped being a thing we just did and instead became part of our assumed identity, whether we wear it willingly or not, it became an eco system increasingly designed to be inhabited for better or worse. And it begs the question, who is a typical hobbyist? Because right now, I’m not sure I know. I know my weird mishmash of reasonably nice gear, decent amount of space and utter chaos is probably not very representative, but I am near certain that the pristine set ups we see online definitely aren’t either. We’ve all seen enough ‘show me your paint station’ threads to know that there is a very broad spectrum of set ups and tools and palettes and options, ranging from the tiny and impermanent to the extravagant and the almost too pristine to look like they’re being used. 

At some point along the way, the hobby became bigger than the act itself. And I think that’s where I keep landing on this. The hobby becoming bigger isn’t bad, it isn't good. It just is.
We all simultaneously benefit from it as much as we can sometimes suffer for the fact that this has happened, from the sheer range of choice now available, to the rising cost of participation, to the analysis paralysis that comes with endless options, or the quiet desk envy that creeps in when we compare our own reality to the spaces we see online.

We live in a moment where the hobby has become richer, broader, more supportive and expansive than many of us ever thought it might be in the heady days of GWs ‘red era’ which many of us greybeards often like to think of as the golden age, when in reality we barely scratched surface compared to what we have now.

It’s so much more than merely paint on plastic, the joy of winning a game, the bitter bite of defeat or the piles of shame that we all know we should dig into before jumping on the next project, but we just can’t stop ourselves from doing so.

It’s an ecosystem and one we live inside, regardless of if we recognise that fact or that we may not be directly represented by what it’s perceived to actually be.

And perhaps this is why I am  increasingly finding myself asking just who is the typical hobbyist anymore? Because I increasingly don’t believe that what we see reflected back to us online is remotely close to typical. And perhaps the strangest irony of all is that the hobby has become so broad, segmented, commodified and identity-driven that even the companies helping shape it may no longer be able to clearly define the audience they’re trying to serve.

Interestingly, while writing this, a new tabletop miniatures game was announced, this time an XCOM adaptation from Modiphius Entertainment. And honestly, considering it’s one of my favourite IPs, I should probably be overjoyed. Instead, I’m strangely… whelmed.

It feels part of a wider trend; Fallout, Star Wars, StarCraft, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Battlestar Galactica... A growing sense that every franchise, every fandom, every adjacent interest can now become a tabletop product. We’ve seen versions of this before with board games, where licensed IP tie-ins exploded for a few years before the novelty eventually settled down somewhat. But it increasingly feels like tabletop miniatures and hobby gaming have now become the next major space companies want to move into and experiment within.

And perhaps that’s part of the same question I’ve been circling this entire time.

When the hobby becomes broad enough to contain everything, who exactly is it for anymore?