Blood for the Blood God!

This project explores the transformation with gods and religion in the Warhammer 40K universe and focuses on how Warhammer 40,000 players interact and understand the gods and religions present within their gamenvironment.

This gamenvironment includes: miniature wargaming, model hobbying, video games, engaging with lore and instructional content in a variety of mediums, and interacting with other players (both online and offline). The aim of this project is to develop new knowledge and understanding in these relationships. 

Warhammer as a site of study provides rich research material across multiple engagements. Warhammer 40,000 (or 40K) is a miniature wargame produced by Games Workshop. First appearing in 1987, 40K entered its 9th edition as of July 2020. According to hobby magazine ICv2, Warhammer 40K is the highest selling miniature wargame in the world (2022).

Religion is being played, engaged, and interacted with, in addition, the players own belief systems could be challenged by the clear satanic, Catholic, or cultic or atheistic overtones within the lore. The field of religion and gaming has to date largely focused on video gaming, despite the growing popularity and complexity of miniature and tabletop games.

In addition, by focusing on the religious manifestation or development in a single game, the depth of the gamenvironment and the unique experience of the player is overly simplified. By contrast, this study aims to explore a more realistic picture of players and how they engage with Warhammer 40K in the context of religion.  

As the range of religious exploration and gameplay within the 40K universe is so wide and diverse, this project will contain multiple methodologies to best engage with the players’ gamenvironment.

The key research areas are the potential of a meditative flow state experienced during the painting of miniatures and the sacred experience, meaning making, and othering that occurs for the players themselves within the universe that correlates to a functional definition of religion.

While gameplay is a large part of engaging with Warhammer and religion, players often spend hours painting the models in deep concentration. This experience itself shares many similarities with academic work on meditative practices and flow states that represent additional dimensions of religious and spiritual player experience.

Part of this research will be conducing interviews and questionnaires with painters and understanding the nature of this flow state. Warhammer players engage in a rich gamenvironment that is suffused with religion in a number of forms, and this is worthy of academic study.

The project will involve research into esoteric spirituality and magic, common themes in the Warhammer 40K lore at the Centre for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, as well as a visit to the Giorgio Cini Foundation to explore meditative flow states in more depth and collaborate with academics at the center.  

Project point person: Tara Smith, Postdoctoral Fellow, Spirituality and the Arts