Swedish Defence University
Organization2 reports
2 reports, presentations and talks by Swedish Defence University in the Game Industry Library, the newest “Missing in Action: Professional Wargaming in Game Studies” (2026).
Documents
Whitepaper2 pages
Missing in Action: Professional Wargaming in Game Studies
This paper argues that professional wargaming, the institutionalized use of games by militaries and defence organizations, is a major yet underexamined object of game studies inquiry.
- Professional wargaming, the institutionalized use of games by militaries and defence organizations, is identified as a major yet underexamined object of game studies, which has focused far more on entertainment games and the military-entertainment complex.
- The paper argues that professional wargames do more than represent conflict: they encode assumptions about rationality, technology, identity, and geopolitical order that shape how future conflicts are imagined, prepared for, and managed.
- The paper is an argumentative, agenda-setting intervention rather than an empirical study and presents no new data on any specific military institution.
Swedish Defence UniversityJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Gamechangers of 40k: Professionalization and Commodification of Warhammer 40,000
This paper examines how the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargaming community is undergoing professionalization and commodification, with players, organizers, and content creators increasingly turning their hobby into paid work.
- The paper argues that Warhammer 40,000's competitive community is professionalizing and commodifying, with players, organizers, and content creators increasingly turning their hobby into paid work, alongside rising sales and revenue for parent company Games Workshop.
- With the 2020 edition's unified ruleset, Games Workshop absorbed much of the competitive community's previously self-organized work on alternative rulesets, sometimes at the explicit request of community leaders.
- The authors interpret this absorption as the community actively participating in the commodification of play, consolidating the player base while reducing community control over how the game is played.
Uppsala UniversityJan 2022