Whatever happened to the Outriders? [Script]

You'll find that there are a few bits here that didn't make it into the final edit. In the case of the comment about events, I removed reference to Historicon and Salute because, actually, both post-date GW and were set up in the 90s (that'll teach me to do my research before I record). And I removed the reference to Henry Hyde because I was worried it would be misconstrued.

Now I am always reluctant to stray into the bottom half of the Internet, but I was intrigued by the number of people commenting on my video about Privateer Press who wanted to tell me I was wrong about when and why Privateer Press’s fortunes began to turn and, look, I wasn’t there. You might well be right. But the comment that really stood out for me was the one that pinned the blame on the cancellation of Privateer Press’s Press Ganger programme.

It prompted me to recall that once upon a time it felt like every miniatures company had to have its army of dedicated volunteers, out running events and promoting their games. And then they seemed to disappear.

So whether the end of the Press Gangers was causal in Privateer Press’s decline or merely symptomatic, it did make me wonder why it was that we saw this tremendous growth, why it seemed to stop, whether any of these programmes are still running today and what we can learn from it all.

And we have to really start with the Games Workshop Outriders.

Not, I hasten to add, that these were the first community volunteers in tabletop games. They weren’t even the first community volunteers in miniatures wargaming. In fact, the miniatures wargaming community is ultimately built upon the blood, sweat and tears of generations of volunteers - teachers, youth club leaders, older brothers, fathers (yes, basically all men, because that was our community in the 1960s, 70s and 80s) who put in the hours to build clubs, to write newsletters, to establish and run events like Salute and Historicon that comfortably pre-date the existence of even our industry’s most capricious gorilla.

And no, I don’t mean Henry Hyde (love you Henry!).

I’m talking about people like Donald Featherstone and - even further back - H. G. Wells.

But it took a corporate entity like Games Workshop to be able to impose the kind of coordinated structure on volunteering in miniatures wargaming that we might otherwise only see directed towards an endeavour with genuine social value, such as a charity or, on the other hand, a religion.

Now, one thing I can’t say for sure, at this point, is when, exactly, the Outrider programme started. It seems certain that it came to an end in 2005 and we’ll talk about why, shortly. But by my best guess, it started in around 1999. And one of the reasons that I’m not 100% certain on when it kicked off is because, despite the programme’s almost legendary status in the history of those who make a secondary hobby of grinding their axe for Games Workshop, the Outriders programme only ever existed in North America. And, as you can probably tell from my accent, I hale from the other side of the Atlantic.

The United Kingdom didn’t need an Outrider programme because our national map is already machine gunned with independent clubs, local events and - most importantly from Games Workshop’s perspective - their proprietary shops, these days called “Warhammer stores” but which, back then, were just known as Games Workshops. Games Workshop was already ubiquitous in the UK and a household name in any household with a slightly geeky twelve-year-old.

But GW was yet to break the States. Much like many a popular music artist, the company had to make that challenging leap from being merely “big at home” to “big on the international stage” and the US was and largely remains the enormous first hurdle that anyone wanting to make that transition has to cut across. But the US presents your average UK high street retailer with a major problem: the sheer mind-boggling scale of how many high streets it has and how astonishingly widely spaced they are by comparison to the same thing in the UK. The whole of the geographical United Kingdom can fit comfortably inside the borders of Texas alone.

So GW took one look at the scale of the task they had chosen to shoulder and realised that they couldn’t do it alone.

Their solution was the Outriders programme: a network of volunteers across the United States and Canada who would run events, teach new players the ropes and organise the competitive scene. And why would they do it?

Well, out of their sheer love for the game, of course.

And… in return for generously valued coupons for money off stock and products from the network of small retail outlets that were springing up behind them. Outriders received a free subscription to Games Workshop’s monthly magazine, White Dwarf, plus what amounted to bounties of a scaling value depending on what kind of activity they conducted, from $75 for running a demo game session, up to $250 for running a full tournament.

Now, you being a wily 21st Century Internet type, raised on cynicism and conspiracies, you’re probably going to spot the big flaw in the plan right away, yes?

And sure enough, people were most likely ripping GW off pretty much from the start, recording demos and events that never happened, claiming the vouchers and then selling on the stock they snatched up sometimes at wholesale price. But if you look at this from GW’s point of view at the time, it was still value for money. If even only a proportion of the Outriders were doing the real donkey work and only a relatively smaller percentage were consistently ripping them off, it was still an incredibly cheap return on their investment for what amounted to a low-key viral marketing campaign.

But it couldn’t last, for several reasons.

For one thing, GW was defeated by the sheer scale of the US. They couldn’t put the old mom and pop gaming stores out of business the way they’d been able to in the UK. A considerable proportion of their US stores, despite being tiny, one-person operations in low-cost strip malls, still failed to pull in more in profits than they cost to maintain. And although a business has to swallow some loss leaders to establish their market presence, GW just wasn’t the juggernaut they needed to be to carry it through.

In that context, the amount of money being thrown down the Outriders drain became an expense the company couldn’t bear and, in 2005, GW formally announced that the programme was ending and - very much in-character for 2005 Games Workshop - that they wouldn’t honour any outstanding bounty vouchers.

As I did some digging around on what little information remains online about this, it seems like GW also announced that the Outriders programme would be replaced with a new one called “Kommandos”... which kind of goes to show how culturally naive they were at the time, because a volunteer group called “commandos” with a capital “K” might be misinterpreted. However, whether because someone had a sudden fit of sanity or simply because the energy was no longer there to try to make it big in America, the Kommandos programme was “coming soon” for two years before being quietly shelved in 2007.

But, as we saw in the previous video, by this time, Privateer Press was firmly on the rise, having released Warmachine Prime in 2003. And as a home-grown, true-blue American miniatures wargame that came pre-packaged with its own pair of cast iron, steam-powered balls - and working in partnership with the US’s pre-existing network of independent games retailers - they were in pole position to conquer where GW had failed.

But whilst Privateer Press started out quite different to Games Workshop’s corporatised mentality, they quickly started to replicate GW wherever they could. That included releasing their own monthly magazine, producing their own range of paints and, of course, starting their own community volunteer plan in the form of the Press Gangers, almost literally picking up where GW left off and recruiting many former Outriders into their ranks.

Privateer Press’s model for the Press Gangers was essentially the same as Games Workshop’s albeit less improbably generous. And from its foundation to its regrettable demise in 2016 it is fair to say that it was instrumental in driving the spectacular growth of Warmachine as the go-to speculative wargame between 2005 and 2014-ish. Every independent wargaming store seemed to want to have a Press Ganger, running events, helping organise demos and acting as the ambassador for the game and for Privateer Press in general.

But unlike Games Workshop, PP’s decision to terminate their volunteer programme seems to have come about through a different set of circumstances.

As mentioned right at the start, Games Workshop wasn’t the first company to have dedicated volunteers forming a part of their profit-making endeavour and another company that did so was Wizards of the Coast. WOTC was and is the manufacturer of cardboard gold, otherwise known as Magic the Gathering, a collectible card game that… No. You already know this, don’t you?

And you probably also know that the competitive scene for Magic was huge in the early oughts. It’s died down maybe a smidgen recently, from its peak at around tenth edition. But it’s still big business. And some of the competitions come with serious cash prizes.

As you’d expect, when there is serious money on the line, the people who organise and run these tournaments are compensated financially for their time. But there is also a network of more casual events and tournaments where the next generation of professional game players cut their teeth - and which rely on enthusiastic volunteers to act as organisers and judges.

And in 2016 a case was brought against Wizards of the Coast, suing them for financial compensation for these unpaid volunteers.

OK, this is a point at which it’s worth stepping away and taking a look at the broad strokes of the law of volunteering in the US, the UK and the EU. And I do mean broad strokes but, in its essence the spirit - if not the letter - of the law is the same in all three regions.

Commercial enterprises aren’t supposed to have volunteers.

Volunteering is based on the idea of working on behalf of organisations dedicated towards some aspect of social good: charities and other non-profits.

But commercial companies are, well, commercial. They are all about leveraging their assets to the greatest pecuniary benefit. So if someone is willing to provide free labour, a business would surely be mad to decline.

Which is where the law really comes into play, because governments are aware that this kind of relationship can lead to exploitation and inequality. The law therefore generally requires that work undertaken by unpaid workers has to meet certain criteria. The minutiae vary, but they fall into these categories:

• Work involving the acquisition of new skills or useful knowledge
• Work that forms part of a portfolio of tasks mandated by a formal course of education
• Work without direct value to the business

The first one is about learning by observing. The second one is a bit more hands-on, but must be about doing a task that a college or university has determined needs to be completed as part of a formal course.

Neither of these is really ever going to apply to a community volunteer in tabletop gaming.

The third one is the one that counts and that’s where it gets tricky, because whether a court thinks that the work of the volunteer has “value” for the business being represented is not an easy call. If a company makes widgets and has a volunteer making widgets and they aren’t undertaking a Bachelor’s Degree in Widget Making, it’s going to be hard to argue that they’re a volunteer.

But what about promotion and marketing? What about, even, aftersales activities like tournaments?

One argument is that a tournament provides no direct value to the manufacturer because the cards or - indeed - miniatures have already been bought. The company’s profit has already been made. Whether hobbyists build, paint and play with the miniatures is, to the absolute bottom line, completely irrelevant.

But the other side of that argument is that the reason the tournament players bought those cards or miniatures at all was in order to participate in the tournament. No tournament? No sales. No sales? No profit. And on that basis, then, the tournament - or demo day or other event - has direct value to the company because the promise of these events in the future was a direct causal factor in the sale of products today: a promise that relies on the labour of volunteers.

There then there’s the question of who directs their work and appraises their performance and how the business rewards that performance. Which brings us back to GW and the Outriders.

The fact that GW could so easily be scammed actually works in their favour, legally. Because to an extent an Outrider didn’t need to do anything to receive the promised rewards. They  were just non-obligation gifts. Any work they actually undertook was, ultimately, incidental to GW’s largesse, undertaken on their own time, at their own pace and in their own way. And no one from GW was coming to check up on them to make sure their investment in free minis was well spent. Of course, as that was largely unintentional on GW’s part the argument might not hold water depending on the jurisdiction in question. But it speaks more particularly to the case of Shaw et al vs WOTC, a class action suit that cited a range of situations in which the work of the volunteer judges was being strictly prescribed by WOTC themselves, with WOTC staff actively supervising and quality assuring their work, even at regional level.

But this episode isn’t about the Shaw case. Suffice to say that, after much back and forth, the case was dismissed in 2018. But the grounds for dismissal were far from insurmountable had the plaintiff been more assertive.

Drrrragging this back to miniatures wargaming, the timing of PP’s decision to terminate their Press Ganger programme coincident with this case hitting the headlines of geek news outlets seems significant. But although it may have been the final nail in the coffin for the Press Gangers, I doubt it was the only one.

Because even if you put the legal question of whether you’re allowed to employ volunteers to one side, you still have to deal with another major issue with using volunteers:

Volunteers are almost impossible to manage.

Individually, I hasten to add, most volunteers are dedicated and selfless assets to their communities. But, in a way, that is the problem. Because if, for some reason, they screw up, the employer has no recourse except to ask them to stop doing what they’re doing, which deprives the employer of their labour but doesn’t save the cost of their employment. When you’re dealing with populations of volunteers, you don’t really give them instructions so much as suggestions, which they will happily ignore if it suits them. And volunteering is also known to create the experience of a sense of entitlement amongst populations of volunteers.  What I’m saying is: volunteers tend to nick stuff.

This is a well-known phenomenon among charities working explicitly on worthy causes - so imagine how much more exaggerated the experience is among groups of people volunteering for a commercial enterprise with no claim to a moral authority!

So who holds volunteers to account?

If we look at the companies that, despite the experiences of Games Workshop and Privateer Press, still use community-based volunteers to promote their games and products, we might get an answer. Chief amongst these are Mantic Games and Corvus Belli.

The first feature that each of these shares is that they’re small enterprises. Oh, sure, you’ve heard of them. But by comparison with Games Workshop, WOTC or even Privateer Press at the height of its early growth, they have relatively small populations of regular players. So the population of volunteers is, itself, relatively small. In a small population, iIndividuals stand out so claims of events organised demos run are easier to validate on a case-by-case basis. Basically, the smaller your number of volunteers, the easier they are to manage.

Size also impacts risk. The more volunteers you have, the greater the odds of something going wrong that ends up in a lawsuit. So to an extent this is a case of risk management. With the number of volunteers kept within manageable limits, you also manage the risk of aberrant events to a low likelihood. This, by the way, is why small businesses are also more likely to get away with shady employment practices. You can afford to run close to the win, legally, when the odds of being sued are very low.

But there’s also evidence that Mantic and CB have studied the history of community volunteers and adapted their practice accordingly. The defined benefits of volunteering are either of negligible value - like T-shirts and badges - or they are abstract. Activities are rewarded with a points system, and although the points can be exchanged for products and freebies the rate of exchange is entirely discretionary on the part of the company. The points really operate as a rating system that tells the company who is investing lots of energy in activity in their local region, thus allowing the company to direct its direct marketing into areas where they know events and demos are already taking place and demand for products, therefore, is likely to be higher.

Is this 100% definitely not “compensation” that would push these volunteers into the category of being workers? No. But it’s sufficiently nebulous that it would probably stand up in court if push came to shove. But I refer you to my previous comments about the management of risk. The odds of a suit are sufficiently small, and the risk sufficiently well mitigated that the company can proceed without losing any sleep.

Perhaps most importantly, Mantic Games and Corvus Belli have an obvious investment in sustaining a volunteer programme because they are still niche businesses in a niche industry who must sustain a continuous marketing effort in order to stay in business. The reassurance of being able to see where, when and in what volume events and activities are occurring with some degree of accuracy is absolutely invaluable to them.

Games Workshop, meanwhile, has grown beyond this need. GW’s intellectual properties have become mainstream. And whilst they may not be as recognizable as Mickey Mouse or Harry Potter, they are a permanent feature of the mimetic dialogue of the English-speaking Internet. That’s not to say that we won’t ever see Outriders again, of course. There are still markets where GW is yet to establish serious in-roads but where they have the potential to do so, such as in BRIC nations and their regions. In a future with greater political stability we might well see volunteer promoters cropping up to provide GW with the same kind of on-the-ground intelligence and feedback. But there will be no universal volunteer programme under GW’s watch in the imaginable future.

As for PP…

The end of the Press Ganger programme was a mess. It came at a time when PP was on a downward slope, having over-extended themselves financially and then salted the wound through a series of cost-saving decisions that damaged their relationship with their one major competitive asset: their US community. But GW has proved that this kind of mistake can be turned around. The only question is whether PP’s leadership has the self-reflection and insight to be able to put together an effective model for community engagement. A volunteer programme could be a really valuable part of such a model.

Finally, we need to come back to the question of who actually holds these volunteers to account and the answer to that is: the community itself. A community volunteer’s credibility is built on other enthusiasts seeing the warcor or pathfinder actually doing the work they’re being rewarded for. It’s the same effect that we see in experiments where, in large crowds, no one will speak up about seeing an assault because they assume someone else is doing something, whereas when there are fewer people around you are more likely to call the police or step in. Smaller communities are better at holding their own volunteers to account than larger ones.

So that’s all I have to say… Wait a minute! What’s going on!?

Hello, Robey. It’s good to see you again.

It’s Bernard! Bernard is my artificial intelligence assistant. She is here to tell me I’ve forgotten something important. What have I forgotten, Bernard?

Perhaps some of your audience is wondering if they could be community volunteers. Given what you’ve said, do you think that’s a bad idea?

No, definitely not! Being a community volunteer is a great idea and very rewarding.

But before you decide to commit to a volunteering programme like the ones run by Mantic or Corvus Belli, you should look at ways to volunteer that support your community rather than a business. You don’t need to be in a programme to help promote tabletop wargaming in your local area. If there’s a local club, they will always need new volunteers to help set up, tidy away, run events, manage membership and all sorts of small tasks.

If there isn’t a local club, you can look at setting one up - but be warned that it’s a lot more work than it sounds. So try to pull together a team of volunteers before you commit to anything.

If you’re going to volunteer, be clear with yourself and your employer what you can and will do and for how long. I think it’s an excellent idea to set a cut-off date for any volunteering - to say “I’ll do it for three months… six months… twelve months”, whatever. Then take a break. Do something else or do nothing.

Although I’ve talked a lot about the problems of volunteers for employers in this episode, it’s also worth remembering that volunteers themselves get problems with employers and a big one is mission creep. Employers will always try to get volunteers to do more, and volunteers should be confident about saying “no”. Don’t let groups guilt you into committing to more than you’re capable of. Set yourself reasonable goals. Stick to them. And if you can’t, set different, more achievable goals.

Volunteers add trillions of dollars worth of uncompensated work to our society every year. They are valuable. But your health and wellbeing is more important.

Thanks for sticking around this long. If you’ve enjoyed this episode or learned something new, please like and subscribe and think about whether you can help keep the show on the road by supporting the Patreon campaign. Link at the end of the episode.

If you love tabletop miniatures games and want to be able to play more without spending hundreds on yet another army, why not check out Precinct Omega Publishing on Wargame Vault, where we sell independent designs optimised to use the miniatures you already own - or to give you an excuse to buy miniatures you’ve always wanted to add to your collection.

In any case, I’ll speak to you again… next time.