The Houston Quilt Festival just passed. It is an enormous festival dedicated to quilts and quilt making. It fills an monstrous convention center in the heart of downtown Houston. I visited in 2009 and the crowds were overwhelming. I have never been to a gathering of hobbyists as large.

Miniatures wargaming will never achieve that level of support and acceptance. HMGS conventions may seem big but they do not come close to the quilt festival. My own sense is that quilting affords a level of respectability and relevancy that miniature soldiers lack. A finely made quilt is a work of art or at the least a display of quality craftsmanship. It affords its users a facility for expression whether it be through abstractions or sad eyed cats. Quilting is a form of communication.

Miniatures wargaming is a rather bizarre form of conflict clinging to the most violent forms of physical interaction while summarily distancing itself as much as possible. Supposedly, there was a club that once tried to simulate war by smashing any figure that became a casualty. The experiment ended quickly. Violence, real violence has no place in wargaming. Miniatures wargaming is about play. One can admire the brightly painted armies, the historical accuracy, the flights of pure fantasy or simply the madness of being in a room with thousands of toys. But violence is viewed from a very safe distance and the casualties swept up from the table are lovingly packed back in their boxes to await the next conflict.

There is one odd thing about the quilt festival. Almost all the people visiting were women. By contrast, if one strips away the RPGs, wargame conventions are mostly visited by men. Perhaps this is a holdover of sexual stereotypes imposed by a culture that places too much stock in them. Hard to say. I cannot recall a time when I was not attracted to toy soldiers but even now could not sit through a football game. I do not feel myself bound by any cultural constraints on my behavior. It is also unlikely that I will start a quilt anytime soon.

Which is to say that gaming is ultimately a social experience. Sadly, this has too often involved board games since relatively few people collect miniatures but ultimately, I end up at a convention somewhere. Even so, I have fond memories of playing board games as when an over enthusiastic player in a 3-player game got into some strange death match with another player and left me virtually the only player on the board by game turn 3. Easy win.

At the moment, I live on the edge of nowhere so everything has changed but I look forward to a return to HMGS or any other convention. In the meantime, I continue to paint and paint and paint.

I sometimes think that with responsibilities bearing down, games are an escape. And as I make a last mad dash to the weekend, it seems as if life has become one long mission of avoiding responsibility.

But the reality is that wargames are for when you can afford the cost, cost in time, cost in energy, and whatever costs accrue for devotion to a game for a few hours. I find that when responsibility looms, when stress bears down, I head towards the mindless simplicity of a computer game or an old movie, something I can participate in without needing to do much of anything. I can play computer solitaire till the sun rises. It gives me the illusion of doing work.

But wargames are for happy times. They are never remotely like work. Which comes around again in the simplest way to the purpose of writing, to focus on wargames and to focus on miniatures, to turn away from the TV or pacing the floor or staring fixedly at the wall and pay attention to something worthwhile.

I have so far learned that photography lights would have been a very good thing, that I have more stuff packed away in boxes, and that I love my wife for her special tolerance. So things are off to a good start.

This is the question I would like to answer. Why are there cavemen, astronauts, cowboys, robots, and more peering out of every corner of this tiny apartment?

After my grandfather died, I recall visiting the garage of his tiny bungalow and finding it packed with birdhouses, fashion wigs, and copies of Popular Mechanics dating back to 1905. After my father died, we found that he had collected over 200 guns so that their collective weight was causing the floor to buckle beneath the tiny second floor room where he stored them.

Now I have to face my own obsessiveness and understand why there is a box with a 15mm Assyrian army sitting on a bookshelf or why another box contains about 2 dozen Napoleonic warships or why one closet is stacked high with games. Most remarkable of all is that I have not played any of them for quite a while.

So here is my exploration of my obsession with whatever information I can provide for people who follow this path. On the plus side, it has not been like collecting stamps or coins where a single piece could cost more than I could earn in a lifetime, nor is it like collecting old cars where even the largest home will not provide adequate space. It has been a rather solitary experience. If my wife ever boasts about my painting or my musicianship, she never mentions the bags and boxes of figures all too readily visible when a cabinet or closet is opened and no one ever wants to know more about it.

So in the end, I may be my best audience.

OK, the photo lights are gone, a refund is not coming, and it is time to post something. The weekend is coming and by that time, I hope to have a more substantive measure of pages.