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What Warhammer taught me about football Whether in politics or football, we create narratives about chance events

These little plastic soldiers have a few lessons about life to share. Credit: Warhammer Community.

These little plastic soldiers have a few lessons about life to share. Credit: Warhammer Community.


July 13, 2021   7 mins

Presumably like me you spent the weekend glued to your screen, desperate for news of the game. Yes: at 6pm on Saturday night, the new edition of Warhammer 40: Kill Team was announced!

Warhammer is a game of dice. You make little armies of plastic figurines, paint them up, and then take it in turns to move and shoot, rolling the dice to see how well your little chaps do it. I used to play it as a child; then, 25 years later, blessed with more disposable income and burdened with less social shame, I took it up again

Since then, to my slight surprise, a little group of my friends has taken it up as well, dads in their late thirties and early forties, some of whom played in their youth, some of whom did not but who have obviously been closet nerds for decades. We play Kill Team, a smaller, faster version of the game, with only a dozen or so models on each side; the real Warhammer 40K could have 50 or more and might take four hours for a game, and we have jobs and families.

The idea is simple enough – your Necron Warrior’s Gauss blaster might shoot 24” and hit on a three, so you measure the distance, crouch down to see if it can see its target, and then roll. Then, if you hit, you roll the other dice to see if it does any damage. Or for your fang-toothed, green-skinned, cleaver-wielding Ork Boyz, you might roll to see if they successfully charge into combat, and then roll again to see how many times they hit their opponents.

The game is all about dice-rolling. It is explicitly random – dice are the archetypal random-number generator. The game is about understanding and managing randomness, about surfing uncertainty; the skill is in navigating the luck. Your big, tough Terminator has good armour; you can probably expect him to shrug off most shots from normal guns. But if you get shot enough times, you’ll probably roll a few ones. Do you dare put him out in the open where everyone can see him, but where he can quickly close with the enemy and do the most damage? Or do you try to sneak him around behind cover, which takes more time but is safer?

We struggle, sometimes, with randomness and uncertainty. We struggle with it in the sense that we don’t enjoy it – we don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. We struggle with it in the sense that we are bad judges of how likely or unlikely things are, of thinking in more complex shades than “will happen, won’t happen, might happen”.

But we also struggle with it in the sense that we don’t recognise it: after the fact, contingent facts seem inevitable; randomness dissolves into fate. We judge decisions not by whether they were made using the best information available at the time, but by what actually happened – a mistake known as “outcome bias”. Say I charge my Terminator out into the open and he gets 15 lasgun shots in the face, with three of them sneaking past his armour, killing him: did I make the wrong decision? Maybe – but maybe I made the right decision and rolled a few bad dice. 

Years ago, I used to play poker, very occasionally and very badly: I tended to get drunk and go all-in on bad hands. Once, I played at a casino against a pro for a feature for the Telegraph. As usual, I played my signature move, betting very heavily on useless cards after a few pints; but for once, I drew exactly what I needed on the river, and won. Very obviously, I had made bad decisions, but got lucky. But from the inside, it felt as though I had played brilliantly. 

I spoke to a financial trader for that poker piece, who uses poker to teach decision-making; he said that in games of uncertainty, like poker (or like Warhammer, he did not in fact say but could have), you can only detect the role of skill over a long time. Even after a new player has played 100 hours of poker, he said, still, “we don’t feel that we have a good handle on truth;” there’s so much noise, so much luck, that the (very real) skill can be drowned out except over the very long term. “If you win a single hand,”, I wrote at the time, “it’s meaningless to attribute it to skill. If you’re in profit after 100,000 hands, you can say with reasonable confidence that you’re a skilled player.”

In Warhammer, too, it feels as though the outcome of the decision is what determines whether a decision was the right one. But these are games of chance – explicitly random. That is, I think, why games of chance are important. Because you know they’re random, it’s easier to detach the outcome from the process. In other areas of life, without the training that games of chance give you, it’s not so easy.

A stock trader might become a billionaire off a few lucky trades. Are they good? We don’t know: millions of traders make trades every day; some of them will be lucky. A company runs a huge profit for a couple of years: is that because it’s well-run? We don’t know; it could just be survivorship bias. Warren Buffet clearly is genuinely skilled: we have years of data to show that. But if someone has one good year, that might just be fluke.

We have an inbuilt need to explain success and failure. And sometimes that’s important. But in some situations, huge outcomes hinge on tiny moments; a dice-roll, in essence, but a hidden dice-roll. The recent Batley & Spen by-election, for instance: Labour won it by 323 votes. In an electorate of 80,000, that’s essentially coming down to a coin-toss. If Labour had lost by 323 votes, it would have been a huge blow to Keir Starmer’s leadership; he might have faced a challenge. But in reality it would have told us nothing different about his success or otherwise.

Or football. As I write this, the memory of England going out on penalties is still fresh and painful; Gareth Southgate is being criticised for bringing Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho on in the last minute of extra time to take penalties, and for asking Bukayo Saka, a teenager, to take the last one. They all missed.

But before the shootout, Jermaine Jenas, the BBC co-commentator, was saying that Sancho was probably being brought on because he had the fearlessness of youth. The outcome was negative, but was the process wrong? As this guy says, in 1996 people got angry with Terry Venables for leaving penalty-takers like Robbie Fowler on the bench; in 2021 we get angry with Southgate for doing the opposite. And it works both ways: at 1-0 up against Germany, Thomas Müller ran clean through after a misplaced pass from Raheem Sterling; he should have scored but put his shot just wide of the post. He would probably make that shot five times out of six; he rolled a one. Sometimes you do.

People then make narratives about it. If the Tories had won Batley & Spen, we’d have been told it was because the Hancock affair wasn’t cutting through, or because “woke” issues were alienating the Labour base. Labour won, so the ground game was strong, or Kim Leadbetter was an engaging candidate. 

Likewise: if Müller scores, our defence isn’t good enough; if Rashford does (and his penalty sent the keeper the wrong way and was only a couple of inches wide), then Southgate’s plan worked. But if you’re trained by games of chance, then you can think: OK, sometimes you roll a one; sometimes the coinflip comes up heads. 

There’s an obvious counter-argument: dice actually are random, whereas football and politics are not. But that’s wrong. Technically, dice are not random: when you throw them, you impart a certain amount of spin, you give them a particular velocity, they will bounce a certain way. The face they show when they land is not randomly determined: it is determined by how you threw them, by the surface they land on, by how sharp or rounded their corners are, by their density and elasticity. A Laplace’s demon, an all-knowing God, could in theory predict how they bounce, limited only by the apparently true randomness at the quantum heart of the universe. But in reality, as chaos theory tells us, tiny changes in the input make it fundamentally unpredictable.

Similarly, tiny, unnoticeable differences in reality can have major impacts on your outcome. David Foster Wallace, writing about tennis in 2006, talks about the minuscule details a tennis player has to pay attention to: the tiniest difference in the angle of the racquet’s face; hitting a ball a millisecond earlier or later. Tennis players repetitively, obsessively hit the same shots thousands and thousands of times in training, so that it is second nature, so they can hit it 999 times out of 1,000. But still, a minor irregularity in the court’s surface can change a bounce; a momentary slip can make a shot fail. The difference between a bad player and a good one is that the good one is more able to control randomness, to put the ball into the area they want to more often. But the randomness is still there. If, in Batley & Spen, a few Labour activists had had to self-isolate for Covid, or if the weather had been different, that might have changed the result. 

If you want to draw conclusions from these things — to say that England should have done X or Labour should have done Y — there are hard limits on how much you can say, from a single data point like a by-election or a cup final. Too much of sports and politics journalism, I think, is finding narratives after the fact, “analysing” events by looking at the results. As in poker, you need more data than a single hand can provide. 

We suck at spotting randomness. The whole enterprise of science is a careful, and only partially successful, attempt to get past our innate human need to see patterns where they often are not. But one way of training your own ability to think about processes, not outcomes, to see the hidden dice rolls behind the events that shape our world, is to play something with real dice rolls. It doesn’t have to be Warhammer; Dungeons & Dragons will do, or poker, or bridge; cards do the job just as well as dice. But I do recommend Warhammer, because you can learn about randomness while also smashing someone to pieces with a gigantic poisonous scythe. Which makes it a lot more fun. I’m going to preorder the new edition.


Tom Chivers is a science writer. His second book, How to Read Numbers, is out now.

TomChivers

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Adrian Burrows
Adrian Burrows
3 years ago

I loved this article Tom Chivers. Best thing I’ve read on Unherd so far. Which, considering the very high standard of writing that is regularly on display, is certainly saying something.

Tom Chivers
Tom Chivers
3 years ago
Reply to  Adrian Burrows

thank you!

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

“Presumably like me you spent the weekend glued to your screen, desperate for news of the game. “

Not me, have not watched any games since the Kneeling began. But I see what you mean,’the game’ haha, but then if one of your nerd friends insisted on kneeling in solidarity with BLM before the first roll of the dice, before the first snake-headed-lazar-ork made its move, what would you all do and say about it, would you booo or cheer, take a knee, tell them we do not do politics ‘in your face’ wile ‘gaming’? That is the question I want to know, the question of randomness of human behavior vs subtle programming fed into one by Social Media and the MSM.
Were Patton and Rommel just two interchangeable guys, (and military geniuses) who had been brought up with different propaganda? Is there nothing but Tabula Rasa and then the liberal/lefty teaching industry and social media and MSM and Entertainment industries form us like wet clay?

It is a hard problem…. but seeing the sheep wandering around with their phones clutched so tightly, or held in front of their eyes wile their thumbs type, I think the Global Elites, few in number, strong in control of media, will end up turning us all into their property, will have us forge our own chains and send ourselves to the gulags we build, just for nothing seemingly – a knee taken here, a statue there, a de-platforming, a doxing…..and we are toast as a society, as a People.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

I’m not convinced either Patton or Rommel were military geniuses. One had a huge numbers advantage and the other was reading his opponents’ signals. Without those advantages it’s unclear either would have been more than a footnote.

Dan Gleeballs
Dan Gleeballs
3 years ago

Fascinating. I always preferred the mental clarity of D&D, which was as much about being in a thriller adventure with a few pals as winning battles against orcs and whatnot. I suppose Fortnite is much the same. These things may not always impart a true understanding of randomness, but they are a chance to laugh with a few of the lads – and to discover who is good and who is bad, the hierarchy. Good clean fun.

Rocky Rhode
Rocky Rhode
3 years ago

Both my sons (now 18 and 28) got into Warhammer in their early teens thanks to my (ahem) encouragement.
They both loved it for a couple of years before moving on to other things. I’d like to think they might return to it at some point as adults.
The author’s point about randomness is well made.

Zac Chave-Cox
Zac Chave-Cox
3 years ago

Excellent article. Reminds me of something I saw a pro Gwent (a digital card game based on the witcher) player say about deckbuilding, that the worst bit of data you can use to determine whether to change your deck is whether you won or lost with it.

ralph bell
ralph bell
3 years ago

Of course ‘Dice Man’ demonstrates this by an experiment to live his live choice decisions by the throw of a dice.
Wasn’t it based on Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy

Zaph Mann
Zaph Mann
3 years ago
Reply to  ralph bell

That’s a fabulous novel

Sharon Overy
Sharon Overy
3 years ago

I, too, was watching the new Kill Team preview on Saturday and will be pre-ordering.

People playing Warhammer (and probably in other games too) often talk about “bad dice”, not literally meaning there’s anything wrong with them, but that the rolls didn’t go your way. I usually refer to whether I’d made the proper sacrifices to the dice Gods – more in keeping with the IP.

I find that, generally, it’s not just randomness that people have difficulty with, it’s the whole concept of chance, probability and likelihood, too.

Also, Black Templars!

wolfiewells
wolfiewells
3 years ago

Thanks, Tom! Great article.
Personally, I find that the more hours I spend selecting, assembling, converting, painting and basing one of my heroes, the quicker he dies in combat…
Like you, I’m looking forward to the new Kill Team. Looks great.

Last edited 3 years ago by wolfiewells
Andrew Raiment
Andrew Raiment
3 years ago

Another interesting and thoughtful article from Tom. Indeed, we are all experts after the event, trying to make sense of it all. With the English football team it has been a longer journey than most people imagine. The players are more skillful on the ball, having adopted a more European approach, with greater emphasis on holding the ball, quick clean passing, keeping the ball on the ground and pressing opponents. For 20 minutes or so this is exactly what England did before the old bad habits resurfaced and Italy started to dominate. Given this, Southgate should have been bolder, especially that 5 substitutions are now available. Rashford, Saka and Sancho would have had more opportunity to turn the game around coming on in the 70th-75th minute mark, Grealish too, may have drawn the foul, creating dead ball options. Southgate put all his money on winning a penalty shootout, an option Italy also favoured.
Other sports have even more complicated gambling related outcomes but based on skilled practices. In cricket, Richie Benaud said “Captaincy is 90% luck and 10% skill but don’t try it without that 10%”. Formula 1 too, how long to keep a driver out on degrading tyres, what are the best tyres and set-up for the car and how might your plans change should there be an interruption such as rain or the introduction of the safety car.
A while ago I read a piece by Nico Rosberg who won the F1 World Championship in 2016 from his team mate Lewis Hamilton. Rosberg could have a given some glib reasons for his success but he attributed it to very small margins, even down to changing his racing gloves to have a greater feel of the car and what it was doing. Drivers and designers are very observant, drivers tend not to think of the “what ifs”, if they did, they might not ever get in the car.

Jon Redman
Jon Redman
3 years ago

Warhammer, D&D, and all things trolls and fairies are for people too lazy or intellectually incurious to master the Renaissaince, or the French and Indian Wars, or Napoleonics, or the American Civil War. They want a world of dweebs, thargs and orcs so nobody can be better at this nonsense by being more industrious in understanding it. There is nothing to understand.
On survivorship bias, yes, absolutely and even Warren Buffett is not necessarily out of the woods. If you have 1,000 guys, make them financial traders and tell them to go trade, then on a purely random basis about a third will make money over a year, a third will break even and a third will lose. If you eliminate the latter third then after about 17, 18 years you’ll have one guy who’s been in the market all the time and never lost money in any year. That guy is highly likely to mistake himself for a financial genius and start putting crazy money behind crazy bets because his gut feel has never been wrong. At that point, it turns out that he is in fact Neil Woodford.
Buffett could be that guy too, except with a comparatively conservative trading strategy and effective management controls over loony bets. He probably isn’t, but the existence of counter-examples such as Woodford casts doubt for me on how good any of these people are.

Geoffrey Simon Hicking
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
3 years ago
Reply to  Jon Redman

Almost all the star wars gamers I know are professionally involved in astronomy, history, or the military*. We could spend all day discussing the imperial navy’s successful if belated integration of hyperspace-capable snubfighters with a battle-carrier doctrine post-Endor…. or spend 2 days discussing the French navy’s convoy protection doctrine in the late 17th and 18th centuries. To what extent were Lacelles and Maxwell involved in the cross-border anti-mercantilist trading undertaken by the likes of Greg and Cunningham circa-1750?

I am currently working on a WW1 boardgame that hopefully will be of use to military professionals for instruction. I also happen to be making models in my spare time of imperial C-10 Seige Towers and Mobile Proton Torpedo Launchers.

Anyways, Warhammer averts the annoying sterile modernist aesthetic of more respectable sci-fi. Spaceships look like cathedrals, space colonies have parishes and churches, it’s quite socially conservative at times.

*Said gamers are also devoted family men in stable marriages.

Zaph Mann
Zaph Mann
3 years ago

I enjoyed this read, right up my alley (I was 20% points ahead of the whole class in Statistics at Uni)…. so I appreciate it but have a caveat.
First let’s take Sterling for example – had some great impacts and scored or caused a couple of goals, he was some commentators player of the tournament. However it’s possible to put a showreel of blunders, missed opportunities and inept control by him together from just this event. So should he (or Mount or Sako) have been playing ahead of say Grealish, Foden or Sancho? Of course it’s hard to know because the latter three bare got any game time.
So the caveat is: Given Tom’s analysis seems to establish no blame for the decisions because the criticism comes after the fact. It’s valid criticism however if it came prior to the facts.
I for one was largely unimpressed by the performances throughout and made the correct criticisms ahead of the outcomes. The only commentator I could find (via youtube) who was more often ‘ahead of the game’ was the usually not particularly profound Steve McManaman