Life in Plastic: Warhammer 40,000 Miniatures, Closure, and the Secondary Worlds of Aesthetic Objects

Increasingly, storyworlds of the 21st century are forged through intertextual narrative practices, whereby transmedial franchises use novels, movies, comics, and video games for multimodal storytelling. However, while textual transmedial franchises have received much academic attention, there is less discussion about how non textual objects like toys, miniatures, or game pieces may expand narrative universes in the same way that a text does 1. I am interested in exploring how such physical objects intersect with the processes of narrative construction by functioning as an intertextual narrative node in and of themselves. Using my case example, the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniature wargame, I consider the ways that the plastic soldiers, monsters, and tanks of the game contribute to an extended diegesis. To examine the intersection of secondary worlds and physical objects, I will discuss how as a small statue, the Warhammer miniature is not simply a game piece to be moved across the table, but also an art object which signifies a world beyond itself through its frozen pose on the tabletop. To illustrate how miniatures simulate a secondary world, I will use Steven Jacobs and Vito Adriaensens’ examination of the theatrical tableaux vivants, wherein the posing of actors as immobile statues suggests “the possibility of life within itself” (Adriaensens and Jacobs 42). Both these frozen actors and the frozen Warhammer miniature signify a captured moment that exists beyond their own physicality; therefore, game pieces not only serve pragmatic game functions, but can themselves extend the fiction of the game itself.