do I have to avoid talking about Warhammer 40k at work?

A reader writes:

My job has a weekly meeting where a different employee each week presents to our group about what they’ve been working on for the past few months (academic lab meeting). The group is about 30 people and includes our boss/PI and everyone else in the lab group.

There’s a tradition where the first five to ten minutes of these hour-long presentations are devoted to photos highlighting cool things from our personal lives. Almost everyone uses this time to show photos from things such as vacations, hobbies, hiking trails, their children’s school events, etc. I think it’s a cool way to connect with my coworkers and I think everyone else feels the same way.

My issue is that I spend most of my time outside work on a hobby that toes the safe-for-work line and I’m curious if it would be appropriate to talk about. I spend a lot of time playing a game called Warhammer 40k. It involves building and painting miniatures (like building a model train or a lego model) and then putting them on a table and rolling dice to have them act out different scenarios (like Dungeons and Dragons). I often travel to large tournaments with my team to compete in this game against other people like in a traditional sport.

The issue is this game is based on fictional sci-fi violence. The game is very explicitly about fighting, and the aesthetics of the game include heavy use of sci-fi guns and sci-fi swords. It would be impossible to talk about this hobby without at least somewhat referencing gun violence being used in a fictional war setting. What are your thoughts on including this hobby in a semi-casual work presentation? I know some of my coworkers would find all this pretty neat but I’m not sure about everyone else, including my boss.

Yeah, you’ve got to nix all mention of guns and instruments of unique, brutal death (which my husband tells me is one of the things the game is known for).

But there’s got to be a way to talk about it in broad terms without zeroing in on guns and deaths, surely! You can reference “battles” and “warring factions” and the building of miniatures and traveling to tournaments and what Wikipedia tells me are supernatural monsters without talking about actual violence. The miniatures angle, in particular, might be interesting to people. (Do you paint them? How do you build them? Etc.)

Plus, even if it didn’t have violence, you should still keep it pretty surface-level, because no one really wants a detailed account of someone else’s gameplay unless they’re an avid fan of the same game, and maybe not even then.

I’d also mix it up — you don’t want this to be your topic every time (and people may really zone out if it’s more than once — but that’s probably true of other people’s topics, too). I don’t think you need to avoid it entirely, though, as long as you don’t focus on the specifically violent elements.

(Caveat: I’m writing this as someone who had never heard of the game until I received your letter. If it’s known among people who know games as one where the violence is the entire point — to the point that people who know the game would question your judgment for raising it there at all — then you should ignore all of the above and not use it in this context.)

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