One who plays wargames. Wargamers are sort of like roleplayers except that: 1) They believe games have WINNING CONDITIONS and 2) They only play the part of the characters involved when they're not losing. And 3) They don't play all the characters because then they'd have to have 10,000-part multiple personality disorder...
{And, controversially, 4) They read rulebooks while playing because they don't spend their lives memorising them...}
You can tell miniatures wargamers by a number of signs:
vertical scars down thumbs is a good one (from snipping things off the sprues they come attached to and not stopping the knife in time.)
paint stained fingernails.
fingers coated in cyanoacrylate.
A tendency to hang on to things other people would consider rubbish muttering something like "bit of work, that'll make battlements..."
I have no idea how you distinguish board wargamers from the normal population.
Ahh, the sound of dice being rolled, and rolled again, and rolled some more, and then rolled a few more times. Must be Tau vs Greenskins in 40K.
Oh, by the way -- this page is not 'off topic," as some would claim. Computer speds are likely to be gaming speds as well. The amount of overlap is astonishing. Plus, gaming principles in general are useful for a lot of systems analysis. And anyway, it's fun.
Wargames are complex abstract formal models of real or imaginary worlds. Programmers tend to enjoy playing with such things. Playing wargames doesn't require the social skills that a lot of social activities do, which is another reason that a lot of programmer-types gravitate toward them. Turn-based games have a cycle of planning, execution, and analysis that many programmers (and managers) find more intellectually engaging than the "real-time" kinds of games.
By the way, what's a "sped"?
Presumably a variant (or misspelling) of 'spod'. A Spod is a Geek/Nerd. I haven't heard it used in anger for a few years though.
I always heard it as "sped," so that is what I have used for the last twenty years or so. Maybe it was local to certain parts of the country (USA).
"Spod" is also a verb, as in "I'm just off to the lab to spod". It means you're about to go and waste some hours doing non-productive things like playing XPilots, reading news, writing email or web-browsing. There's an air of pointlessness to it as well... -- Katie Lucas
See original on c2.com 