Paperback, 328 pages
Published March 8, 2022 by The MIT Press.
Dry, and a little hard to follow all the named people as, because it’s not narrative, they don’t have any distinguishing characteristics, but very interesting. It asks some questions that I didn’t think were this big, despite being in the hobby for almost thirty years. Would recommend if you’re interested in gaming history or design.
In 1974 Dungeons & Dragons described itself as a set of “rules for fantastic medieval wargames campaigns.” Nowhere in the text could the term “role-play” or “role-playing game” be found. This book attempts to show how that term came to be applied to D&D and the games it inspired, and how the application of that term shaped the discussion of what exactly D&D (and other role-playing games) was, and how it should be played.
The author does this largely through exploring the fanzines of the era, within which a lot of this debate played out. In the process, showing that many of the questions asked by later gamers as to what was the nature of role-playing were being asked by the earliest players, and many of the same answers were being presented.
An excellent addition to the still rather limited corpus of works covering the history of role-playing games.
