Review: Playing at the World

When we think of topics that deserve a historical analysis, role-playing games aren’t considered to have much candidacy, being only forty years old. Even if we widened our scope to include the history of the various factors that influenced the creation of role-playing games, from war games to fantasy fiction, that would likely serve only to make such a study overly broad, and thus dilute the main idea…wouldn’t it?

Jon Peterson, author of Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-Playing Games, says no. His book takes us on a fascinating journey to observe various factors that served to ultimately catalyze the creation of a new type of game with the creation of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. This is the history of our hobby.

…or rather, the pre-history of our hobby. While Playing at the World does discuss the immediate aftermath of Dungeons & Dragons’ debut, it is far and away more focused on the elements that led to its creation. Those looking to find a detailed examination of the growth and evolution of the role-playing hobby industry will not be completely disappointed, but they are far less favored than those who want to understand how such an industry could possibly have formed in the first place.

Before we venture deeper into that subject, however, a moment must be taken to discuss the book’s format. Simply put, Playing at the World is HUGE. The book is seven hundred pages long, and even taking into account that roughly ten percent of that is the bibliography and index, there is still a massive amount of reading material here. Beyond the page-count, part of this can be attributed to the small, densely-packed font, making for a high volume of words per page, even before the extensive footnotes are taken into account. While illustrations are to be found, they are comparatively rare.

If the above paragraph makes the book sound intimidating, then it’s doing it justice. This is not a volume for casual perusal, as it lays out its history with rigorous precision (though the author does temper his writing style to be that of a peer, albeit a didactic one, more than a professor). Fortunately, the author had the good sense to break the material in the book down into chunks. Beyond presenting the material in the form of chapters, each chapter is itself broken down into sub-sections, and a large number of those have sub-sub-sections. The effect of this is to limit each block of text to about twenty pages or so of material, allowing the reader to digest what’s here in bite-sized pieces, rather than demanding long slogs through several dozen pages all at once.

Playing at the World divides itself into five broad chapters, each covering a different area of influence for how role-playing games came to be. The first such chapter starts in medias res, as it walks us through the preceding ten years immediately prior to the advent of D&D. Here, Peterson looks at the bubbling cauldron that was the immediate time and place that created a new type of game, with a primary focus on the emerging nature of collaborative hobby-gaming. Here is where fanzines were in full swing, and historical war games were not only widespread, but were starting to make room for their fantasy-focused cousins.

It’s also here that we see the most concrete example of what makes Playing at the World so different from similar works on the history of role-playing games: this book utterly eschews contemporary interviews in favor of studying written materials from the period being observed. By restricting himself solely to what was written at the time, instead of relying on the vagaries of memory, Peterson avoids the natural inclination that historical observers have to white-wash history and pave over the details of what they might deem to be inconsequential or irrelevant. Thus do we get an uncharacteristically honest look at the details of the founding of our shared hobby.

This is a method of research that Peterson retains throughout the entirety of the book, including the second chapter, which is focused not on a particular time, but on a particular mode of inspiration for D&D. In this case, as the chapter title plainly tells us, it is the medieval fantasy genre itself that is under the proverbial microscope. As noted above, Peterson knows better than to examine the whole of fantasy fiction, instead restricting his analysis to the major works (largely from the 1930’s through the 60’s) that had clear thematic elements appearing in D&D, from the the objective forces of Law and Chaos in the works of Moorcock, to the “visitation fantasies” (a person from Earth visiting a fantastic realm, akin to how a role-player temporarily visits such a place in their game) of Burroughs and Anderson, to the unique spellcasting of Vance, among others.

Chapter three is the meatiest portion of the book, both in scope and page-count, focusing on the development of the rules of war games. Indeed, this chapter is more like two chapters that have been amalgamated, as it separates the sections that discuss the history of the development of war games over the last two centuries from those that outline the unique attributes of role-playing game rules (e.g. multiple polyhedral dice, individuated characters, and character progression). This is the section of the book that historically-minded gamers are likely to have some familiarity with, as its here that we hear familiar names such as Reiswitz, Bath, and Zocchi.

It’s only in the book’s fourth chapter that we start to see how the elements from the previous two began to mix. Here, the actual playing of roles is discussed, not in the context of the previous chapter’s focus on rules, but in how that was applied in practice throughout the nascent gaming community. Whereas chapter one discussed the manner in which war games arose as a hobby, here we see the first attempts to actually craft shared worlds, where multiple characters undertook actions that changed the landscape of the game setting for everyone playing. Notwithstanding chapter one’s discussion of Blackmoor, it’s here where we see the first proto-campaigns being attempted.

With all of the formative factors now explored, the book’s final chapter turns its gaze forward to focus on the immediate impact of Dungeons & Dragons. The period under analysis here is quite small, covering roughly the first three years of the game, but the results here are dramatic, as we begin to see how quickly the gaming community – to which sharing and modifying rules was already well-established – began to grow beyond D&D by itself, giving rise to what would eventually become a hotbed of role-playing games to try and satisfy burgeoning demand for new mechanisms for role-playing.

The book’s aim is largely fulfilled at this point, but Peterson has the acumen to present a brief (and make no mistake, compared to the remainder of the book, less than forty pages is brief) epilogue looking over the long-term impact of role-playing games. Here at last we come to the more familiar stomping grounds of role-playing history, from the “Satanic Panic” of the eighties to the Zork computer game to the birth of MMORPGs with Ultima Online. Of course, none of these get more than an overview, which grow increasingly cursory as we approach the present day, but all are acknowledged.

History is attempting to explain why things happened the way that they did, with works of historical analysis focusing on asking these questions in regards to specific times and places. Playing at the World, with its focus on role-playing games, expands on this question to ask not only why RPGs were created in the time and place that they were, but why they contained the elements that they did. It’s in asking this question that the book moves beyond a dry reading of facts (though it is still replete with them) and becomes a genuine examination of the genesis and evolution of the ideas that went on to form an entire new way to play games. It’s there that Playing at the World can be called a truly scholarly analysis of role-playing games.

More than knowing its history, Playing at the World helps us to better understand the hobby that we all enjoy so much.

Playing at the World can be found at DriveThruRPG and Amazon.