Pride and Prejudice and being taken in

Since I discussed it last week, I finished Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I enjoyed the experience tremendously, but following the afterglow, I started having second thoughts about my reactions to it.

Pride and Prejudice and an historical novel as mystery

During the last couple of years, I've played many sessions of Regency Cthulhu, a Call of Cthulhu supplement focusing on running scenarios set in the Regency era. More specifically, the supplement calls out Jane Austen's novels. After playing, and during a break, writing a few Lovecraftian pastiches set in that era using a very different version of the character I created for the campaign, I came to realize that I really was missing out by not having read any of Austen's work. I read Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as a kid, and some Dickens, and possibly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, but all of these were obviously not very sharp in my mind. So, in a timely fashion, I decided to start with her classic Pride and Prejudice.

The writing was very good from the start, and the characters fascinating, but the first of three volumes had me terribly confused and unsettled. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take as sensible, what was supposed to be ridiculous as opposed to being read as ridiculous form my modern point of view, and so on. With time I obviously realized that some of the characters are not particularly reliable, but I wasn't sure what kind of acme I could have for making sense of them.

And then, the second volume had a large, clear exposition that made me reassess my entire experience. The exposition added facts that were known neither to me nor to the character to whom it was aimed - and then the character made note of some facts that were familiar to us both, but which we had missed the significance of at the time, but now were shown in a new light with the new evidence.

The facts and what they suggested were not really culturally-dependent - they pointed to an explicit contradiction between someone's behavior and statements and their actions. If I hadn't been so busy second-guessing myself as to my interpretation of the many events and discussions surrounding this contradiction, perhaps I would have noticed it. I felt like in a detective novel, where there's a revelation of what really happened, or who did the crime, and the reader feels like they should have been able to figure it out themselves.

With this in mind, I no longer feel as I did during the first volume, that I wish that I were reading an annotated version of the novel. Instead, I would like, going forward, to try and appreciate novels like this, historical novels that do not begin with an exposition or clarifications to the reader as to the cultural and social significance of what is happening before them, as a challenge, to see if, despite not being familiar with the setting because of its distance in time, space, and/or social and cultural situation, I can nevertheless figure out when something is being hidden in plain sight like this.

I am looking forward to finishing the third volume, and then moving on to other works of this nature. Not just historical novels - fantasy and science fiction often suffer from too much exposition, but some works do gamble that throwing the reader at the deep end will not dissuade them from continuing on, and getting more and more invested in the world, perhaps exactly because they have to work so much themselves to make sense of it.

Console cowboys and arcade aces

On several occasions, William Gibson has noted that his inspiration for console cowboys in Neuromancer wasn't necessarily contemporary hacker culture, but instead the kids he saw in video arcades who became experts at the games, so immersed they mastered these new pieces of technology.

Before video games became a home phenomenon, their greatest popularization was through arcade machines. I, myself, remember spending far too much time and my parents` money on these machines in the 90s, but at least overseas the first wave started in the late 70s, and author Martin Amis wrote a very illuminating contemporary account published in 1982, Invasion of the Space Invaders. It is interesting to see how much closer to the grimy entertainment culture of dive bars, drug dens, and porn theaters. He describes his relationship to them as addictive, and interprets their design in the context of getting as many quarters from players as possible. He then also describes the people who have mastered some of these games, the aces, how they exchanged tips with each other, and in fact spends a third of the book describing tips and strategies for the most popular games. Another third is dedicated to home and hand-held consoles, comparing them with the arcade experience.

Sol Yurick's 1965 novel The Warriors obviously predates the video game arcade phenomenon, but one of the Warriors encounters an arcade full of mechanical games in the same Times Square station in which he earlier has an experience at a brothel, and feels quite at home in that milieu.

This kind of social, ubiquitous but subcultural view of gaming seems very distant now that "Gamer" has been so heavily molded by ads and marketing. Ironic that the "barcade" is in fact a lot closer to the origin of video games as a cultural phenomenon, although it's obviously quite gentrified.

Current and recent reading (June 2022)

I've been suffering from blogger's block for the past few months. To try and break it, I figured I'd go over some books I've read recently, or am in the process of reading:

• The World of Fanzines - A Special Form of Communication, by Fredric Wertham, most famous for his Seduction of the Innocent, which lead to the Comics Code, and made him in many ways an enemy of comics, weird fiction, and the like. And yet, he became a big fan of fanzines as a medium, and writes about them insightfully and appreciatively, even when they satirize him. Cites from a variety of sources, and dedicates the first half of the book to reproductions of fanzine art.
• Sailing - an Informal Primer, by Richard Ulian, is an acquisition from back when I gathered up quite a few books about maritime subjects, preparing for it being a bigger focus of my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I'm glad I got this one - it helps me make sense of description of sailing in fiction, and gives some ideas of the kinds of problems you might run into. Possible seeds for challenges and hazards in games that are focused there.
• The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes - this collection is a treasure trove of classics in the field. It's grouped by subject, and is wide-ranging - which is good, because folklore is very wide-ranging itself.
• Contested Culture - The Image, the Voice, and the Law, by Jane M. Gaines - a difficult read, encompassing two fields I'm not very acquainted with: legal and culture studies. But I'm enjoying my slog through it. This critical look at copyright law and how it relates to the creation of culture, and who gets to be termed a creator thereof, is a nice complement to all my reading about folklore.
• Subterranea - Journey into the Depths of the Earth’s Most Extraordinary Underground Spaces, by Chris Fitch - each one of the vivid studies in this book could inspire a dungeon delve or other underground adventure, from terrifying natural phenomena that either themselves or taken to a slightly larger extreme could become a significant adventuring challenge, to depictions of human habitation below the surface.
• The Complete Wargames Handbook, by James F. Dunnigan - I am starting to feel that I could at least get something out of a hex-and-chit wargame. Also interesting to get some perspective on how an out-and-out board wargamer saw role-playing games in a book published in 1980. A third edition is available online (pdf), although I'm reading a copy of the first edition.
• Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Keeper's Rulebook - the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide was a huge disappointment when it came to helping me do my work as a dungeon master. This, so far, seems to be much better at providing guidance as to how to actually run a game of CoC, although I haven't done this myself yet.
• Apocalypse World 2nd Edition - this edition is supposedly less edgy than the first one. It still has a bit of that left left, but having persevered in reading through a few chapters, I'm already seeing why it's become a classic, as well as a template for a whole genre of RPGs.
• Welcome to Mars - Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America, by Ken Hollings - a book based on a limited radio series (found here; out of order, unfortunately). Made me revisit the start of the Atomic Age, and realize how fascinating it is, in itself, in its effects on our culture and society, and in its fictional and gaming potential. Also full of horror stories resulting from Operation Paperclip, MK-ULTRA, and many human experiments.
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman - I went all in on Goffman after encountering his frame analysis in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, and reading this is already rewarding.
• Night's Black Agents, by Fritz Leiber - More well-known for his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, this shows Leiber as a very good modern weird/horror fiction writer, as well. An easily available, Lovecraftian sample is The Dreams of Albert Moreland, originally published in a now scanned fanzine (The Acolyte 10, pdf).
• Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Sep/Oct 2020 - I used to manage to keep up with Analog so that I would finish one before the other came around. Towards the middle of 2020, as I started accumulating RPG and other books, this fell by the wayside. I was also not very happy with the early 2020 issues, which made it easier to decide to cancel. I still have a backlog, and I finally finished this one. Mixed bag. Two stories that should express the gamut of the magazine pretty well are available from the publisher online: The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (pdf) is a weird tale with Arthur Machen vibes, while The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser (pdf) is a more typical hard science fiction story, with animalistic aliens that would make fine inspiration for your next science fiction or fantasy game.

TTRPGs as folklore

Last year, I wrote two posts reframing the role-playing game system as a theory - as a way of comparing subsequent play sessions. The first introduced the idea, while the second responded to criticism, and developed the framework a bit further. In this post, I'd like to take a lateral step, and incorporate my recent delving into folklore to examine play sessions in aggregate as a folk activity. I'll start by motivating this viewpoint.

Imagine the following: a small group of people, usually 3 to 6, gather together on a regular basis, somewhere between every week to a few times a month. They sit down at a table. They talk, read, write, roll dice, move figurines around, sketch for each other. They imagine a world together, and fictional characters living and interacting within it. There are rules for how this is done. Often, one of the participants is tasked with describing the world and most of the characters within it, while each of the others describes what an individual character attempts to do there, although that's not required. Whether or not a character succeeds or fails in what its player wants it to do is determined by these rules, with or without the use of dice, potentially combined with numbers and figures, whose interpretation the participants agree upon. After each session, and especially as sessions accumulate, the participants build up a set of experiences, and a collective story about those experiences, that they helped create, and for which they are, if not the only audience, then the most important one.

This is a folk activity. Folklore is notoriously hard to define, but it usually requires a set group, with creative practices that are performed by members of that group for members of that same group. Most commonly people think of folktales, but the items of folklore can be dances, pieces of pottery, jokes, barns, parables, as well as, importantly, storytelling and games. In addition, the practices are passed on traditionally, informally, rather than taught through formalized training.

And, indeed, despite repeated attempts, through the use of the tools of pedagogy, the creation of starter sets, sometimes even professional associations and after-school activities for children and young adults, I think that the vast majority of tabletop role-playing is learned and conducted through this kind of traditional, informal process. In particular, most play groups, or tables, in which one or more campaigns are played, are formed this way.

I'd go further and say that the TTRPG started as a folk activity, bridging and combining the folk activities of science fiction and fantasy fan communities on the one hand, and miniature wargamers on the other, to form a new folk genre. This was further developed by informal communities, who communicated through play and through the zine and APA scene. Due to his focus on contemporary and often informal self-documentation by participants, Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, which covers the former, and The Elusive Shift, which covers the latter, provide important material for the TTRPG folklorist. This despite giving short shrift to folk history in the sense of accepting people's recollections today of what they thought and did in the past.

Even Peterson's more business-minded The Game Wizards has something to offer. Coupled with the interviews in the indie documentary Secrets of Blackmoor, it sheds a better light on Dave Arneson's seemingly self-defeating attempt to lay claim to a portion of Dungeons & Dragons, while simultaneously arguing against the very publishable and formalizable aspects of the product that are actually respected by modern American intellectual property law. I think that he was trying to capture, using legal tools not up to the task, the fact that his practice of running Blackmoor as an informal creative process, inherently hard to document, and therefore market as a product, was foundational to the subsequently written product, D&D, as mostly formalized by Gary Gygax and other writers and designers at TSR. 

I have to wonder what a folklorist's version of The First Fantasy Campaign would look like. Not a collection of Arneson's notes, but a combination of transcripts of sessions, interviews with participants, perhaps records and insights from participation. Something that would do for Blackmoor what Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles did for Appalachian ballads.

We do know that Blackmoor and the Braunstein games that immediately precede it had enough informal cachet that they proliferated to other participants in person, as a folk activity, to the point where others were independently creating formalizations before D&D started spreading. Unfortunately, at the time, and perhaps to this day, the only form of widespread legitimacy a gaming practice like this could have was through a ruleset.

There's a conversation to be had of how the very attempt at reproduction, and the expansion in audience it entails, might change the activity, as well as the relationship between reproduction and commercialization - I hope to return to that in a future post.

Until then, I would suggest that this point of view is already illuminating about the hobby, both its history and its contemporary practice.

2021 in review - folklore

Another thing I spent quite a bit of time on in 2021 was folklore. It started with an exasperation at repeatedly running into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey as a blueprint for all compelling stories - and how this affects writing and the expectations from role-playing game plots - but became something more.

I started with Stith Thompson's classic, The Folktale. It is an extensive study of folktales from around the world, using what's now called the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folktales, and the Thompson motif index of folk literature, including descriptions of the folktales and their variations, as well as the methodology of collecting and cataloguing them. While a bit outdated, and occasionally offensive - to give an example, it separates the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, and when presenting folktale collection methodologies, has no problem having members of the former do their own collecting, while the latter's work is to be collected by more civilized folklorists working with local agents - it made it clear that there are a variety of story types, most of which have nothing resembling a hero's journey, that have been so engaging to various cultures, that they have been continually reproduced and adapted, often without the use of mechanical reproduction or even writing. It also presented evidence of an extent of inter-cultural permeability that isn't often taken into consideration when people discuss culture. It was also interesting to read the various categories of supernatural elements that appear in folktales, and that now live in modern fantasy in a much more restricted manner, due to their appearance in Dungeons & Dragons and in Disney movies. Jon Peterson's treatment of the medieval fantasy genre in his Playing at the World goes into the former in detail. The latter you can reflect on when you consider what first comes to mind when you hear of Snow White or The Little Mermaid.

Having finished with Thompson for now, I went on to read Barre Toelken's The Dynamics of Folklore, which tries to provide a starting point for analyzing folk life and folk creation as something living, as opposed to a pervasive attitude of relegating it to a less educated past. Toelken makes it quite clear that folklore is happening all the time, and that the actual performance of the piece of folklore is paramount - which, to me, connects very closely to how I'm starting to view role-playing games, an activity whose focus is in its performance to and for its participants, rather than something that should be compared to fiction, or cinema, or other forms of culture that involve separate stages of generation, reproduction, and consumption. There's something bigger to discuss here about the relation of canon to fan works and vice versa, and the attempts to control folklore, a creative, autonomous process, when it develops around reproducible media, with all the intellectual property consequences that entails. I will hopefully find more learned studies of this topic.

In Dynamics, Toelken pointed several times to the works of Edward T. Hall, specifically to his The Hidden Dimension, where he introduced the concept of proxemics, the study of personal and cultural perceptions of space. I took a detour to read that work, which is why I will probably only be done with Dynamics next year. While it is also a bit outdated, and has an unfortunate tendency to present animal models for human behavior uncritically, as well as to indulge in cultural stereotyping, the very fact that human perception of space is multi-sensory, can be broken up into reasonable ranges, and that people's comfort and interest in what happens when thus separated from each other can depend on their cultural context, context, as well as personal preference, was pretty insightful. Specifically, for tabletop role-playing games, this is something I will be keeping in mind as I am trying to communicate position and its emotional effect, and will contribute to my thoughts about combat systems, exploration, and other spatially-significant aspects of an imagined world. I have some more reading material in that direction - here's hoping it can bear fruit sometime next year.

Fooled by alignment

Let's talk about alignment charts. Not just that of characters in Dungeons & Dragons -  with evil vs. good on one axis, chaos vs. law on the other - but also the types of role-playing games according to Blacow - role-playing vs. wargaming over power-gaming vs. story-telling - and the political compass in politics - authoritarian vs. libertarian over left vs. right.

There's a sense of descriptive power to them, isn't there? You're free, even more free than you would have been had you been trying to line things up on a spectrum. You can fit a lot of personalities, games, and political positions on a flat piece of paper, and maybe even capture the relations between them. But that's not all that happens. Once people accept these alignment charts, they start becoming normative. People want to stand out, so they start defining themselves based on limited combinations of the extremes, and instead of having a whole flat surface, you end up with a discrete set of possibilities. For character alignment, there are at most nine; when the Blacow typology for role-playing games came out, people soon pigeonholed themselves, as well as the games they enjoyed or wanted to design, by the extremes on the two axes - so four types of games and gamers were born. The political compass, at least when it originally came out in the 1990s, was presented online by American libertarians, as a way of explaining and justifying their singular position. What happened to the freedom, the explanatory power of two whole space dimensions? Gone. Who is going to take the time to explain that their character is actually 60% Chaotic 40% Lawful, and 80% Bad 20% Good? What do those details even signify? The original breadth of ethics or games or politics is gone, and we're left with caricatures.

And that's before we start criticizing the frameworks themselves. Are role-playing and wargaming actually at odds, or, as I argued in a previous post (where roll-playing can easily be a stand-in for wargaming), independent player interests, that can be brought together with the proper design? What if a game is decidedly detrimental to both power-gaming and story-telling, say by enforcing strict inter-character balance using mechanics that deny the possibility of creating a consistent story? It could either fail to do these things out of bad design, or it could benefit a different agenda.

With D&D character alignments, we run into different problems: who is good to everyone, or bad to everyone? Is lying to protect a friend good or bad? It's probably a difficult moral question, not easily resolved by the alignment chart. Is a loyal underling of a crime syndicate lawful for keeping their word, or chaotic for undermining the rule of law? Is an informer who keeps ratting out members of their corrupt organization lawful for upholding the rule of law, or chaotic for undermining this organization? Why are these interesting questions? We already have the drama, the tension, the focus of difficult decision-making, in the description of the person's connections to the people and society around them, the conflict between the various values they hold. Since we're already going to be pushed into the extremes, let's just accept the combinatorial explosion and revel in it. 

Many games dispense with alignment. Fate has its aspect system; most Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games describe bonds and character weaknesses explicitly, rather than trying to throw them on a two-dimensional chart; even old-school RuneQuest has you align yourself with or against several cults and guilds, groups in the world that have complicated and dynamic relations with each other, and that are not always mutually exclusive.

Alignment in its many forms is very compelling - too compelling. It becomes the subject instead of helping understand it. I think it's long past time to let it go.

Persistence of the ephemeral history of RPGs

Many years ago I read a collection surveying the thoughts and ideas of the pre-socratic philosophers, whose focus was on what we would now call natural philosophy, or science. They had some remarkably modern sounding ideas, including some presaging modern cosmology. And yet a large portion of the book was dedicated to explaining, for each thinker, just how little remained of their work. Some of them were only known through limited summaries of their work centuries hence. Throughout, aside from the astonishment at how relevant they present to the modern reader, there was this persistent sense of loss.

I got the same feeling when I read through some parts of Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (which I've discussed a little bit in comparison to Secrets of Blackmoor here), and especially through his latest book, The Elusive Shift, which expands on these parts - the parts that are based on fanzines, amateur press associations, variant rules and whole role-playing systems with very limited print runs, and other extremely rare ephemera. These sources came out in the era just before and after the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, and involved the communities of wargamers, science fiction and fantasy fans, Diplomacy afficionados, and ultimately, role-playing gamers and designers. Many of his sources are not widely available. In fact, a significant part of his work in both of these books was tracking them down in public archives and private collections, and sometimes even bidding on specific items in auctions to get at their contents. We are all the poorer for not having access to these discussions and arguments in full, and role-playing theory and design in the next few decades seem like they could have benefitted so much from building on them instead of reinventing the wheel.

A more recent archival catastrophe that has happened to role-playing discourse was the loss of many Google+ groups, not just as active creative spaces, but as archives of arguments, conversations, and designs. Indeed, we are fortunate that those ephemera of role-playing past that Peterson discusses were physical artifacts, booklets and sheets of paper, rather than files on the cloud. Otherwise, they, too, might have been irrevocably lost. This precarity of historical records is still a problem: Facebook groups can be shut down unilaterally by their administrators, or because some of their content violates the company's Community Standards, whether due to legitimate poor moderation of hateful content or just report bombing, taking important posts and discussions down with them. Twitter threads are hard to follow, and may also disappear or become sparse because some of the people involved either had their accounts suspended or deleted them themselves. Discord's management is entirely opaque, and the content there is not particularly well organized for archival purposes - and there is no way consistent with their current Terms of Service to back up servers.

One of the reasons I decided to start writing this blog, instead of merely engaging in the other platforms I've mentioned, is to move away from this one-point-of-failure ecosystem. It's true that Blogger is still a platform controlled by Google, but the actual framework of a blog is transferrable, and there are several competing platforms. I also back up my posts, just in case.

I think the hobby and the theoretical discourse about it would benefit from moving towards spaces that are not managed by platforms whose main focus is engagement hacking, and which are not as centralized. There is, of course, the question of moderation and dealing with bad actors, but being beholden to an all-or-nothing toolset outside of any particular user or group's control will leave us in a situation where some pieces of data are lost, others can only be found as quoted somewhere else, still others can only be known by the arguments of their detractors - just like with the pre-socratics.

What is Dungeons and Dragons made of - panel introduction

Back in October I was tasked with hosting a remote panel for an Israeli role-playing game theory group about the history of Dungeons & Dragons, with the documentary film Secrets of Blackmoor, and the book Playing at the World as starting points. My qualifications were mostly my having watched the film and read the book, and being interested in the subject.

Secrets of Blackmoor uses interviews and a bit of documentary evidence to trace Dave Arneson's development as a wargamer, and ultimately, as the first dungeon master, in the context of the Twin Cities group of miniature wargamers, while Playing at the World focuses on contemporary documentary sources to get a broader understanding of how D&D and early tabletop role-playing came to be, weaving a story from wargaming, the fantasy genre, psycho-dramatic role-playing, and the influential board game Diplomacy. To focus the conversation, we decided to stick to the immediate history of D&D.

The following is a translation from Hebrew of the framework I wrote up to get things started. As with any good panel discussion, the conversation started in earnest before I finished covering everything.

Introduction

In January 1974, a game called Dungeons & Dragons was published. It came out as a boxed set, with three instruction booklets, and a few loose pages with tables. The front of the box described its contents: "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures." But in truth, it was the first role-playing game product.

This discussion is going to wrestle with the question: "what is D&D made of?" Hopefully it will allow us to learn about the conditions required for a role-playing game - or at least, this particular role-playing game - and to derive a few lessons relevant to creating innovative games in a hostile environment.

What did Arneson and Gygax bring to Dungeons & Dragons?

A good starting point for the question of what D&D is made of is the names written on the front of its box, as well as on the booklets contained within: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

What did they bring to D&D? Let's start with the common elements: they both brought many years of experience in miniature wargaming - creating terrain, painting soldiers, setting them out and fighting with them, in accordance with rules which they either adopted from elsewhere, or formulated themselves. They even worked together previously on a ruleset for Napoleonic naval warfare. They both also took part in play by post variations on the influential political board game, Diplomacy, which originally dealt with the era just before World War I. Some variations dealt with the Napoleonic wars - Gygax created one of those, and participated in a campaign that Arneson ran based on it - while others dealt with Medieval and fantastical themes. They both also brought a deep interest in the Medieval and fantastical settings, which became more popular in the 1960s and '70s as a result of the cheaper paperback publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Dave Arneson

What did Arneson in particular bring to D&D? He brought experience with an attitude towards wargaming rooted in Prussian Kriegsspiel, which emphasized the position of referee. The referee is the person who decides what the premise is for the battle, what information is known to which of the players, and how to deal with what the players want to have their subordinates do in the game, whether the rules have accounted for these possibilities or not. He also brought experience in Braunstein-style freeform play, developed by David Wesley, which focused on group dynamics between characters who were played by individual people. These repeated attempts to push the boundaries of what was possible in wargames eventually brought about the Blackmoor fantasy campaign, which introduced a critical aspect of D&D: an adventure undertaken by a collection of characters played individually by players and managed by a gamemaster (not a dungeon master yet - this term came later). The participants in the dungeon adventures in this campaign were really excited about this novel implementation of the refereeing principles developed in Arneson and Wesley's circle, and after this was presented to Gary Gygax, he was taken in by it as well.

Gary Gygax

What did Gygax bring to D&D? First and foremost, rules: the Chainmail rules for Medieval battles, which he developed with Jeff Perren, and included the famous appendix for games with fantasy units, and became the initial mechanical basis for combat in Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, and therefore to the mechanics in the first tabletop role-playing game; experience in developing and designing rulesets, which allowed him to translate Arneson's tools into something that other people can use; and experience in board games, which got him used to thinking of these rules developments as something commercial, which can be sold. In addition to that, his love for the fantastic was stronger than Arneson's - he was so focused on the fantastic that he promoted it even in the face of backlash and public expressions of disinterest and hostility from the various wargaming communities, and even though this preoccupation distracted him from marketing an earlier game by the company he created to publish D&D, Tactical Studies Rules.

Secrets of Blackmoor and Playing at the World

The book and movie which form the basis for this discussion fill out many more details in the story of the formation of D&D, and the development of the role-playing game product afterwards.

Secrets of Blackmoor

The film is mainly based on interviews with people close to Arneson, and comes with a certain agenda to correct the lack of attention that he seems to have suffered from, even though he was one of the two creators of this influential, and eventually, profitable game - as far as the filmmakers are concerned, he was the more important contributor. But there is one point, appearing towards the end of the film, that is vital for understanding the wider context: Greg Svenson, one of the first players in the Blackmoor campaign, says that after D&D was published, the participants in the campaign didn't feel like there was a big difference. They felt that they were continuing to play Blackmoor, but with slightly different rules. All that changed was that other people could play this same game that they were playing.

You cannot replicate Dave Arneson

That's a critical point: had this experience not been converted into a product that people can buy, it would have been stuck as something that is hard to replicate without either knowing Arneson personally, or someone who understood what to do from experiencing Arneson's game. This is especially true since Arneson tended not to explain the rules he used to his players, but instead asked them to focus on how he described the world, and how they wanted their characters to react to it. The fate of similar attempts at role-playing games, sometimes more expansive ones, coming from science fiction and fantasy fandom, was similar. You had to know someone who knew someone from the Society for Creative Anachronism, or some improv group going in a role-playing direction, to get a similar experience. A box with rules as a product, as a game, was like the Apple II's draw over the mainframes, in terms of accessibility to the general public - in Gygax's case, to begin with, it was mostly focused on wargamers like himself, but from there it spread out to science fiction and fantasy fandom, and to a much wider hobby.

Playing at the World

Jon Peterson's book provides a wider context than Secrets of Blackmoor, explaining some of the points I brought up. It goes deeper into the long history of Kriegsspiel games from which Arneson eventually got his approach to refereeing; investigates the history of the fantasy genre as it crystalized towards the time of D&D's creation, which in the author's view, was especially adapted to creating a target audience for an experience that would carry them into an imaginary world; looks into the history of games which pushed into group dynamics and discussion, like Diplomacy and its derivatives; and then takes all of these and connects them into a deeper explanation of what D&D was, why it was created when it was created, and where it, and role-playing games as we know them today, went from there.

Theoretical Questions

Since this group is focused on theoretical rather than historical discussions, we can ask different questions than who did what. For example: what do we think about the claim, that recurs both in Secrets of Blackmoor and in Playing at the World, that the fact that characters can do whatever their players want them to do is the critical element for the transition into a role-playing game? Do we agree with this? Does this conform with more current theories about role-playing games?

What about accessibility to the public? I think that opening the experience to the public, as much as it was partial, requiring then and now constant updating with respect to the audience to which they are being opened, as well as to the tastes of TSR and then Wizards of the Coast, is still critical when attempting to bring more people into this hobby. How important is it to adapt this accessibility to new media, such as through recorded and live actual plays and podcasts?

And how important is the personal and immediate experience to role-playing games? Is there a qualitative difference between playing by post and playing in person? Would it be interesting to compare with Tony Bath's Hyborean wargaming campaign, which came before Blackmoor, where the main dynamic was strategic decisions by post on behalf of characters, which Bath and another referee would adjudicate through discussion and board and miniature wargames between them, without a concurrent and immersive involvement of the various players, instead updating them through in-world and out-of-world reports sent after the fact?