Shining Light on a Dark Age ... the Seventies

The 2nd ed. of Jon Peterson's magisterial overview of the origins of RPGs, from MIT Press or, y'know, Amazon 

Jon Peterson's weighty Playing At The World came out in 2012 and, at 720 pages, won plaudits from the chin-strokers of the gaming community, but was only ever going to be a niche entry in popular history.

Nonetheless, its status grew and it proved itself prescient: the last decade has seen a torrent of books exploring the inspiration for D&D and the rise and fall of TSR and of founder Gary Gygax. Yup, the 1970s is officially 'the historical past' and therefore another country, requiring travel guides. I don't mind: I was only a kid in the '70s. When someone tells me the 1980s is the historical past, well, that's when we riot.

For this 2nd edition, Peterson has divided his magnum opus in two. This, Part I, covers the chronology of D&D's appearance, dutifully starting off with H G Wells publishing Little Wars in 1913, leaping ahead to the appearance of the Avalon Hill company manufacturing board-based wargames in the 1950s, then the emergence of a wargaming fandom in the Midwest in the '60s that proved particularly creative and collaborative, with E. Gary Gygax as its mover and shaker. The book goes on to explore the people and groups that 'ran with the ball' once D&D emerged from the correspondence of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Peterson examines the vibrant fandom on the West Coast that produced the fanzine Alarums & Excursions. He discusses the impact of conventions like GenCon and Origins in the mid-Seventies, and the, often heavy-handed, attempts by Gygax's company TSR to control the ownership and direction of D&D against a grassroots movement of fans that was often more radically creative than the game's original designers.

Part II, due in 2025, will abandon the chronological approach to delve into three key 'pillars' of RPGs: a more theoretical approach.

At 370 pages, Part I is still a hefty tome, but Peterson has a light style and covers ground quickly. He's particularly good at tagging key personalities and publications and keeping them distinct. What would otherwise be a welter of confusing names (Gygax, Charlers Swann Roberts,  Lee Gold, Don Featherstone, Donald Lowry, Hilda Hannifen, etc.) and fanzines with names that are either quirky (Corner of the Table, Fire the Arquebusiers, Owl & Weasel), prosaic (Great Plains Games Players Newsletter, Strategic Review), or just a jumble of letters (IFW, APA-L, CITEX), becomes a crisp narrative with a shifting focus that reminds me of the opening sequence to TV's Game Of Thrones. The key players are placed before the reader then orientated in time and space: Peterson prevents things turning into a blur. Academic writing of this clarity is no small achievement.

Nonetheless, it's dense stuff, and not the ideal starting point for people who don't yet know their Kasks from their Kayes, their Lakofkas from their Leibers.

The sheer granularity of Peterson's analysis is impressive. He's read every amateur rules set, every fanzine, cross-referenced all the letters pages, unscrambled the anagrammatised pseudonyms, tracked gaming road trips across the continent, broken down inventory lists to spot the emergence and abandonment of products, and deconstructed the attendances at conventions. He deduces who met whom at a San Francisco dinner party in December 1974  then played D&D into the small hours of the morning - then he finds their session write-ups in a letter or amateur press association article. 

Cultural history is an elusive thing, because the world is full of broken Roman pottery, but poetry is winged, and vanishes unless someone writes it down. Thousands of people discovered D&D in the 1970s, but reconstructing how they found it, how they played the game, how they influenced each other: that's the missing pattern. Gygax was a voluminous correspondent and the Los Angeles gaming scene documented almost everything they did, but between Gygax's Lake Geneva and the LA burbs stretches a 'dark continent' from which only stray names and texts emerge: Ken St Andre publishing Tunnels & Trolls in Arizona in 1975 or Richard Berg in Baltimore, coining the term 'role-playing game' that same year.

I'm reminded of books on Dark Ages history. You've got a few monks writing in Latin, a few genealogies of Welsh kings, and the historian surmises that the Cynddigilligwdd who died at Amyggyllydd fighting Rhydyddydyd must be the same Cynddigilligwdd mentioned as the brother of Nggiog in the Life of St Gwrgygwgion. Names emerge out of the murk and get anchored to the few secure landmarks in a vast sea of anonymity.

The price Peterson pays for this granularity is a loss of, well, the culture in cultural history. Peterson is so busy pinning down names and terms, who met who where and how they influenced them to write what and when, that the experience of playing D&D rarely gets touched upon. There are flickers of ancient passion from the gushing letters, idiosyncratic session logs, and fan fiction that Peterson quotes from time to time. And of course, you can still feel the heat from the letter page debates condemning styles of play - and dragging the Blackmoor supplement over hot coals of criticism. You pick up a sense of Gygax's prickly, preening, passive-aggressive personality. But you're left with little sense of what anyone else was like as a person, what they got out of D&D, what it was like playing those early, groundbreaking games.

The reward is lots of insights into the development of ideas in the abstract. Where did 'rolling for initiative' come from? Not D&D - it appeared in the short-lived Warriors of Mars wargame that TSR rushed out for 1974's GenCon VII. Who invented the Thief class? Not Gary Gygax: it was submitted by California fan Gary Switzer in early 1974, but made its way into the 1975 Greyhawk​ supplement uncreditted. How about 'role-playing games'? As noted above, it was Richard Berg, reviewing the new trend in fantasy games for New York wargames company SPI.

Peterson isn't just doling out fascinating titbits. He draws broader conclusions from these things. TSR's appropriation of the Thief class, without giving credit, is made into a touchstone for the way Gygax's company attempted to define 'canon' and rein in the creativity of fans. The term 'role-playing game' becomes a way of exploring, not just what makes D&D different from other wargames, but a distinction between D&D itself and the RPGs that followed, like Tunnels & Trolls, En Garde, and Runequest. With the arrival of this term, D&D becomes simply a role-playing game, which has important consequences for TSR's attempt to discourage competition with threats of copyright infringement.

One chapter that, I think, illustrates Peterson's strengths is #10 'Return of the Referee.' He identifies a Twin Cities wargamer David Wesley who, back in the early Sixties, reintroduced to the hobby the idea of a Referee, which had lain dormant since the 19th century. Referees were important when wargames were military instruction tools, because someone had to arbitrate which side would prevail when asymmetric forces employed different tactics against each other. Wesley adopted this playstyle, with its revolutionary principle that 'anything can be attempted' but the Referee decides what worksl. To this he added a concept drawn from a Parker Brothers family board game: the idea of victory points.

From this combination came Wesley's pivotal Braunstein wargame in which players took roles of combatants and civilians in a Prussian siege - and one of the Braunstein players was Dave Arneson, who pitched the as-yet-unnamed and unsystematised D&D to Gary Gygax a few years later.

There were other ingredients crucial to the creation of D&D: the growing acceptance (amidst resistance) of the fantasy genre in wargaming circles, the idea of gaming moving between a geographic/exploratory mode and a tactical/combat mode (which Peterson sources in fan variants of Diplomacy from the late-'60s), and the emerging and collaborative fan culture that Peterson traces back to Avalon Hill's in-house magazine The General and its 'Seeking Opponents' column.

What's missing is an attempt to link these innovations to wider cultural movements of the 1960s and '70s. Some of that will doubtless inform Part II next year. However, in this 2nd Edition, Peterson does address some current year preoccupations of race and gender. He celebrates the important contributions of Lee Gold and Hilda Hannifen from the West Coast fandom. He finds great resonance in Len Lakofka's notorious article from a Diplomacy fanzine in 1976 that argued for female characters having lower Strength scores but instead having a Beauty attribute which could be used to seduce men. TSR foolishly reprinted the article, prompting a community backlash, and Peterson cleverly links this to his theme of who could and should define D&D authoritatively. 

I found Peterson's deep dive enthralling, but maybe I'm a special case. I discovered D&D in the UK in 1978 and pored over the product lists and reviews from far-away America. I never read Alarums & Excursions but it was a title redolent of wonder for me; likewise Empire of the Petal Throne, Blackmoor, the Egg of Coot, GenCon, and tournament dungeons. Peterson reads, to me, like a Bible concordance, unpacking all the childhood stories from Sunday school.

Maybe you'd rather wade into D&D's tumultuous history with something less academic, less impersonal, more dramatically engaging? OK, here are four alternative reads:

Click covers for links

Empire of Imagination (subtitled 'Gary Gygax & the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons') by Michael Witwer has a GREAT cover. It's an homage to the Unearthed Arcana D&D expansion, casting Gygax in the wizard role, complete with slack-jawed expression. It tells the tale of Gary 'n' Dave, their falling out, Gary Gygax's excesses, and the loss of his beloved company, in the style of an in-flight magazine: a lot of dramatic cliffhangers and flashbacks, but not much real insight. It's attractive and accessible, even if you know nothing about D&D.

Of Dice & Men (subtitled 'The Story of Dungeons & Dragons And The People Who Play It) by David M Ewalt has a GREAT title. It's popular journalism, like Witner's book, but much better written and more insightful. It has a revelatory structure: as well as a history of the game and its key personalities, it's a memoir and road trip, culminating in a personal pilgrimage to Lake Geneva, the birthplace of D&D. It's a book with a lot of heart, even if the history too often takes second place to the vibes.

Slaying The Dragon (subtitled 'The Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons') by Ben Riggs has the worst title, far and away. Unlike the previous two, it's a proper piece of historical research, but Riggs's focus is less on the game than on the business side of D&D. Like Peterson, he has the gift of lucidity and the ability to draw out a revealing theme from a mass of confusing detail. Based on interviews with the main actors (but not, alas, the much-maligned Lorraine Williams) and a forensic eye to contract law, he traces the rise and fall of TSR and its flawed business model throughout the '80s and '90s. I heartily recommend this one, especially if you grew up on the D&D settings and novelisations in the '90s.

The Elfish Gene (subtitled 'Dungeons & Dragons And Growing Up Strange') by Mark Barrowcliffe has the BEST title. It's an autobiography, so you only get historical details about D&D in passing. What you do get is an unflinching analysis of a teenage obsession with D&D when it first landed in Britain in the late-'70s. Barrowcliffe doesn't spare himself any blushes with his by-turns comedic then tragic dissection of clueless adolescence and the deep (and possibly damaging) addictive quality of D&D for young minds. It's a story of friendships lost and opportunities for growth squandered - but every word of it resonates with me.