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In Playing at the World, 2E, Volume 1: The Invention of Dungeons & Dragons, a new book from MIT Press, bestselling author Jon Peterson offers a remarkable tutorial on the off-putting pathologies of academic scholarship.
I was delighted to see Playing at the World in MIT Press’s catalog this spring and to get my hands on the galley. Since I’m old enough to recall Dungeons & Dragons’ meteoric rise in the late 1970s and have always been taken with its intricacies and inventiveness, I thought the genesis of the game would make for a captivating read.
Well, not so much. Not because the author didn’t invest himself in the project, but because he embraces a model of historical narrative that just isn’t penned with the reader in mind. It’s intended, rather, to demonstrate its own thoroughness—to boldly proclaim, “Look how exhaustively I waded through boxes upon boxes of letters and old manuscripts.” I suppose this kind of fascination with minutiae is as good a hobby as any other, but it strikes me as a huge missed opportunity if the author is going to publish the result for an audience of actual human beings.
In this book (which is a revised and updated version of one-half of a 720-page tome first published in 2012), Peterson explains how the wargaming culture that enraptured a few dozen hard-core adherents in the upper Midwest birthed Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s pioneering creation. He details how their basement role-playing game trickled into broader awareness via fanzines, gamer conventions, and mail-order offerings.
It’s fair to say Peterson over-delivers on some of that, in a manner common to academic writing. He isn’t content to explain how the culture of miniature-based wargames helped give rise to D&D; he provides an exhaustive accounting of gaming clubs like the 100-member United States Continental Army Command. He explains how the group launched in 1966, rebranded itself in 1967 as the International Federation of Wargaming (“international” because it had a member in Germany), was nearly undone by a convention that year that drew only 75 attendees, was saved by the efforts of vice president Scott Duncan, and went on to hold a convention in 1968 in Lake Geneva’s Horticultural Hall that drew 96 attendees.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this kind of detail; the problem is that it comes at the expense of character, consequence, and clarity. It turns a significant, lively chunk of contemporary history into a lifeless exercise in arcana. Having unearthed so many half-century-old missives and fanzines, Peterson appears intent on using them all. Thus, his narrative is stuffed with sentences like, “To recap, in 1969, Arneson’s Napoleonic Simulation Campaign had incorporated a postal Diplomacy game as a ‘background’ strategic context for its tactical miniature battles, especially the ‘Napoleonic Diplomacy II’ variant by Gary Gygax.”
It’s tough to find much personality or narrative amidst the tidal wave of trivia. It may be hard to believe, but there’s literally no discussion of when Dungeons & Dragons started getting attention in the popular press, the impact of its success on the creators’ lives, or even how much money Gygax and Arneson’s start-up earned. Instead, the reader learns that, “At GenCon VII, James Lurvey spent some time at the two MiniFigs booths and commented on ‘their new Fantasy figures’ including a ‘spider, an unusual giant, goblin foot[man] and elvish horse[man],’” or that, in spring 1975, “The Santa Monica hobby shop Aero Hobbies . . . even began circulating a hand-written price list of TSR games as a ‘contribution’ to the APA.” Ultimately, I had trouble keeping track of the goings-on or the various names that would pop up and then disappear.
The crazy thing is that there’s a fascinating story buried in here: a tiny community of nerdy guys in Wisconsin and Minnesota spent the late 1960s and early 1970s creating a wholly new type of game that allowed geeks and freaks to inhabit the world of The Lord of the Rings. How the rules evolved, how the game caught on at MIT or in L.A., and how the creators dealt with their success—these are all big questions with intriguing implications. Unfortunately, while all of this is touched upon in multiple places (sometimes in suffocating detail), I came away without much perspective or feel for the story.
And that’s where things get instructive. Peterson is clearly a thoughtful guy who poured enormous passion into this volume. And he seems to be a capable writer—he’s been a finalist for science fiction’s esteemed Hugo Award. Yet, he’s produced a volume that was a wooden read, tough to follow, and didn’t really convey the heart of the enterprise. Keep in mind that this isn’t a book about negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, European social mores in the 1600s, or the history of sub-Saharan agriculture. It’s a book about Dungeons & Dragons!
I’m disinclined to blame Peterson for all this. Maybe I’m being too easy on the guy, but a few minutes spent browsing his author’s page or video clips makes clear he cares about this stuff and can be interesting. Rather, I’m inclined to lay the blame on the customs and expectations of academic narrative. After all, this is a book that opens with a note from the series editors, a couple of university professors. They explain, “In a line, the aim of the series is to help actualize critical historical study of games” and “exhibit acute attention to historiography and historical methodologies.” They say they’re seeking “a mix of qualities partially described by terms such as diversity, inclusiveness, and irony” (italics in the original) because this can “connect game studies to scholarship in a wide array of fields.”
In the editors’ opening note, I could find nary a word about accessibility, motivation, scope, coherence, or humanity. And, while I’m no expert, it seems to me that those are the qualities that make history relevant and relatable. In fact, I find it bizarre that the academy has come to favor historians who view themselves as stewards of self-regarding minutiae while farming accessible, inspiring, and instructive history out to the Walter Isaacsons and Christopher Nolans of the world. That seems oddly out of kilter. It also helps explain, I suspect, why history has migrated from a central place to a peripheral one in the academy.
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