The Elusive Shift, How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity

How the early Dungeons Dragons community grappled with the nature of role-playing games, theorizing a new game genre.When Dungeon Dragons made its debut in the mid-1970s, followed shortly thereafter by other, similar tabletop games, it sparked a renaissance in game design and critical thinking about games. DD is now popularly considered to be the first role-playing game. But in the original rules, the term "role-playing" is nowhere to be found; DD was marketed as a war game. In The Elusive Shift, Jon Peterson describes how players and scholars in the DD community began to apply the term to DD and similar gamesand by doing so, established a new genre of games.