On the evening of October 30, 2013, I had the pleasure to make Jonathan Tweet’s acquaintance at Peter Adkison’s place in Seattle. As we hunkered down over a board game, Jonathan cunningly distracted me with a series of historical questions, one of which became lodged in my mind: Which game system first attempted to simulate the structure of a story rather than the physics of a world? Some initial research into how the gaming community of the 1970s positioned that distinction opened up a series of related inquiries. Our ensuing conversation spilled over into telephone calls, emails, coffee shops, and Gen Con bars until in July 2015 I floated, “Do you think there’s something that needs to be written about all of this?” So Jonathan served as the initial impetus for the present volume and became the first critical reader of early drafts, which centered on the chapter now called “The Role of the Referee.” As punishment, he does appear in this narrative, but out of gratitude it is only at the very end.
Around the same time, the Role-Playing Game Studies anthology settled on a publisher. As Evan Torner developed the section “RPG Theorizing,” I supplied him with some few primary sources and eventually with a draft of the present work. In the course of working on the anthology, I identified a few areas where historical light might be shed on the development of role playing in theory and design alike. Most of the “Toward a Philosophy” chapter followed from that research. Evan also helped to introduce a bit more academic rigor into my bibliography and citations.
Discussion about this growing project also slotted readily into several ongoing dialogues I was having, such as my discussion with Luke Crane about the features that distinguish recent role-playing game designs from their “old school” forebears in the 1970s. Luke was even kind enough to tap the brain trust of the Burning Wheel Headquarters to assemble a list of such key features. It was thanks to Luke’s influence that the chapter here called “How to Play” came into being. Victor Raymond, who reviewed early drafts, provided valuable insight into the fan experience of the 1970s and the epidemiological spread of role-playing games beyond the Midwest. Several threads of online-forum discussion about the origins of role playing, especially in the OD&D ’74 forum, also helped core concepts here to gel.
I became connected to Henry Lowood as a co-contributor to the Zones of Control anthology, and in the course of a lunch at Stanford we discussed whether the current work might be a fit for the MIT Press series on game history. Thanks to the support provided by Henry and his series coeditor Raiford Guins, the idea received a favorable hearing. I am indebted to them as well as to Noah Springer, Elizabeth Agresta, Marge Encomienda, Mary Reilly, and Jim Mitchell at MIT Press for their advocacy in bringing this book to fruition and for making sure it received a much-needed review to whip it into shape.
Where possible, I have tried to base this study on sources available to scholars; during the course of this project, issues of zines like Alarums & Excursions and Wyrm’s Footnotes fortuitously came out in a digital format. For access to more obscure fanzines, I am indebted to the Brown Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University and to the Pelz fanzine collection at the University of California, Riverside. Some of these materials, however, survive now only in private collections. For assistance with some of the scarcer sources here, I must thank Bill Meinhardt, Frank Mentzer, George Phillies, Lewis Pulsipher, Merle Rasmussen, and Matt Shoemaker.