We’re living through a particularly excellent time for scholarship on Dungeon’s and Dragons, and this latest edited volume from MIT Press is a real showcase for the vibrancy of that scholarship. I’ll confess that sometimes these edited volumes make me a little concerned – it’s a real challenge to keep a book like this on theme while simultaneously ensuring that each chapter (twenty in total in this case) is interesting to anyone who might pick it up. That’s not to say that other edited volumes I’ve read have been bad – but rather that I often find myself enjoying at most one-third of these kinds of books with many of the other articles just being okay or simply not relevant to my interests. Given the range of fields on display in Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons I expected to find parts of it to be a bit of a drag, and while I cannot claim that I loved them all equally I found myself enjoying every single one of the book’s chapters. This is an excellent edited volume with plenty to offer anyone interested in the history, study, and culture of Dungeons and Dragons.
Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons’ core theme is that it is a showcase for the current state of scholarship about the titular RPG. To that end, it is subdivided into four sections which are roughly classified as Histories, Influences, Analyses, and Futures. Reviewing these big edited books can be kind of tricky since every chapter is unique and it can be hard to group all the disparate contributions into one summary of quality. Instead, I plan on giving an overview of each section, including highlighting some of my favorite chapters.
As a historian, it’s no surprise that I liked the first section, on the history of D&D, best. I am continually impressed with Jon Peterson’s contributions to the field, and his chapter on the development of experience and the concept of leveling up is fascinating, but the chapter that probably stood out the most to me was the interview with Ryan Dancey on the development of the Open Game License (OGL). Far more attention has been paid in scholarship to the origins and early years of D&D, the TSR era as it were, rather than the more recent editions and this chapter helped to cement that Fifty Years of D&D would be a book on the full life of the game, not just its origins and earliest iterations. The development of the OGL happened more than 20 years ago, it is hardly new, and it was fascinating to hear about its origins and impact during D&D 3.0 and 3.5, especially with the separation of the decades since. The other history chapters are comparably excellent – the chapter on the origins of the Basic Set is great and Evan Torner’s critique of D&D’s emphasis on combat helps to cement the book’s tone that while the contributors by and large are D&D fans they will not let that stop them from critiquing it. Overall, a great selection of chapters, I hugely enjoyed every one of them.
The Influences section is much more social science, and to wear my heart on my sleeve I bear the classic historian’s mistrust of the social sciences. That’s not to say that this section is bad, these are still excellent chapters! Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s chapter on the “Mercer Effect”, which examines the impact of Matt Mercer and the Critical Role actual play series on how players and dungeon masters approach playing D&D. Critical Role and its ilk are probably the most impactful thing happening in D&D culture at the moment and it’s great to see it receive some serious academic attention. I also enjoyed Dimitra Nikolaidou’s discussion of the impact of D&D on contemporary speculative fiction, which doesn’t look for easy answers or draw simple conclusions. My minor critique of this section is that some of the chapters would be better served by being in a volume on roleplaying games generally, rather than about D&D specifically. For example, Premeet Sidhu’s chapter on D&D in the classroom is interesting but seems a little restricted by having to focus on D&D when arguably other (probably simpler and cheaper) RPGs might find a better application in classrooms. It’s a small criticism, all things considered, and while I preferred the history section this one has a lot to offer – especially for the more social science inclined out there.
The third section splits the difference with a mixture of history and more social science perspectives, as well as a dose of personal memoir, to form a wider cultural analysis. Daniel Heath Justice’s reflection on finding D&D while growing up in an almost abandoned mining town and how to relate his indigenous identity to the race politics of the game is fascinating, but to me the real standout chapter has to be Kellynn Wee’s analysis of the D&D scene in Singapore. There has been quite a bit written on how D&D handles race, including several chapters in this volume, but in Wee’s chapter that interplay of 1970s American conceptions of race with the complex racial order of Singapore brings something new and fresh to the scholarship. Singapore’s colonial history and the interplay of language, Chinese and South Asian cultures, and the specific tropes of D&D provide many avenues for analysis and most of them are in display in this chapter. While other chapters click better with my historian’s taste for the kind of niche stuff that I adore, I think that this may be the best one overall in the book.
The final section is a theoretical look at D&D’s future, considering what a similar book published in another fifty years would look like. In keeping with the spirit of D&D it includes tables for randomly generating potential futures. This is a fun homage to D&D and a novel idea. I’m not sure it totally works for me, but I do love to see experimentation within academic spaces, particularly around writing and communication.
Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons’ explicit goal was to showcase the impressive state of contemporary scholarship on D&D and in that it absolutely succeeds – I can say that without reservation. It also strikes a great balance between being academic and being readable by D&D’s fans. Some chapters suffer slightly from being a little too academic in their writing, but overall, the quality is high, and I never felt the tedium that plagues some of the worst academic works out there. This is a great volume, and I hope that many of the authors who provided chapters go on to write books of their own. The state of scholarship on RPGs and D&D is truly in a wonderful place, and based on the promise in this book will only go from strength to strength.