Few books have impacted me quite as much as the first edition of Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World. A 700 page self-published brick of a history on the origins and influences of Dungeons and Dragons was exactly the kind of deep nerd lore that I craved. I devoured it while working on my PhD, and even snuck in a little reference to it on my footnotes. Now long out of print, it was a book I would recommend but with many caveats around people having to really be into this kind of thing specifically. Thankfully, Peterson has seen fit to put together a revised second edition, now available via MIT Press, and Playing at the World has never been so approachable. While a weirdo like me can’t help but miss some of the first edition’s idiosyncrasies, even I must admit that this is altogether a more polished history of the origins of D&D and roleplaying games in general.
For its second edition Playing at the World has undergone a complete restructure. No longer a single hefty tome, it is two volumes. The first - which I am reviewing here - is the more straightforward narrative history of how the duo of E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson happened to create Dungeons and Dragons between 1971 and 1974. It starts before either individual, though, and examines the early history of commercial board and miniatures wargaming in America to provide a clear contextual account of how the ideas that informed D&D happened to be in circulation for Gygax and Arneson to encounter. The second volume will examine what Peterson has called the “pillars” of influences on D&D, looking at things like how fantasy fiction of the time created the specific flavor of fantasy adventure that comprises D&D campaigns. While I believe this split makes complete sense, and certainly makes the book more accessible to general readers, I am a little saddened since I actually adored the weird structure of the first edition and many of my favorite aspects of Playing at the World are in the forthcoming volume 2.
Still, I can’t complain about what volume 1 achieves. This is a very readable and engaging history of the origins of D&D and the further years of research Peterson has done on this subject clearly shows. The book handily avoids falling into hero worship of the game’s creators and instead takes ample time to outline the many influences and side figures without whom D&D never would have come to be. As the book itself says, D&D was more than the creation of one person.
I particularly enjoyed the expanded sections on the introduction of various now iconic sub-classes. While I remember the story of the invention of the Thief character - submitted by fans to TSR and then later made official, without compensating the inventor of course - this new edition includes stories of how rangers, bards, and other classes emerged from the fan communities and even how fans reacted to new official sub-classes, like monk and assassin, by making their own versions.
While the founders of TSR do not exactly cover themselves in glory in this book, Peterson does a good job of explaining the challenges facing a company trying to balance their own commercial goals with the collaborative fan culture that made them as popular as they were. I don’t think anyone would say that sending letters from lawyers as a first step was the brightest idea for engendering a good relationship with the game’s fans, but Peterson does paint a complex picture of some of the gray areas that existed with the creation of a new style of game and the interaction between fan creation and publisher’s brand. This also helps to further underpin the narrative that while Gygax and Arneson’s names are on the game’s cover, D&D was a product of a wider community without whom we would not have roleplaying games as we do now. I also really enjoyed the factoid that apparently the term “role-playing game” was coined by one Richard Berg, an eccentric, prolific, and personal favorite designer of mine.
Peterson is an excellent writer and making this kind of dense sub-culture stuff both readable and engaging is no small feat. I read a lot of academic histories and few are as exciting as this one about midwestern nerds inventing a new game. I also really enjoyed how Peterson frequently engages with the fact that people struggled to describe D&D after it first came out - it is fascinating looking back from a time when RPGs are ubiquitous to examine a time when people didn’t have a name for them and even struggled to describe what the game was. A helpful reminder that language is tricky and explaining new concepts is hard.
I can never be who I was when I first read Playing at the World. Since then I have read several more books on the history of RPGs, including several by Peterson, so the new revised edition could never hit me the same way that the original did. Still, I had a great time reading it and didn’t want to put it down. If you haven’t ever read the original, you should definitely read this one and if you did read the original I think it is still worth your time. Now, who do I talk to about getting an advance copy of volume 2? I don’t think I can last until April.