History of role-playing games

Box cover for the original Dungeons & Dragons set.

Role-playing games emerged in the late twentieth century as a new form of entertainment. Each game is an interactive fictional story where player choices shape the outcome. This increasingly mainstream hobby is successful at adapting to new media.

Role-playing games are substantially different from competitive games such as ball games and card games. This has led to confusion among some non-players about the nature of fantasy gaming. The Dungeons & Dragons game was a subject of controversy in the 1980s when well-publicized opponents claimed it caused negative spiritual and psychological effects. Academic research has discredited these claims. Some educators support tabletop role-playing games as a healthy way to hone reading and arithmetic skills. A few religious conservatives continue to object.

Media attention both increased sales and stigmatized certain games. In forty years the genre has grown from a few hobbyists and boutique publishers to an economically significant part of the games industry. Grass-roots and small business involvement remains substantial while larger projects such as Sony Entertainment's EverQuest have attracted several million players worldwide. Games industry leader Hasbro purchased fantasy game publisher Wizards of the Coast in 1998 for an estimated $325 million.

Origins

Wargames

Humans have long engaged in impromptu dramas and children's games of "let's pretend". Modern role-playing games trace their heritage to wargames. Drawing inspiration from Chess, Helwig, Master of Pages to the Duke of Brunswick created a battle emulation game in 1780. Increasingly realistic variations became part of military training in the nineteenth century. The hobby market began with the publication of Little Wars by H.G. Wells in 1913.

H.G. Wells designed rules for children's toy soldier games. A niche hobby emerged for adults that recreated model games around actual battles from the Napoleonic period onward. Where a marker or miniature figure once typically represented a squad of soldiers (although "skirmish level" games did exist where one figure represented one entity only), in early proto-RPGs each token invariably represented a single character.

Literary roots

A literary heritage inspired the beginnings of sword and sorcery roleplay. J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series began a genre of magical fantasy fiction. Pulp fiction and comic books also played a part. Game designer Gary Gygax has named Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt as strong influences.

Chainmail and Blackmoor

The first role-playing games as such were played in the late 1960s in and around the University of Minnesota's wargaming society, especially in scenarios moderated by Dave Wesley and Dave Arneson. Wargame designer Gary Gygax had recently developed a set of rules for a late medieval milieu. This unusual wargame saw publication under the name Chainmail. Although Chainmail was a historical game, it included an appendix for adding fantasy elements such as wizards and dragons. Arneson modified Chainmail, reducing the use of battle miniatures and exploring its potential for fantasy narrative. This new hybrid game became known as Blackmoor.

Blackmoor contained core elements that would become widespread in fantasy gaming: hit points, experience points, character levels, armor class, and dungeon crawls. Like the wargames it grew from, Blackmoor used miniature figures and terrain grids to illustrate the action. Arneson and Gygax then met and collaborated on the first Dungeons & Dragons game.

Tabletop role-playing games

Dungeons & Dragons

The first commercially available role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons, was published in 1974 by Gygax's TSR. TSR marketed the game as a niche product. Gygax expected to sell about 50,000 copies.[1] After establishing itself in boutique stores it developed a cult following.

The game's growing success spawned cottage industries and a variety of peripheral products. In a few years other fantasy games appeared, some of which blatantly copied the look and feel of the original game (e.g., one of the earliest competitors was Tunnels and Trolls). Along with Dungeons & Dragons, early successes included Chivalry & Sorcery, Traveller, Space Opera and RuneQuest. Organized gaming conventions and publications such as Dragon Magazine catered to the growing hobby.

TSR launched Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies (later called "first edition" among gamers). This ambitious project expanded the rules to a small library of hardcover books, each hundreds of pages long. These covered such minutae as the chance of finding a singing sword in a pile of loot or the odds of coaxing gossip from a tavern keeper. Optional modules in the form of small booklets offered prepared adventure settings. The first edition Dungeon Master's Guide published in 1979 included a recommended reading list of twenty-five authors.

Literary and mythological references helped draw new fans to the game. Success became a mixed blessing for TSR. Copyright infringement issues dogged the first edition Deities and Demigods rules book. A public controversy emerged (see below) that brought public attention and improved sales but also stigmatized the game. The company underwent dramatic growth, peaking at 300 employees in 1984. The second edition of Dungeons & Dragons, launched in 1988, downplayed literary elements to reduce objections. Surviving artifacts of this heritage and its influence on the wider gaming community include widespread use of Tolkienesque character types and the persistence of the gaming term "vorpal." Borrowed from Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," this was the first edition's most powerful magic sword.

Dungeons & Dragons has always been a leader among tabletop role-playing games. The property underwent two acquisitions in the late 1990s (see below). Its third edition, also known as the D20 system, is an open license generic roleplaying system. The game is now in edition 3.5.

Steve Jackson Games

Outsiders who misunderstand the nature of fantasy gaming have created serious problems for the industry. Rival publisher Steve Jackson Games nearly went out of business after a 1990 Secret Service raid seized the company's computers. The firm's fantasy technology game GURPS Cyberpunk inspired a mistaken assumption that they were computer hackers. A 1994 United States court of appeals, fifth circuit ruling upheld the firm's subsequent lawsuit against the Secret Service. Noteworthy role-playing products from Steve Jackson games include GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing Game System), an omnibus blueprint for flexible game settings and Munchkin, an expandable set of parody games that lampoon gamer subculture.

White Wolf

The White Wolf company launched in 1991 specializes in gothic and horror themed games with strong narrative elements. Their most famous game is Vampire: The Masquerade. Their supple and simplified rules appeal to gamers who prefer immersive storytelling to charts and dice rolls. White Wolf's games are popular among LARPers, or Live Action Role Players.

Wizards of the Coast

An influential newcomer called Wizards of the Coast released Magic: The Gathering in 1993 under the collaboration of founder Peter Adkison and Richard Garfield, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. This competitive card collecting game is a zero-sum game. For that and other reasons some purists contend that it is not a true role-playing game. Magic: The Gathering draws inspiration from medieval fantasy role-play, baseball card collecting, and the strategy card game Bridge. A collectible card game genre emerged. The franchise Pokemon is the most famous example.

Wizards of the Coast experienced phenomenal growth and purchased financially troubled TSR in 1997. Wizards of the Coast became a division of Hasbro in 1998 for an estimated $325 million buyout. [2]

Other publishers

The four examples named above are by no means comprehensive. Small publishers abound in the role-playing game industry. Refer to the following articles for links to other games, publishers, and designers.

• list of publishers of role-playing games
• list of role-playing games
• game designers

Controversy

James Dallas Egbert III

As the role-playing game hobby grew it saw a scandal in the 1979 disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III. Egbert had a slight involvement in the gaming community. For several unrelated reasons he was also deeply troubled. He went into the steam tunnels beneath Michigan State University with a bottle of sleeping pills and tried to end his life. A well-publicized search for him began. When he awoke the next day he feared the consequences and hid at a friend's house for a month.

James Egbert's parents hired private investigator William Dear to seek their son. Dear knew nothing about Dungeons & Dragons at that time. Dear questioned some of Egbert's friends who were nearly as ignorant: Egbert had never played the game at his own campus. Dear supposed that Egbert had gotten lost in the steam tunnels during a game. The press repeated Dear's hypothesis as fact. When Egbert met Dear he asked him to conceal the truth: besides being an attempted suicide Egbert had a drug problem and was a homosexual in an intolerant community. Dear left the new media myth unchallenged for the rest of Egbert's life. Later Dear stated that Egbert's troubles had nothing to do with a role-playing game.

Rona Jaffe published Mazes and Monsters in 1981, a thinly disguised fictionalization of press exaggerations about the Egbert case. In an era when very few people understood role-playing games it seemed plausible to the public that a player might experience a psychotic episode and lose touch with reality during role-playing. The book saw adaptation into a made-for-television movie starring Tom Hanks.

BADD

The American Association of Suicidology, the Center for Disease Control, and Health & Welfare (Canada) would later conclude that there is no causal link between fantasy gaming and suicide. However, Patricia Pulling's son Irvin "Bink" Pulling did commit suicide in 1982 and was a Dungeons & Dragons player. The grieving mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit against her son's high school principal, holding him responsible for what she claimed was a Dungeons & Dragons curse placed upon her son shortly before his death. The case was thrown out of court. Pat Pulling founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, known by its acronym BADD, which circulated her belief that role-playing games were linked to devil worship and suicide. BADD contacted conservative Christian churches and mainstream media outlets.

Opponents of role-playing gaming were remarkably successful at attracting media attention. In a 1994 Skeptical Inquirer article, Paul Cardwell, Jr. observes that, "The Associated Press and United Press International, between 1979 and 1992, carried 111 stories mentioning role-playing games. Almost all named only Dungeons & Dragons... Of the 111 stories, 80 were anti-game, 19 had no majority, 9 were neutral, and only 3 were pro-game. Those three pro-game stories were all from UPI, which is a considerably smaller wire service than AP. "[3]

Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR made little attempt to counter this impression other than to reduce objectionable content in its products. The company was experiencing growing pains. Sales had doubled annually throughout the 1970s and quadrupled as the controversy ensued. TSR also commenced a partnership with Random House at the same time, so the degree to which media attention helped sales is uncertain. Internal management and production issues appear to have consumed the firm's attention. Gamers themselves organized in 1988 with the Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games, or CAR-PGa. This organization writes letters to editors, gives interviews, and advocates for balanced reporting.

Ms. Pulling's views may be called extreme. She once told a newspaper reporter that 8 percent of the Richmond, Virginia population were Satanists. Ms. Pulling obtained a private investigator's licence, became a consultant to law enforcement, and was an expert witness in several gaming-related lawsuits. All of these suits lost in court. BADD's data collection and analysis methods were unsound. In The Pulling Report, Michael Stackpole analyzes BADD's own data to demonstrate that suicide is actually lower among gamers than non-gamers. Mainstream criticism subsided with the debunking of BADD. A number of urban legends have been linked to the game. Jeffrey S. Victor the phenomenon in his book Satanic Panic (1993). The Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs has published a report on role-playing as a hobby. The report describes role-playing as a stimulating activity that promotes creative thinking.

Recent controversy

A small number of conservative Christians continue to object to Dungeons & Dragons. Jack Chick publications is prominent in this effort, still publishing tracts from the 1980s that claim the game is a recruiting ground for Satanic cults where players learn to cast actual spells. These are similar to religious objections sometimes made against Harry Potter and Disney.

Recently, two crimes in Brazil against RPG gamers shocked Brazilian society [4] [5]; a discussion in the press about the permission of these games by parents, based on the lack of information, cruelty and format of these crimes, was exposed in the media. In Espírito Santo, the site of the crimes, law projects to ban RPG games have been initiated by religious leaders in the local deliberative assembly. [6].

Electronic media

Early imitations of role-playing games such as Atari's Adventure were simpleminded. Many gamers shared a desire to adapt complex rules into computer code. It proved difficult to recreate the depth, flexibility, and teamwork of pen and paper gaming. Players conducted early multiplayer games online over BBSes (electronic bulletin boards) which paved the way for MUDs (Multi User Dimensions), MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), and play-by-email (PBeM) gaming. TSR found itself on the other side of the copyright issue with litigation against file sharers who were bootlegging RPGs.

Contemporary computer role-playing games exist in a variety of environments. This is a popular genre for video game consoles. Many home computer role-playing games are networkable. Users can play alone or participate in LAN parties (Local Area Network parties). Text-based Internet games retain a grass roots following. A few friends can launch a nonprofit MUD on a small budget. Graphical variations such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft have gained rapid popularity.

Online text based role playing games have gained popularity throughout writing-based communities. These games often have little to do with the dice or random number generators used by some players to determine outcomes; rather, characters are created and manipulated by their players in the form of a large interwoven story, using only the imagination to determine what occurs. These are usually conducted through internet forums, but can also occur through e-mail or chat programs. This type of role playing can be a form of fan fiction, with players taking the roles of characters from their favorite movies, television shows or books.

External links

• A Brief History of Roleplaying - categorization of role-playing games in history
• Roleplay.org - An introduction, history, and articles on role-playing and role-playing games.
• What is role-playing? (a copylefted introductory article)
• A History of Role-Playing - 8 part series
• The Attacks on Role-Playing Games - originally from the Skeptical Inquirer.
• History of Wargaming - discusses developments from chess to H.G. Wells
• Literary Sources of D&D - a detailed summary of first edition literary borrowings.
• Text of the appellate court ruling in favor of Steve Jackson Games
• SJ Games vs. the Secret Service - a summary by a Steve Jackson Games attorney
• Card sharks - success of card game company Wizards of the Coast - Company Profile - a financial analysis of the firm
• Interview with Gary Gygax
• An educator's opinion of tabletop role-playing games
• The Open Gaming Foundation
• "Why Economists Are Obsessed with Online Roleplaying Games," Slate, 2003