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

This is a wonderful book that investigates how role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragon’s happened. Not the mechanical history behind it, but rather how they made “the elusive shift” from wargames to a more personal experience.

(If you’re looking for a more traditional history, I recommend Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It.)

In particular, the seeks to answer the questions:

• How did RPGs separate themselves from wargames?
• What is the point of an RPG?
• What is the relationship of the DM to the game?
• What is the relationship of the rules to the game? Are the rules the point, or is role-playing the point?
• What are the different styles of play?

And so on.

The author is a RPG historian of note, and his sources for the book are hundreds of different fanzines, it seems. I used to be involved in the RPG community, and I remember Dragon, but the author has collected hundreds of references to articles and essays about theory.

The book goes deep on the subject, but stays incredibly readable. Along the way, it really makes you think about the concepts of storytelling, and how being part of a story alters your perception of it.

RPGs are fundamentally interactive storytelling, and the biggest question in the book, it seems, is whether the story matters more than the dice or the rules.

There’s no clean answer to that – opinions differ wildly – but the book is an absolutely joyful attempt to figure it out.