Michael Tresca

Even if you have never played Dungeons&Dragons, you almost certainly have heard of it, and probably even have a reasonably good idea of how it is played.

The structured role-playing game, in it's myriad forms, is a surprisingly recently invention, with direct roots in the military officer training exercises of the last three centuries, and in board games reaching back to origins lost to recorded history.

In this interesting book, Michael J Tresca summarizes and illuminates the prehistory of such games, and then explores in depth the contempoary history, origins, social dynamics, and individual experience of each style of FRPG: collectable card games, minatures battle recreations, tabletop games, play by post, gamesbooks, MUDs, computer aided RPGs, MMORPGs, and LARPs.

If you have any interest at all in gaming, military history, or sociology, or if you are curious at all as to how gaming is now, dollar for dollar, a larger entertainment industry than Hollywood, you should read this book.

I received this book as a free review copy via the LibraryThing reader-reviewer program.… (més)

I went into this book really truly wanting to like it. (Surprisingly, I only request books through ER that I really want.)

And I liked it. Sort of. It felt uneven, parts of it were intriguing, parts of it weren't. It was informative, dry in parts and engaging in other parts. And to continue on with the wishy-washy review, I was either the ideal reader or the exact wrong reader. My husband's an avid gamer, so I know enough about the culture to feel my way through it. And so I knew just enough to be dangerous and confused, where a more intimate knowledge might have helped, as would have coming to the text a blank slate.… (més)

I don't really get this book. The title claims that it's about "the evolution of fantasy role-playing games," but there's little history. The format of the book is scholarly, but there's little in the way of scholarly insight. Tresca encapsulates his thesis in the preface (inasmuch as the book has a thesis): "It's my hope that... authors and developers alike will learn the difference between editions of Dungeons & Dragons and know the heritage of the various races and classes that are commonplace in all forms of gaming today" (3). I'm not really convinced that these are worthwhile projects for a 228-page book, especially one whose title implies it will be about something else. If I want to know about the difference between editions of D&D, I can go to Wikipedia. Probably also the heritage of various races is there, too, but quite frankly I couldn't care less as to which edition incorporated the Dragonborn. It's a weirdly specific set of goals for a book with such a potentially interesting title.

The introduction has a lot of weirdness in it, too, such as when Tresca declares, "This book primarily focuses on fantasy gaming through the lens of American culture. Although non-Western cultures were influential in gaming, they are beyond the scope of this book" (12). Well, which is it that he's excluding? Non-Western or non-American games? In explaining his rationale for excluding (what turns out to be) non-American games, Tresca says that Dungeons & Dragons "is suffused with hope and power, with gold around every corner," and that the lack of official campaign worlds was because of "American individualism," whereas the Warhammer role-playing games are full of history, decadence, and nobility because they're made by the British (12). Um, what? Glad you can boil those cultures down so easily based on two texts.

Then, discussing why women don't play RPGs, Tresca suggests it's because women don't like sitting at a table as long as men do (16). Okay. How does he substantiate this? By quoting the gaming experiences of his sister-in-law. Well, there's some in-depth research for you. We're then subjected to a detailed breakdown of Tresca's gaming life, which includes fascinating sentences such as, "I switched to the Finnish LPMUD BatMUD" (19). I don't really get why academics are so fascinated by MUDs, given that they're a form of gaming that no one actually does.

After the introduction, the book proceeds through several different types of gaming, one per chapter: The Lord of the Rings, collectible card games and miniature wargames, tabletop RPGs, play-by-post and browser games, interactive fiction, MUDs, computer RPGs, MMORPGs, and LARPs. He is theoretically viewing each of these through the idea of "the Fellowship," the band of adventurers, which would be a good idea if he would remember this more often or make a more clear argument about what the Fellowship is actually doing. In each chapter, he talks about several categories, like "personalization," "risk," "roles," and so on, even when they're not really relevant to the topic, like you would suspect many aren't to The Lord of the Rings.

Mostly, though, there seems to be an emphasis on dull minutiae, as Tresca gives you breakdowns of every race/class in The Lord of the Rings, and wonders if the fact that "elf" and "Alps" share a root means that the Alps are an elvin home (32). (No, it means that both the Alps and elves are white.) There's a ton of details about how D&D changed over time, but not much about any other role-playing games. And the D&D stuff is so detailed that it's hard to get a coherent picture of the changes as a whole and what they mean. Also, they're constantly interspersed with details about Tresca's own gaming experience. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less about his saurial barbarian from D&D's 3.5th edition. There's the occasional interesting anecdote or detail, but it's often buried-- and it's never really looked at analytically.

The computer RPGs chapter is probably the worst offender in this regard, as it is little more than an extended list of computer RPGs that Tresca played, with no sense of evolution at all. The MUD and MMORPG chapters are also kinda like this. Also, one of his chapter epigraphs is someone talking about his master's thesis. (He mentions that it was cited in Penny Arcade fifteen times.)

Many of the chapters are short, or oddly imbalanced. Card games only get the faintest of nods in their chapter, as do play-by-post games, and I'm not really sure what he means by browser game, so scant is his discussion. The discussion is brief because they're not really relevant to his idea of "the Fellowship"... but then why have them in the book to begin with?

The one chapter that worked more than it didn't was the one on LARPs. There's some interesting discussion of how it's difficult to port the RPG experience into live action, and his analysis of the immersive aspects is fairly interesting. Even his personal anecdote is relevant and interesting!

Really, the book is trying to be a "scholarly" analysis but not really succeeding, and it doesn't live up to its title at all-- it ought to have been called Changes Made in Dungeons & Dragons Over the Years, and Also Some Anecdotes from Michael J. Tresca's Gaming Experiences, with Cartoons by His Brother for Some Reason, Not to Mention Copious Mentions of the Fact that Penny Arcade Once Mentioned His Master's Thesis. But even better would have been for Tresca to just write a book about what he thinks about Dungeons & Dragons and World of WarCraft, which is obviously what he really wanted to do. And then I wouldn't have been interested, and everyone would have been happy.… (més)