Playing At the World: a Huge New History of Gaming 18
New submitter disconj writes "Over at Wired, Ethan Gilsdorf interviews Jon Peterson, author of the new book Playing at the World. Gilsdorf calls it 'a must read,' though he cautions it 'is not intended for a general audience. It's a book for geeks, about geeks.' It is apparently an insanely-detailed history of role-playing games and wargames, including everything from Prussian kriegsspiel up to Dungeons & Dragons and the beginning of computer RPGs (but none of that heathen stuff after 1980). Peterson says in the interview that he wanted to write a history of these games 'worthy of the future they are creating.' He apparently spent five years on the project, including unearthing a huge trove of previously-unknown historical documents."
Summary implies curmudgeon alert (Score:5, Interesting)
I think calling post 80's stuff heathen is disingenious. The evolution of RPGs on the PC and consoles has been phenomenal to watch, and there's a lot of history potential in documenting MMO politics. All of the open world PVP games have had a very interesting development post-launch controlled entirely by the players, and I think its a lot of thought-provoking material at its core. Region control maps over months for games like UO, AC, EVE, SB, Darkfall, etc, are all like watching a condensed version of medieval history play out in a real time simulation. I would be very interested in reading up on those histories and the insights gleamed by an author studying them.