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http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/132159/The-Fantasy-RolePlaying-Game-A-New-Performing-Art

Description:
Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris).

Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu.

Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games.

The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

Note: This digital edition is available in ePub format, not PDF

.. if anyone has/does read this please let us know what you think.


A ( good) few years back I read Shelley Mazzanoble's "Confessions of a part-time sorceress" are there any other RPg related books out there -- satanic panic ones aside -- worth a read ?

'Playing at the World' is a fantastic look at the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, and even early wargaming (which pen and paper RPGs spawned from). I'd definitely recommend picking it up.

"Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris)."

When this intro was written, the way we wrote the year began with "19" rather than "20", yes?

http://geekdad.com/2014/07/little-history-dd/

 infinite_array wrote:
'Playing at the World' is a fantastic look at the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, and even early wargaming (which pen and paper RPGs spawned from). I'd definitely recommend picking it up.

I second this recommendation. Just don't expect a geek memoir or dork empowerment celebration manual. I ordered it imagining something like the DVD extra documentary on "40 years of D&D" but no, Playing At The World is a solid academic investigation into how/why D&D came to be. It's crammed with fascinating ideas and vignettes but some may find it dry.

Nice recent piece by Jon Peterson to give you an idea of his interests/style: The Ambush At Sheridan Springs.

Also, I think I have posted this here before but it's worth another look:Of course, you may want to look at GG's own book, Master of the Game.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 reds8n wrote:
A ( good) few years back I read Shelley Mazzanoble's "Confessions of a part-time sorceress"

Speaking of which, I just stumbled across this piece today. That's from Anna Kreider's "Go Make Me A Sandwich" blog about gaming and feminism. Here's what I think is the heart of Kreider's critique of Mazzanoble's book/column:

The thing that really bothers me about this is that almost every one of Shelly’s columns seems to follow the same formula, and that always starts with Shelly being adorably and/or humorously insecure about some facet of playing D&D. This then leads into neurotic and sometimes irrational attempts to wrestle with the insecurity in which a humorous result is achieved and a lesson of some sort is said to have been learned. Only it’s not learned, because the same insecurities pop up again and again and again.

That’s not to say it’s not okay to be insecure about stuff. Heck, no one is the perfect gamer, and D&D is a tough system to master. Some insecurity is justified – especially as a woman in a predominantly male environment. It’s the fact that at no point does Shelly ever express confidence about anything pertaining to D&D that bothers me. The tone, too, bothers me. If these insecurities were addressed in a genuine way, it wouldn’t be so bothersome. But these are clearly stereotypes being played for laughs.

[...]

Shelly Mazzanoble is presented as a very prominently female voice, one of the only female voices to come out of Wizards. And she constantly presents herself as this stereotyped caricature of a woman who is insecure and thinks D&D is hard and this roleplaying stuff is pretty scary. And you know what? That could be okay if she managed to soldier on and find a way to succeed despite her many insecurities. I could roll my eyes and move on with my life if it didn’t constantly lead to the conclusion that she should just stick to the basics and let other people worry about achieving system mastery. That system mastery is for other people and is too lofty a goal for poor little Shelly to achieve.

This makes me want to hit things, because this gak is insidious and toxic and just reinforces stereotypes of female gamer behavior. This more than anything says that when it comes to gaming, women are never going to be more than second class citizens because gaming is just too hard for our little female brains. And. Gah. This is so wrong. Being a dude does not automatically confer superior powers of mathematics and gaming. It just doesn’t. Like, times a million.

I didn't read Mazzanoble's book. Do you find Kreider's critique accurate?

It basically is this:

Shelly: This is how I feel about gaming.
Kreider: Your opinion is wrong and you shouldn't be allowed to express it publicly.


It is essentially an Dakka OT argument.

I think Kreider is more saying that Mazzanoble's book was WotC's attempt to reach out to potential female customers and the portrayal of a female gamer as constantly in-over-her-head (whether it authentically reflects Mazzanoble's experience or not) is off-putting. So it's not so much that Mazzanoble shouldn't be able to publicly express her views as it is the idea that WotC is doing a poor job reaching out to women through Mazzanoble's work.

There is more than a hint of skepticism in Kreider's criticism regarding whether Mazzanoble's work is sincere reporting as opposed to being edited or even self-edited for marketing purposes. I find this is a larger problem with books on roleplaying games. David Ewalt's "Of Dice And Men," for example, reads to me like a cash in on geek chic, a.k.a., nerd minstrelsy. Ewalt (who covers D&D for Forbes, hint) himself writes in the introduction that he is trying to "explain the phenomenon of D&D to a mainstream audience" and warns "if you seek a detailed history or obscure arcana, you have just failed your Gather Information check."

Fair play -- at least he warned me. It certainly felt like a "NOT FOR YOU" sign. So I started reading the meat of the book there in the aisle before just buying it (as planned). The book is ... well, blog material at best. It's breezy stuff, just a shade too heavy for a magazine although that heaviness is more a question of length than substance. It seems like a good book for someone who wants to superficially learn about roleplaying games but has no chance/absolutely refuses to buy or play one.

It's hard (for me at least) to resist a "closing the ranks" mentality when faced with the prospect of mainstreaming, especially when the raconteur is disparaging. Ewalt's readers are treated to such gems as "The fact is in any historical-miniatures battle, only 10 percent of the match is really spent playing. Half the remaining time is spent arguing about history, and the other half arguing about the game's rules." A match? It kind of sounds like Ewalt has constructed a plausible-sounding negative stereotype out of second- or third-hand information there (despite claiming first-hand experience in this anecdote). I have no doubt he has played some 3.5, however: I mean, he references Gather Information checks right from the Introduction.

There's a guy on YT who does something similar:Ugh.

Yeah, Mazzanoble's character (insofar as I do not believe it is na accurate representation of a real human being that manages to function in society outside of a psych wing of a hospital) bothered me, too. Meh?

 Melissia wrote:
Meh?

Well, as Kreider put it: "this gak is insidious and toxic and just reinforces stereotypes of female gamer behavior ... [Mazzanoble's book/column] says that when it comes to gaming, women are never going to be more than second class citizens because gaming is just too hard for our little female brains."

I'd say that's an accurate summary.

For my part, I never paid any attention to Mazzanoble's work because it also sends out "NOT FOR YOU" vibes in my direction. But my wife did once express interest in it, albeit somewhat snarky interest. Even just walking through the book store SciFi/Fantasy section (she does not hang around there with me), she immediately spotted Mazzanoble's book. It clearly sent out the "YES FOR YOU" vibes in her direction.

Little backstory, my wife attempted to play D&D with my then-group a couple of times. We were playing 4E in those days. I was DMing. She played an Eladrin Sorceress. She had even picked out a set of dice. She stuck out two sessions (and we played long ones back then) but was practically silent most of the time. She actually liked the board gamey parts, the dice rolling and modifier-adding and tactical movement parts, but she just could not get into roleplaying. To me, that is the opposite of what Kreider notes about Mazzanoble's work.

In all fairness I didn't realize that the author had an ongoing series of articles. I did read [Confessions of a part-time Sorceress] years ago as it was a free book at GenCon, but I don't recall it painting all women with a brush and just being a memoir. If it has changed so be it, but the criticism still comes across as sort of a wrongbadfun argument. Each person brings a their own expectations and leanings to the game and pretending one is better than another doesn't really sit well with me.

Are you saying WotC published Mazzanoble's equally valid, special snowflake experience for its own sake rather than a "how to buy our products" manual for Women Ages 16 - 35?

 Ahtman wrote:
the criticism still comes across as sort of a wrongbadfun argument.

Which I do not understand, as it sounds completely legitimate to me, and you haven't actually presented a reason as to WHY it comes across as this.

"This is crappy writing, here's why" shouldn't be responded to with "I don't like your tone".

Ever.

I don't think Ahtman is taking issue with Kreider's tone so much as what he perceives as her argument, namely that Mazzanoble is not playing/enjoying D&D the "right way."

But I don't think that's Kreider's argument: rather, she seems to be saying that Mazzanoble's book is a marketing tool WotC aimed at potential customers who are women but the prototypical woman in this "woman tries D&D" story is perennially insecure at best and incompetent at worst in addition to being neurotic and obsessive about stereotypically "girly" topics such as fashion. This isn't an argument about whether Mazzanoble enjoys D&D in the proper manner so much as what kind of image of women gamers Mazzanoble and WotC are asserting/perpetuating.

The counterargument is, I guess, that Mazzanoble and WotC are not asserting anything at all about women gamers and this book and her column (or at least just the book) are exclusively about the particular experiences of Mazzanoble. But my follow up question is, then why did WotC publish it?

 Manchu wrote:
Are you saying WotC published Mazzanoble's equally valid, special snowflake experience for its own sake rather than a "how to buy our products" manual for Women Ages 16 - 35?

What makes it a special snowflake? I have no doubt it was meant to appeal to a different audience, but that also doesn't mean it is supposed to represent the entirety of a gender either; where does it state that this is how all women should feel and/or act?

My impression is the book is an advertisement. Like all ads, it has an intended audience. The audience is pretty clearly (at least) women of X age and Z income ranges. The ad boils down to "I played D&D and so can you." The message assumes the "I" in that sentence is prototypical and relatable: "I played D&D and therefore you also can play D&D because we are similar." That is, Mazzanoble (or her literary personality, if you prefer) is supposed to stand in for the targeted consumers.

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/29336.html

vil Hat Productions has released updated details on their revised and expanded four volume edition of Designers & Dragons, a comprehensive historical guide to the role-playing game industry. The books will release to trade in January 2015. The project is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.

The four volume revised set of Shannon Appelcline’s comprehensive history of roleplaying games was first announced in 2012 (see “ Expanded 'Designers & Dragons'”), a little over a year after the first edition printing by Mongoose Publishing released, and quickly sold out. The 442-page hardcover chronicled the history of the RPG industry from the beginning in 1974 to the present, and detailed the history and products of almost 60 companies.

This new edition has been split into four volumes, each covering a corresponding decade, and according to Fred Hicks of Evil Hat, will include 300 to 400 pages each. The 6” x9” black-and-white softcovers will include cover photos of many game books detailed. Each volume will feature a foreword by a noted gaming professional: Greg Stafford (1970s), Mike Pondsmith (1980s), Peter Adkison (1990s), and Lisa Stevens (2000s). Cover artwork for each volume is done by Andrew Bosley. Each volume has an MSRP of $20.00.

Hicks shared additional information about the updated release, “Each article for a company is complete (rather than spread across multiple volumes), and lives in whatever volume contains the decade in which the company was founded. Every volume has expanded entries based on a few additional years of research and interviews. There's new cover art and a different arrangement of pictures inside.”

The company turned to Kickstarter in hopes of funding simultaneous printing of all four volumes, and actually reached its modest $7,500 goal before official launch (due to soft-launch to test the live links for PDF content). In two days, it has raised over $47,000 from nearly 1,200 backers as of this writing, more than enough to fund the contiguous printing of all four volumes at once. The Kickstarter offers a retailer level for multiple copies of the book(s), which are due in to backers in December, just before trade release.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evilhat/designers-and-dragons

B-B-Backed!