The Fine Art of Making Dungeons & Dragons Really Boring

The crazy thing is that there’s a fascinating story buried in here: a tiny community of nerdy guys in Wisconsin and Minnesota spent the late 1960s and early 1970s creating a wholly new type of game that allowed geeks and freaks to inhabit the world of The Lord of the Rings. How the rules evolved, how the game caught on at MIT or in L.A., and how the creators dealt with their success—these are all big questions with intriguing implications. Unfortunately, while all of this is touched upon in multiple places (sometimes in suffocating detail), I came away without much perspective or feel for the story.

And that’s where things get instructive. Peterson is clearly a thoughtful guy who poured enormous passion into this volume. And he seems to be a capable writer—he’s been a finalist for science fiction’s esteemed Hugo Award. Yet, he’s produced a volume that was a wooden read, tough to follow, and didn’t really convey the heart of the enterprise. Keep in mind that this isn’t a book about negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, European social mores in the 1600s, or the history of sub-Saharan agriculture. It’s a book about Dungeons & Dragons!

I’m disinclined to blame Peterson for all this. Maybe I’m being too easy on the guy, but a few minutes spent browsing his author’s page or video clips makes clear he cares about this stuff and can be interesting. Rather, I’m inclined to lay the blame on the customs and expectations of academic narrative. After all, this is a book that opens with a note from the series editors, a couple of university professors. They explain, “In a line, the aim of the series is to help actualize critical historical study of games” and “exhibit acute attention to historiography and historical methodologies.” They say they’re seeking “a mix of qualities partially described by terms such as diversity, inclusiveness, and irony” (italics in the original) because this can “connect game studies to scholarship in a wide array of fields.”

In the editors’ opening note, I could find nary a word about accessibility, motivation, scope, coherence, or humanity. And, while I’m no expert, it seems to me that those are the qualities that make history relevant and relatable. In fact, I find it bizarre that the academy has come to favor historians who view themselves as stewards of self-regarding minutiae while farming accessible, inspiring, and instructive history out to the Walter Isaacsons and Christopher Nolans of the world. That seems oddly out of kilter. It also helps explain, I suspect, why history has migrated from a central place to a peripheral one in the academy.