The History of Tabletop Role-Playing Games: A Correction

One of the assigned articles, from Zach Waggoner's My Avatar, My Self, goes into the history of role-playing games. Mr. Waggoner's accounting of the origins of tabletop role-playing games is not correct, and his factual errors are relevant in the way that gamers in general--across all gaming media--relate to their characters, and by extension to the milieu wherein they enjoy gameplay, and thus to the matter of identity.

I enjoy a certain privilege in that I met not only one of the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons before both of them died, but I am also a friend of one of the people who was there when D&D came into being back in the early 1970s. I've learned, from those who were there when it happened, what went on and what they thought at the time. These are not the oft-repeated claims that Mr. Waggoner repeats, most probably out of ignorance. Rather than spend time while in session addressing these errors, I will take this post to issue the corrections and other relevant details.

• Gary Gygax created D&D in conjunction with Dave Arneson. (The linked Wikipedia article is correct in its presented facts, but is neither complete nor comprehensive in its coverage.)
• Both Gary and Dave were avid wargamers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, favoring medieval through Napoleonic wargame scenarios and multi-scenario campaigns. This play preference greatly influenced the design of D&D, evolving out of a variant Napoleonic scenario called "Braunstein".
• At this time time M.A.R. Barker taught at the University of Minnesota, and began to interact with this community, which focused upon an axis between the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Professor Barker, following J.R.R. Tolkien, created a fantasy world known as "Tekumel" as a youth; during the 1970s Prof. Barker adapted his creation for use in role-playing games.
• Neither Arneson nor Gygax like Tolkien and the High Fantasy subgenre in general, preferring the Sword & Sorcery subgenre typified by Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter, Fritz Lieber, and (as a writer whose's famous creation was originally a counter-example which became a trope of its own in this genre) Michael Moorcock.
• Arneson, Gygax, Barker and all of the other early RPG creators never conceived of their products as a storytelling medium. The language today for their designed and intended mode of play is "vicarious life experience", where there is no outside force acting to enforce a narrative framework as one expects from passive media such as film or print fiction.
  
  Players kept a stable of characters, each of which would be at different levels of power and influence, and would exist at different points in time and space. (Bob the Fighter is at the Dungeon of Terror from 3 March to the present, but tonight's play session starts on 1 July of last year so Jack has to make a new character if he wants to play tonight.) All of this is far better explained at Ars Ludi.
• Player identification with their character did not happen in the manner we're talking about until the snot-nosed kids that had no wargaming background (i.e. my generation) got into this through our older siblings (or the siblings of our friends) between 1978-1983 or so. What Waggoner calls "ego investment" was something that came along with my age cohort's entrance into the hobby; the effects are not ones that we--as remaining hobbyists--agree as being beneficial. James Maliezewski, author of Grognardia, uses his typical allusions to mythical age reckoning to summarize the matter.
  
  Originally, players--coming from that wargaming background--did not have an avatar-like identity with their character. What today is "your character" was then "your hero", as in a classical Greek hero of "an individual of extraordinary ability that champions the desired virtues of his people", and your hero led a band or an army.
  
  The original scenarios were variations on traditional wargame scenarios meant to scale down the action to single figures or small warbands, which further changed when Arneson demonstrated a fast-play variant to Gygax that let the then-neutral third party referee run the opposition forces instead of an opposing player. (This is where your Dungeon Master came from.) Gygax ran with that, creating his (and the second) D&D campaign: Castle Greyhawk.
  
  The first, by the way, was Arneson's "Blackmoor". Both freely mixed fantasy and science fiction in their settings, as was the fashion in popular literature at the time. (The firm divide between the two genres is a post-D&D invention.)
  
  In short, the early days of RPGs had little or no avatars and a hell of a lot of agents; identification came with the collective stable of characters one had, and not with any specific individual character. That changed with the 1980s, and the shift in the business of the RPG hobby as a generational turnover occurred; a lot of the founding cohort, being college students at the time, graduated and entered the work force so their careers and marriages took off- time for hobbies went away. Mine was the up-and-coming cohort, and we were the ones that made the changes happen- and not for the best of reasons.
• Because we lacked the wargaming background, and we were children lacking both in maturity and perspective, a lot of what was unspoken (and thus assumed) about how to play RPGs went by the wayside. Rather than seeing our characters as Heroes (and thus Leaders), with sidekicks and proteges performing the role in gameplay that today we see with easily-reversible death/maiming/etc. due to magic or like-magic technology, we saw them as Power Fantasy figures and acted accordingly. We invested our egos into our characters all right, and in the process created a toxic subculture that had consequences far beyond our little hobby niche.
  
  A lot of tabletop RPG tropes that still directly influence console, PC and MMORPGs are the result of my cohort collectively acting like spoiled shits to each other and thus ruining it for everyone, because damn near everyone that's a big deal in videogame RPGs has quite the background in tabletop RPGs. (More than a few fantasy fiction authors after 1974 also have such a background, which is why that genre is so homogenous now.)
  
  Only in the last decade has that changed, as the original cohort is at or past retirement age and the survivors are now online to tell us what the hell we did wrong (and how to fix it).

If you want more on the history of tabletop RPGs, you can start with Grognardia, written by an acquaintance of mine by the name of James Malizewski. He links to other hobby bloggers that focus on D&D, or other tabletop RPGs--Traveller, RIFTS, Call of Cthulhu and Champions are commonly discussed in addition to D&D--of note. I also recommend "Playing at the World".

Still with me? Thanks. With this in mind, I'll go straight to online RPGs tonight in session; if you have any questions regarding tabletop role-playing games and the subculture thereof, please save them for the break.