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Jon Peterson’s Playing to the World was one of those rare books, like Guns, Germs, and Steel or High and Mighty, that’s extremely engaging despite covering subject matter that seems like it should be boring as hell. While I’m not bothering with the multi-book “let’s see if they’ll buy it twice” reboot of Playing to the World, I have read Peterson’s follow-up books. I’ve also tried to read a few other RPG histories, but most of them were boring as hell and a gave up after a few chapters. Yet I keep buying them, because I never learn.
I actually finished a (sort of; more on that later) non-Peterson history of RPGs for a change, but it was only 100 pages long and had a lot of pictures. The book was Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games, by Fred Ven Lente, Tom Fowler, and Bill Crabtree. I backed the Kickstarter a while ago and the book arrived last week. When I took it out of the box, I knew I’d read it soon. There was something about the book that really drew me to it, but I didn’t realize what it was until I sat down to read it.
It turns out, it was all about format. The book is constructed like a First Edition D&D book: The size, the texture, the sharp corners, and everything else makes the book feel like you’re holding an old Player’s Handbook. And not one of the orange-spined reprints with Jeff Easley art. We’re talking the Trampier cover here. There’s something different about the material used to make the “new ones” that’s so slight it takes years of thumbing through them to notice the difference. So right off the bat, the design team gets credit for making me want to read the book by activating my sense of nostalgia.
What’s inside is less impressive, and not just because it’s slick color paper rather than the world’s thinnest and gentlest sandpaper that they used in the old books from my childhood. The first several chapters are just a stripped-down version of Peterson with pictures (which we’ll talk about in a minute). I mean, it’s history, so there’s definitely going to be a lot of overlap, but since they mention several other sources at the end of the book, you’d think there’d be something new. While I tried and gave up on some of the source material cited in the comic, the only one I’m familiar with is the Secrets of Blackmooor documentary, which came out before Peterson’s Game Wizards but covers a lot of the same material. So maybe Peterson was just so thorough that every other history basically follows his outline.
I don’t really think that’s the case though, in part because of what happens once they get past the material that Peterson has covered in depth. Everything after the (very abbreviated telling of) Gygax getting the boot is just a mess. It’s out of order, disjointed, and the subject matter sometimes seems completely random. For example, there’s nearly 3 pages about CD Projekt Red, a video game company. Even worse, that part comes before the discussion of White Wolf (which only gets 3 panels), Magic: The Gathering, the WOTC and Hasbro takeovers, the OGL, Pathfinder, and many other events that in some cases happened decades before Keanu played Johnny Silverhand. Since most of the material in this section is well-documented (the FBI raid on Steve Jackson Games) or recent (the OGL fiasco from a few years ago), you get the feeling that they wanted to go beyond what’s already been written, but didn’t have the time, ability, or motivation to actually do the research.
“Maybe it’s not supposed to cover new ground,” you may be saying, “but to retell the story in a new format. After all it’s a comic book.” There’s just one problem with that theory: despite the subtitle, this is not a comic book. A comic book tells a story using words and pictures. This book tells a story with words and also has some pictures. I only noticed two (very minor) instances where the illustrations provided any information that wasn’t in the text. In fact, half the images are only tangentially related to what’s being discussed. You don’t need the illustrations to tell what’s going on, which makes this an illustrated story in my taxonomy. Just because the illustrations are frequently arranged in a 9-panel grid does not make it a comic book. The art is good, and often funny, but the book is not a comic.
Overall, this book feels like something that was only produced because someone decided they could turn a profit on it. There’s a “work for hire” vibe to the whole thing that makes me wonder if anyone involved has ever even rolled a d20. It’s not so much bad as just completely unnecessary.
