MIT Press

The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity, Paperback/Jon Peterson

How the early Dungeons Dragons community grappled with the nature of role-playing games, theorizing a new game genre. When Dungeon Dragons made its debut in the mid-1970s, followed shortly thereafter by other, similar tabletop games, it sparked a renaissance in game design and critical thinking about games. D D is now popularly considered to be the first role-playing game. But in the original rules, the term role-playing is nowhere to be found; D D was marketed as a war game. In The Elusive Shift, Jon Peterson describes how players and scholars in the D D community began to apply the term to D D and similar games--and by doing so, established a new genre of games. Jon Peterson, a leading scholar of Dungeons Dragons and role-playing games, is the author of Playing at the World and Dungeons Dragons Arcana: A Visual History. Book specifications: Collection: Game Histories Dimensions: 226 x 152 Author: Jon Peterson Cover type: Paperback Publishing Year: 2022 Publishing Month: 3 Pages: 328 Language: English Publisher: MIT Press Weight: 408 g