Well, I will throw a couple of connections your way. You mention Steward Brand; it might be worth expanding a bit more on The Whole Earth Catalog as a cultural nexus where all those ’70′s and ’80′s nontraditional-but-homebrew phenomena intermingled. The Last Whole Earth Catalog did have articles on wargames and D&D if I recall correctly.

Another book of that era was The Great Escape, ed. by Min S. Yee and Donald K. Wright. It was slicker but less well-known than Whole Earth; it had a whole chapter on games which included New Games, wargames, RPGs, and other entertainments.

Finally, one element that I think you could touch on a bit more is the continuous nature of RPGs, which was as revolutionary as the cooperative quality. This had a number of effects, including making the games more “pervasive” (you were still “in” the game even when you weren’t playing) and, somewhat related, creating an expanding field of meaning outside the isolated scenario. The continuity of gameplay combined with the hierarchical “levels” of play–the 20×20 room skirmish, or the search for traps & treasure contextualized by the dungeon expedition; the dungeon expedition contextualized by the campaign arc and geography; those in turn contextualized by the PC narrative; and then the PC narrative contextualized by the “world” as a whole–this was an entirely new experience compared to nearly anything that had gone before, especially as an interactive activity.

What I would really like to find would be a nice searchable archive of Gygax’s online mailing lists for the 1990s. Most yahoo groups seem to start at 2000. I think the 1990s were a critical decade for changes in attitude.

If I manage to get some good source documents, I’ll try to get back to serious writing around July 2009.

I hear what you’re saying about things getting weird when you try to trace the lineage of D&D/AD&D etc. The exact questions of priority of invention and who came up with what are extremely sensitive for many people.

Again, thanks for reading and for being a real person!

I do, however, have an obsessive and hard-to-justify interest in how AD&D got to be the way it was, because one way or another it ended up having a massive impact on the Western world’s approach to gaming.

Unfortunately, the lawsuits make it hard to document exactly which elements got weird at which points in time, and the all-too-recent deaths of both Gygax and Arneson still have some people mourning, so I try not to discuss it as bluntly as I otherwise would.

I’m going to look up Boulding now! And “new games”. Thanks.

Rob: I’d love to see that proposal if you don’t mind sharing. Better yet, the paper if it gets picked up.

I only just found Wells’ Little Wars a couple years back and thought it was crazy that folks were playing these games so far back, but having grown up after Vietnam, I never considered the connection with the development of the RPG hobby.

Truly…a lot of food for thought (next up: an analysis of the change in RPGs and RPG philosophy due to events of the last decade or two!).