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Playing At the World: a Huge New History of Gaming
New submitter disconj writes "Over at Wired, Ethan Gilsdorf interviews Jon Peterson, author of the new book Playing at the World. Gilsdorf calls it 'a must read,' though he cautions it 'is not intended for a general audience. It's a book for geeks, about geeks.' It is apparently an insanely-detailed history of role-playing games and wargames, including everything from Prussian kriegsspiel up to Dungeons & Dragons and the beginning of computer RPGs (but none of that heathen stuff after 1980). Peterson says in the interview that he wanted to write a history of these games 'worthy of the future they are creating.' He apparently spent five years on the project, including unearthing a huge trove of previously-unknown historical documents."
Well, it seems to me that a lot happened since 1980, including at least a couple of orders of magnitude increase of people who play this sort of game. The author can always publish sequels.
It's worth noting the effects of past games on the present. A game like WoW didn't magically spring up out of the void. It has a past in other computer games (Everquest and other graphics-intensive games, a number of text-based MUDs, and the various old pen and paper or board games that inspired all of these predecessors).