I’m partway through The Elusive Shift, an excellent history of early TTRPG play and theory. It’s fascinating how many recurring topics of conversation were debated from a very early stage (genre convention vs realism, interaction via system vs interaction via narration, challenge-oriented play vs open-ended play, centrality of the GM, etc.)
I adored the Elusive Shift. I think I’ll need to read through it again with a highlighter and try to absorb even more. The TTRPG hobby has been locked in a cycle of the same arguments since before its inception. It’s a little wild to me how there isn’t really any technical language or jargon that has really stuck around in describing how we play or any work to classify things into those play types. TTRPGs cover a wide variety of actual play but I’m not sure how much our language and conversations focus on important parts of those differences.
There’s a little bit towards the end that mentions a “lack of institutional memory” as the reason the 80s saw repetitions of the arguments of the 70s (and, by extension, why the 2020s can’t get past the arguments of the 70s either). Fortunately, I think the book may be an actual antidote for that part! Easier to remember with so much proto-discourse in one place.
Elusive Shift, for my money, is currently the most important text written on our hobby, yet.
Not only is it interesting from a “we’ve all been debating this before” perspective, but I also think it points to just how diverse in terms of play culture the hobby has always been, that there is no one style that you can point to as “this is how it was always done.”
Play was always highly varied, and people expressed multitudes, playing different ways with different people, games, and contexts. We’re very quick to point out that the “OSR-as-playstyle” wasn’t the “one way” played back in the 70s, but we end up recreating a new cycle when we say “ok nobody could have played that way,” or create a distinction without a difference in terms of revisionism by creating something we label as a “Classic” or “Trad” play style.
Fantastic book. It’s surprisingly engaging and interesting. I also loved how they had figured out all of role playing in the 70s, argued about it all, and then we do it all again and again.