Book Review - Peterson: Playing at the World (2012).
Here's a copy of my Amazon review of Jon Peterson's book Playing at the World. A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures from Chess to Role-playing Games (San Diego: Unreason Press
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No matter what you may think, it's not about boosting anyone's citation indices. It's about credibility. Whether you like it or not, your book will most be read and promoted by academics. Academics who are themselves role-players. To many of them, your omission to include what they see as relevant work - to either quote, refute or nod towards - will make them question whether your work can be trusted. "If he hasn't bothered to check existing research out, can we rely on the other parts." This can then be seen in the style you get mentioned later on. There's a big difference between how "[historical fact] (Peterson, 2012)", "according to Peterson (2012)..." and "Peterson (2012) claims that..." describe what you've done to new readers. Staying almost isolated and not being in at least momentary discourse with the likes of Mackay or Salen & Zimmerman makes the result appear amateurish (or exceptionally arrogant), when you for example make claims against artistic merit, to many professionals who'd otherwise like to use the book as a basis for further research. For me, the key factor on whether to consider it worth buying was seeing that at least Fine and Guetzkow had been read - that presented me with enough level of initial trust that it might be the product of a devoted scholar, not just obsessive hobbyism.
When you write a full chapter called "Characters - Roles and Immersion", the issue of immersion stops being peripheral. Likewise, you may not like looking at influence history, or about thinking about potential serendipity, emergence and frameworks instead of seeing the thing as a happy set of accidents, but others do (and have, in the likes of Simulation & Gaming, for a long time). That's once more where being in discourse with existing research counts - if you have the data to refute what you see as outrageous or misguided claims, use it, instead of blocking out the rest of the world. Like you say, they aren't as versed in the very minutiae of the development. If they were, there would have been no point in you writing your book, would there?
The way I was taught when I studied publication history was that one gathers the facts and reflects upon them in proper historical context. You excell at the former, but the latter part is why I also remain critical.
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But to your side points - if I am, as you have here so starkly proposed, ignorant, prejudiced, arrogant or amateurish, or all of the above, then surely my work will justifiably be ignored. Academics reading the book certainly should question its methods and conclusions, and if they find that a work like Mackay provides a superior insight into the origins of role-playing games, no one is forcing my book onto their desks. I did read Mackay fairly early into my project, and while I found the connections between the imaginary worlds of role-playing games and amusement parks charming, I didn't find anything within relevant to the particular works I was studying.
Mine is a book about the history of certain games, not a book about the secondary critical literature surrounding games. Again, I think you want it to be a very different sort of book than it is, and are condemning it for the absence of content that doesn't belong in it. You and I definitely understand the phrase "proper historical context" very differently. I certainly don't think I should be obligated to name-check works that I consider irrelevant or faulty, rather than simply ignoring them. PatW is already quite a long book. If I were citing a work like Mackay, it would be to refute its own historical claims (not to engage on questions of Barthes and narrative). If I had to do that for just the sources you've mentioned so far, it would already be bloating the text significantly.
There is indeed a chapter called "Characters - Roles and Immersion," but it is about a set of particular historical games and outlier phenomena (such as the Bronte siblings "games," or the SCA). The purpose of the chapter is to show a specific historical chain of influence that ran through those games, which helped to inform the audience and authors of Dungeons & Dragons. Immersion itself is not peripheral to that story, but a definition or theory of immersion definitely is. As I said in my note above, I believe that understanding the particular characteristics of those historical phenomena requires us to forget what role-playing games would eventually become. If my method fails to capture that history, then again, I'm sure my work will justifiably be ignored. Its legacy will not, however, falter for want of shout-outs to tangential works, I don't think.
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Where our expectations indeed differ is that I think you should have included a few footnotes where you say how your data contrasts existing claims - in an already 700 page volume, that would not have bloated it much, and would give a versed reader a better handle on what you say. In my opinion, "if your research shows that Mackay had it wrong somewhere, say so". Science is made in discourse, not isolation. You yourself, however, seem happy to do just (extremely impressive) data collection, but not much analysis. For me, an integral part of historical research is the reflection on how one's data correlates with existing claims. You've left that almost completely to others.
An example of what I mean by generalization problems is on p. 596: "That much said, few could deny that intense gaming triggered the powerful sense of immersion frequently discussed in the preceding chapters. To what degree, if any, does the property of immersion trigger in players a confusion between reality and the simulated world of games?" This immediately begs questions on what's being meant by "immersion", how is it a "property", why is immersion created, and so forth. Simulation/game research that preceded D&D already tackled with those questions here and there, so it's not even ignorable as just "secondary" or "peripheral".
What it all boils down to where you see only shout-outs and something that needs to be ignored, I see necessary discourse without which a work remains a collection of documented events, not proper historical research. In summary, you excell in the "what happened", but whenever you go into "why", the lack of sufficient grounding and terminological explication makes your claims not nearly as useful or reliable.
Ignoring irrelevant works is fine. "I ignored them because I thought them faulty", however, is not research, its an assertion of one's own superiority without presenting proper grounds for it. Where you could have shown why your work was more accurate, you chose to stay silent and leave most public assessments to the very people whose work you decided to ignore as irrelevant, faulty or both. Therefore you may, like here, get judged by standards others than those you'd like - and be found wanting in some parts that others see as the most valuable.
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Thanks for providing a citation that concerns you. Immersion is mentioned throughout the book from p.15 forward, and yes, that page does at least illustrate what immersion is (though I wouldn't say it defines immersion). The specific teaser on p.596 about the confusion between reality and the simulated world of games is there of course to tee up the historical narrative about Egbert which begins on the following page. But more importantly, the first pages of the Epilogue are littered with rhetorical questions, virtually all of which are answered only by my general statement, "We cannot hope to resolve such philosophical quandaries in these pages." There is a clear scope of the book drawn here and elsewhere (in the Introduction especially). Questions of why immersion is created, or how it is a "property," are out. Questions of what happened to Egbert and how this impacted sales of D&D, those are in. Other people are very interested in these philosophical quandaries, I'm sure, and my book isn't trying to comment on them either way - though if you asked my personal opinion, I'd say these questions are very hard to answer.
I tried to answer simple questions of fact, which are easier in the sense that you just have to gather evidence to answer them - but since pretty much everyone had gotten these facts wrong, clearly a work setting the record straight was needed. Some people write about the past in order to illustrate points about philosophy, or political science, like say Michel Foucault. Other people write about the past in order to narrate events to improve our understanding of the period in question, like say Edward Gibbon. One of them is a critical theorist and the other is a historian. So actually, I would be proud if my work was nothing but "a collection of documented events." The events are hard enough to solve for, and if I moved the ball forward on documenting them, I will have accomplished my modest purpose. (And yes, I do understand that writing history involves judgment calls and interpretation, but these days people favor putting that heavily-laden cart in front of the horse for reasons that remain obscure to me.)
So in summary, I maintain my book is only "worthless" in respects in which it shouldn't have any worth. It is worthless as a guide to dolphin migration patterns as well. While you seem to think it is arrogant to ignore historical errors in related works, I think that chastizing every author who was misled into believing the Castle & Crusade Society began in 1968, for example, would not be a good use of space. These questions of historical fact are, after all, just peripheral in the works of an author like Mackay. If Foucault slipped and got wrong the date that Bentham wrote about the Panopticon, would that undermine Discipline & Punish? Where secondary sources have intended to cover scopes that I found comparable to mine (like, say Perla's history of wargames, or 40 Years of Gen Con), I did call them out in footnotes and explain their shortcomings. But it would be needlessly pedantic for me to do the same to, say, Mackay. My book is indeed just an anthology of correct details. We needed one. If it is a better foundation for the basic historical framework than the existing works cited by folks like Mackay (say, Mona), then perhaps it will be of use to future authors.
I would rather by judged by the standard of history than of theory. I am however aware that I cannot prevent people from judging me by whatever standard they like.
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I didn't expect you to go ad hominem, Jon, and claim reviewer self-interest bias based on one of the over three dozen works I've written over the years, one even irrelevant to the book being reviewed (as it came out much later), excluding issues of potential expertise in pointing out where your claims overextend themselves. That's bad manners, and very unbecoming of an author receiving critique on the potential shortcomings of his own work. Discussion closed as pointless.
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