At almost $300 for the hardback, The Routledge Handbook of Role-Playing Game Studies isn't likely to end up on my bookshelves, but wealthier gamers can buy it here.
Is it worth it? No idea, though I do wonder how long human beings can keep writing stuff like this now we have LLMs. An excerpt:
No AI hallucinations there, I'll give it that, but why bother with the accent in "Tekumel" if you aren't going to say what it means? (It's an emphasis mark, ie the word is pronounced TAY-koo-mail, but there's no point including the accent here if you aren't also going to write "Mórdor" when discussing Lord of the Rings and "Wiscónsin" in the section on TSR.)
Still, maybe I'm a tad biased towards the hard sciences. This diagram will tell you if it's the book for you or whether you'd rather buy the Vulcanverse series and have $225 left over:
I find histories of RPGs and the early days of the hobby really interesting, but to my mind it feels more like the work of journalism rather than academic analysis. To be fair to the various contributors, I guess they're addressing a lot more than just the history of RPGs, but I'm not £215 curious to find out the details!
ReplyDeletePlus, I've already sunk money into all five Vulcanverse books, so I guess that choice has already been made for me! XD
Good choice, Ray. (Though I would say that...)
DeleteThis one looks a bit more rigorously academic than Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, in that they cover games of historical importance regardless of whether they approve of them personally. But even so, if I had to take either of these whopping great tomes to a desert island, I think it would be the more journalistic one. The contents page alone of the Routledge book is enough to send me to sleep.
As someone who has been published by Routledge, I should comment that their books are essentially designed for two purposes: bulking out the list of publications of academics, and bulking out the list of references of academic papers. The price of the books is set where it is because hardly anyone is going to buy them, so they will mostly be acquired by university libraries. I would always recommend that anyone who has any interest in a Routledge book start by looking for them in a university library. They aren't all tedious rubbish (a friend of mine has written some pretty good analyses of the Japanese education system for them), but that's damning with faint praise, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteI reckon Routledge should emblazon "Not all tedious rubbish" -- Paul Mason on the front covers!
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