The era of the RPG historian started in the 21st century, but that’s not when the RPG history has its roots. In the last decade or so, Jon Peterson, Shannon Appelcline and Ben Riggs, among others, have released volumes about how the tabletop RPG came to be. Though the RPG historians of today have different writing styles and research approaches, they share the perspective of being twenty-first century gamers looking back into the twentieth century through the lens of the hobby’s accumulated history, theory, and perspective. It is the very limitation of this twenty-first century perspective that illuminates the value of the few scholarly texts written about tabletop gaming in the time of its ascendancy. That’s why today I want to discuss Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine.

Gary Alan Fine is not a gamer, per se (though he became one in order to write this book). Rather, Dr. Fine is a sociologist, one who has spent his career analyzing the emergent culture of small groups. Through his illustrious career he’s written ethnographies on Little League baseball teams, mushroom foragers, high school debate teams, and MFA programs, to name but a few. And while Shared Fantasy was relatively early in his career it is of outsized importance to us gamers, if only because it’s likely the only text of roleplayer sociology that exists in the mainstream.

What Dr. Fine did to write this book is a step beyond most RPG historians, who all did amazing work compiling primary source documents, personal relationships, and years of correspondence. No, to write Shared Fantasy Dr. Fine went to a local gaming club in Minnesota (called The Golden Brigade), and simply joined. After a year he had played several games, run sessions of Chivalry and Sorcery, and was even invited to M.A.R. Barker’s home campaign of Empire of the Petal Throne. As a result, Shared Fantasy is likely one of the best outsider accounts of RPG campaigns and the social norms those groups produce (here described by Dr. Fine as ‘idioculture’, from the same root as ‘idiom’).

One of the most significant issues with Shared Fantasy (and also an issue with its lack of followup by others in the sociology field) is that it discusses the RPG hobby as it existed in 1977 to 1979, when Dr. Fine’s research and gaming took place. It’s hard to overstate the impact and social upheaval which has occurred since then, and thanks to the advent of the home PC, the internet, and the smartphone in the intervening years, leisure time especially looks wildly different now than it did then. What’s more, in 1977 the formalized RPG hobby was merely three years old, and the biggest point of upheaval in its first decade of life, the 1981 Basic Set release, hadn’t happened yet either. This all means that, in a lot of ways, RPG culture looks nothing like it did in 1979, and we need to consider how to interpret the differences. At the same time, any gamer who reads Shared Fantasy will be immediately struck by how much has stayed the same.

What’s changed

[CW: This section contains blunt discussion of sexism and sexual assault.]

Given that Dr. Fine’s research started the first year the Apple II was released, it’s wholly unsurprising that where RPGs fell in typical leisure time was vastly different compared to today. Early in the book one of the gamers commented in an interview that, since the club met on Friday nights, the types of people who would decide to go to a community room and play D&D were not exactly the ‘normal’ sorts who would otherwise be going out with friends or on dates. This was one factor that skewed the play group younger, and in fact the gamers of The Golden Brigade were said to skew yet younger as Dr. Fine’s residence continued. Now TTRPGs skew young today as well (every demographic survey Wizards has done puts the median gamer’s age in their 20s), but it was striking to me how normal ‘aging out’ of the hobby was considered at the time. Essentially it was assumed that the vast majority of men would not have the free time necessary to actively engage in roleplaying after they left college.

I picked ‘men’ as the descriptor here quite intentionally. The most generous gender distribution available at the time was from Gary Gygax (a personal estimate regarding D&D specifically) and was about 85:15 male:female. Meanwhile, most other figures available at the time ranged from 95 to 99% male. Dr. Fine offered up several theories to explain this lopsided distribution (and thankfully none of them have anything to do with gendered interest or capability). One, which I had not heard before but find fairly compelling, is the idea that men who were playing games at the time saw RPGs as a hobby pursued with other men, much like poker or bowling may have been. Given more conservative social and gender norms there was an unspoken push to keep social circles segregated by gender (one that arguably still exists today in some social strata), and as a result men extended invitations to many social and leisure events only to other male friends. The explanation of this in the book is much better done than mine, but the point should still be clear.

The other theory, one which we’re all (unfortunately) more familiar with, is regarding the content of the games. There is a segment of the book discussing violence in these games, and the discussion given towards gratuitous violence and sexual violence honestly surprised me. My impression as a millennial gamer has historically been that the stories of rape in roleplaying sessions have been horror stories, limited to edgelord problem players and maladjusted groups. Though it wasn’t described as common, apparently the number of players who decided that raping an NPC was for some reason a necessary addition to their game was high enough that Dr. Fine noted it in the book. Given that, it certainly makes sense that there were very few women who stayed in games like the ones Dr. Fine observed.

I had to give this one thought because the sort of gratuity that Dr. Fine observed (in more typical RPG scenarios as well, not just sexual violence) is starkly absent from my games, save a few specific moments. Obviously a lot of the gender segregation is gone too, but a lot of that stems both from changes in social norms as well as the advent of the internet, which has rendered some gender self-selection phenomena so weak as to be moot. The violence, though, interests me; I have a theory, though of course I’m not a sociologist. I don’t necessarily think it’s controversial to say that there is a demand for violent escapism in media. I also don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that the availability of that sort of escapist material has exploded since 1977. The 70s certainly had violent movies, even some action movies, but in 2023 I can open Steam and lose count of the number of video games that I personally own that will allow you to chop or shoot off enemy limbs. The amount of pornography available on the internet for free is staggering, and in 1977 you were only just beginning to have access to home videos (which most of the members of The Golden Brigade were too young to purchase).

My point in all this is simple: Roleplaying games are already a chance to be someone else. If you live in a society where there’s no other way to pretend to impale someone with a sword, why wouldn’t it happen at a gaming table? And in the opposite direction, when you can you hit X to swing a sword and chop off an enemy’s head at 4K in the comfort of your own home, where is the motivation to bring that bloodlust to your RPG session? This also aligns with what we currently understand about violent video games, namely that they are outlets for impulses which are already there, not the root cause of them.

In a lot of ways it’s easy to discuss what’s changed; I couldn’t even imagine living in 1977 given how different society is now. What’s stayed the same in roleplaying, though, is even more fascinating. I personally wonder if Dr. Fine has had a chuckle at how similar gamers of the 2020s are to the gamers of the late 1970s.

What’s stayed the same

Over the last fifty years, gamers have not gotten any better at trusting their dice. Dice shaming, rolling the ones out, and all sorts of other dice superstitions were as common in 1977 as they are today. Similarly, some debates never get resolved. There was a lengthy discussion in the book on dice fudging and ‘cheating’, with the fascinating observation that because games are cooperative, dice cheating becomes an area for debate as opposed to an absolute (as cheating typically is in competitive games). This in turn led to a (quite familiar) analysis on the role of the GM; turns out my group’s personal favorite ‘never give the GM ideas’ is significantly older than any of us at the table.

One astonishing thing I got out of this book is that the interviews with gamers about GMing (or refereeing, which was the common term in the book) kind of give lie to the notion that the best practices for running a game have evolved over the last fifty years. Most GMs interviewed for the book understood that their job was to help the players have fun, even though some GMs were tougher than others. Similarly, most GMs understood that nothing they wrote would survive contact with the players, and that extensive prep was more likely to go to waste than anything else. Now, it is entirely possible that the intermingled structure of the Golden Brigade helped highlight good GMs and isolate bad GMs (and there are certainly several anecdotes of *bad* GMs in the book).

At the same time, there is some evidence that some bad GMing techniques were (whether intentionally or not) encouraged later. I think adversarial GMing, or our perception thereof, may be an outgrowth of how advice on challenging your players was written in the 90s, specifically thinking of examples like Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads for Cyberpunk 2020 and John Wick’s Play Dirty column. The same could be said about the popularity of Vampire:the Masquerade in the 1990s, which encouraged its GMs to come up with sprawling plots, including layers at the upper levels of vampire society which the characters couldn’t necessarily affect. In Shared Fantasy there’s plenty of examples of good GMs, bad GMs, and everything in between, but the advice that circulated around the Golden Brigade likely almost never disseminated to other clubs or gaming groups.

One other fascinating element that’s stayed the same is the diversity in gameplay styles. While the rules-light, player skill-heavy philosophy of the OSR is literally called ‘old school’, nothing in Shared Fantasy indicates that a playstyle resembling OSR was more popular than others, or even popular at all. The games which were popular in the Golden Brigade were mostly unsurprising, with D&D and Traveller being the two games with the most mentions. Of note, though, was Chivalry and Sorcery, a game published in 1977 that aimed to be more realistic (and more complex) than D&D. C&S is, from what I’ve read, the antithesis of what we’d consider an old-school playstyle, instead using more and more complex rules in the name of realism. The Golden Brigade apparently played a lot of C&S, and it was a popular stepping stone from D&D. In modern terms, this would be akin to moving from Fifth Edition D&D to something like GURPS or Burning Wheel. Now, this is not to say that more complicated games were more popular back then, nor is it even to claim that the OSR is misrepresenting history (from what I understand, no one in the OSR is making claims that they actually play anything like play in the 70s, nor do most older gamers who started in the 70s feel any particular affinity towards the OSR). Rather, the thing that has stayed the same is the immense diversity in RPG playstyles, and the attendant debates over who’s doing it better.

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I’ve mostly discussed the content of Shared Fantasy rather than critiqued it; in some ways I’m not an appropriate critic given my lack of academic background. That said, as a mere reviewer I can still bring us back around to the book as a whole. What Dr. Fine has put together here is a comprehensive and thought-provoking assessment of roleplayers in the late 1970s. From an RPG history perspective I don’t think there’s a better text about the players, as opposed to the designers, from the RPG’s early history. There are of course limitations, given that this is a text about the era from the era, and as such any consideration or speculation about what changed and why is left to the reader (as I’ve done above). It’s also worth noting this is an academic text, and it can be pretty dry at times as a result. Even so, I think it’s a worthy read. The culture of a small group of gamers in Minnesota gives not only valuable insight into what gaming was like (and is like, to a degree), it also helps us understand how our own group norms came about and how we are (or are not) influenced by the social networks around us.

One interesting thing, at least from my perspective, is that with a few exceptions (like the discussion on violence), the content of the, ahem, shared fantasies of these gaming groups were not primary. This does come down to the fact that this is a sociology text. While the games Dr. Fine observed involved many different fantasy and science fiction worlds created by their players, it was those outside social constructions which enabled a shared vision of a world to come into being that were more interesting. Within the broader discussion of what social culture evolves within a group of roleplayers, there’s a snapshot of gamer culture and how it enables tabletop RPGs to transcend ‘playing pretend’. While Shared Fantasy can only ever be an analysis of the past, it is still to this day a good discussion piece on why role-playing games can be so socially significant, and why our gaming groups can be so personally affecting.

Shared Fantasy is available from the University of Chicago Press.

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