A tabletop game hands digital worlds their basic vocabulary

What happened

Miniature wargaming supplied the starting point, but the crucial move was scale. Instead of commanding an army, each player controlled one person, described by a handful of numbers, who accumulated experience and grew more capable across sessions. A referee described the world and judged attempts to act in it. The first edition arrived as a hand-assembled boxed set of pamphlets in a print run of roughly a thousand, sold largely by mail and through hobby shops in the American Midwest, and it sold out.

Programmers on university machines were among its earliest and most enthusiastic players, and the rules translated almost too easily into code. Hit points, armor values, dice rolls, character classes, experience thresholds and monster tables are arithmetic, which a computer adjudicates faster and more consistently than a person. Within two years dungeon-crawling programs were circulating on time-shared systems. Within a decade the structure was the backbone of a commercial genre on personal computers, and shortly afterward of console series made in Japan.

The world at the time

Hobby gaming in 1974 was a small mail-order world of historical wargamers arguing over rules in mimeographed newsletters. Fantasy fiction was enjoying a paperback revival, and campuses were full of readers who also had access to computers. No entertainment industry existed for either audience, which is why the book spread by word of mouth for years before mass attention arrived.

What it changed

The game itself became a cultural phenomenon and, in the early 1980s, the target of a moral panic of its own. Its mechanics passed into text adventures, dungeon crawlers, the first commercial computer role-playing games and eventually online worlds with millions of inhabitants. Disputes over credit between its two authors, and over royalties, shadowed the company for the rest of its existence.