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The Elusive Shift
  • Published: 3 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780262544900
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 328
  • RRP: $75.00
Categories:

The Elusive Shift

How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity

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How the early Dungeons & Dragons community grappled with the nature of role-playing games, theorizing a new game genre.

When Dungeon & Dragons made its debut in the mid-1970s, followed shortly thereafter by other, similar tabletop games, it sparked a renaissance in game design and critical thinking about games. D&D is now popularly considered to be the first role-playing game. But in the original rules, the term "role-playing" is nowhere to be found; D&D was marketed as a war game. In The Elusive Shift, Jon Peterson describes how players and scholars in the D&D community began to apply the term to D&D and similar games--and by doing so, established a new genre of games.
  • Published: 3 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9780262544900
  • Imprint: MIT Press Academic
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 328
  • RRP: $75.00
Categories:

About the author

Jon Peterson

Jon Peterson is widely recognized as an authority on the history of games, best known as the author of Playing at the World, The Elusive Shift, and Game Wizards. He also co-authored Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana, Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook, and Heroes’ Feast Flavors of the Multiverse. He has contributed to academic anthologies on games, including MIT Press’s Zones of Control and Routledge’s Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Jon also has written for various geek culture websites, including Wired, Polygon, and BoingBoing, as well as maintaining his own blog.
portrait photo of Jon Peterson

Also by Jon Peterson

Heroes' Feast Legends of the Table (Dungeons & Dragons)
Playing at the World, 2E, Volume 2
Heroes' Feast: The Deck of Many Morsels
Playing at the World, 2E, Volume 1
Lore & Legends [Special Edition, Boxed Book & Ephemera Set]
Heroes' Feast Flavors of the Multiverse (Dungeons & Dragons)
Dungeons & Dragons Lore & Legends (B&N Exclusive)
See all

Praise for The Elusive Shift

"Jon Peterson, author of Playing at the World, [one] of the most well-regarded books on the early history of D&D."--https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/22/18001762/dungeons-and-dragons-art-arcana-visual-history-book-review-excerpt

"Jon Peterson, author of Playing at the World, [one] of the most well-regarded books on the early history of D&D."--https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/22/18001762/dungeons-and-dragons-art-arcana-visual-history-book-review-excerpt