A: Before we get to our predictions, we should probably take a little look at how far we’ve come over time. With video games, most people are aware of Pong debuting in the 1970s. However, even before Pong, a similar game was invented in 1958 by physicist William Higinbotham. (Incidentally, we share the same birthday- although separated by over 70 years.) Tennis for Two didn’t have "graphics" as we think of them today, and instead used a series of cathode ray tubes to make a simple display. Unfortunately, we’re not up to 100 years of electronic gaming history yet, but things have changed quite a bit since the early days. Similarly, with tabletop roleplaying games, Dungeons & Dragons, the first commercial RPG, was created in the 1970s. Thanks to a number of factors, it's still the major force in TTRPGs as they stand today. Fortunately for both of these mediums, a ton of progress has been made in the interim, and plenty of alternatives exist today. Bugsy, what do you think were the pivotal moments in history for video games and TTRPGs?
B: One thing that's always fascinated me, and a reason I feel comfortable talking about both tabletop and electronic gaming in this blog, is the way the analog and digital worlds have influenced each other. It's no coincidence that both stem from the same era, when strategy and wargames had reached new levels of complexity and players were looking for ways to expand on their play experience. One of the earliest electronic games was essentially a seek-and-destroy wargame, but, significantly, where most wargames existed in an abstraction (providing, at most, an historical era for the conflict), Star Trek provided context for the player - they were controlling specific characters on a specific mission, in an established universe. To be fair, this was all borrowed (and unauthorized) context that assumed the player's familiarity with an existing franchise, but in a very real sense it was a "roleplaying" game.
Dungeons & Dragons itself hadn't even been out for two full years before there was an attempt to recreate the experience on a computer in the form of Colossal Cave Adventure - the first text adventure. With its design based entirely around player choice instead of stats and random chance, Colossal Cave Adventure (which would become Zork when it made its way to the first home computers) presented a significant move away from the wargaming roots of RPGs, long before tabletop games explored these directions. Not that this aspect of gaming was neglected, crunchy combat too would make its appearance in the digital realm before too long with games like the Dunjonquest series (literally conceived at a D&D session) that started with The Temple of Apshai. At this point, the relationship between players, characters, and rulesets were still being worked out, and the rule processing aspect of the game was given the persona of a "Dunjonmaster." (Using odd spellings to get around copyright is nothing new.) This makes sense, of course, a tabletop player would be used to number crunching handled by a human DM - but this is a conceit that wouldn't last, and before long, it was simply accepted that all statistical bookkeeping was simply an aspect of the gameworld. One thing that did stick, though, was the way, in both the printed descriptions standing in for DM narration and in the game itself, Dunjonquest games referred to the player in the second person, the way one would at an-person tabletop. Other attempts to bring roleplaying to the screen (including some early text adventures) would be presented in the first person, directly asking the player what they (the character in the game) should do. This seems a bit more reasonable if one assumes the player is coming to the (metaphorical) table without previous RPG experience, and that they are going to think of the game as more akin to a TV show or movie with established characters they will be narratively guiding. This is an approach that would (eventually) be worked out in later decades to be become standard in certain genres, albiet in a self-contained way without addressing the player as a separate entity than the character they're controlling. (Hideo Kojima notwithstanding, of course.)
A: Welcome to the world of tomorrow! I’ve been so out of touch with electronic games until a few years ago, it can be hard for me to make predictions. Having children really ate away at gaming time. As things are currently going, it would be easy to say that games are going to continue to become more mobile. At the rate technology goes, the possibilities are staggering. I could see us continue to attempt to gamify our lives and bring that aspect of enjoyment more into our every day routines. Unless the apocalypse does come, in which case our electronic gaming will probably be in the form of fixing solar panels and generators so we don’t have to rely on fires for lights and heat at night. Maybe those hours playing Spider-Man mini games will pay off!
I do feel like I have a better read on tabletop roleplaying games. A major development over the last few years has been all of the digital tools that have come out to make games more accessible and streamlined - you don’t even need a real tabletop anymore. I don’t have a good idea of what the future will hold, but I can say what I’d like to see. While I enjoy Dungeons & Dragons greatly, I hope we see a rise in popularity of some of the other genres and systems out there. Something that would be immensely helpful to this is more system-agnostic tools. One reason Dungeons & Dragons is still a go-to today is the development of D&D Beyond. While there are stalwarts who prefer pencil and paper, D&D Beyond just makes the life of DMs and Players alike much easier. If other genres are going to proliferate and become more accessible, something like that will need to be made for them, too - perhaps something easy to customize. And while we're at it, may we also have something to consolidate all our digital tools so I don’t need the same sourcebook in my virtual tabletop, as well as in my organizer and elsewhere? Bugsy, what do you prognosticate for the future of gaming?
I don't think the current system is particularly sustainable on the electronic gaming side, either, as development costs skyrocket and big studios take fewer and fewer risks... as well as gobble up smaller developers whenever they try something new and it catches on. I don't expect another 1983-style crash, but rather a shift away from big titles. Mobile gaming, as you said Andy, is here to stay, but the living room and desktop have both remained steadfast through all of it. Just as with those bridge nights, there's something about gathering together around a shared activity, in a way that's harder to achieve remotely through phones or other devices. That's assuming, of course, that we'll be able to gather together again at some point... COVID has ways of dealing with the best-laid plans.
In both cases, I don't think shifts in their respective industries are going to kill gaming in any form. We've been doing it as long as we've been around, whether companies are making money off it or not. And we'll keep telling stories through those games, well into the future, no matter what it brings us. We look forward to talking about in the next hundred posts, and beyond.
Break out the dice, and we'll see you all at the table... wherever it may be.
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