Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds

Shared Fantasy is an ethnographic description of the fantasy role-playing games community circa the early 1980s, linked to a functional, if not exactly scintillating, theory of fun and games. Fine is a sociologist, and he’s interested in the workings of status in the young, male, gaming group that he studied, and also the creation of a shared culture around an imaginary world of magic, heroics, violence, and ever fickle dice. He treats RPGs as entertainment, with all the care that the subject deserves—games won’t save the world, they won’t turn kids into satanic monsters, but they’re a great way to spend an evening with your friends.

This book is most valuable from a historical perspective, in that a lot of modern ‘serious gaming’ culture was formed in these D&D clubs, and the conflicts that Fine studies are the same as the ones argued at length on RPG.net today. Rules vs rulings; problematic players and arbitrary GMs; the troubles of moving beyond adolescent male power fantasy. There are some choice quotes from Gary Gygax when he truly was the high priest of a rapidly expanding hobby, and a lengthy section on the world of Tekumel developed by the incomparable Dr. M.A.R Baker.