Book Recommendation: Game Wizards

I’ve previously done a 100-word book review of Game Wizards – though, technically, I wrote the long-form version that I’m reposting here first.

I’ve since done a video version of that 100-word review and shared it on my various platforms. You can watch it on YouTube here:

And if you’d prefer to just the review as a text post, you can find it on Substack.

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And the long-form post that goes into more depth and detail is right here:

My inspiration for writing the very first version of this post about Game Wizards — a corporate history of the first couple decades of Dungeons & Dragons — was the Dungeons & Dragons-related controversy that broke up in late 2022/early 2023.

A new corporate controversy seemed like a good reason to write about revisiting a previous era of corporate controversy…

I’ll spare you the details (in part because I’m not actually deep enough into the hobby to really understand), but the short version is that Wizards of the Coasts — the subsidiary of Hasbro that owns the Dungeons & Dragons brand — announced (and then promptly backed down from) a pretty substantial overhaul to the licence that allows third parties to use elements of the Dungeons & Dragons IP, barring those elements that Wizards contends are integral parts of their corporate IP( for example, those dudes with octopuses for faces — basically everything that isn’t already a Public Domain folkloric being) in derivative works.

And by “overhaul”, I mean “claim IP ownership and demand royalties from basically everything even remotely Dungeons & Dragons-related.”

Naturally, fans got mad and for the first time in history, complaining on the Internet actually worked.

But, like I said at the top of the post, this was not the first time the corporation behind Dungeons & Dragons would make decisions the fanbase deemed questionable…

Game Wizards isn’t really a book about Dungeons & Dragons, it is essentially a history of the formation, rise, and fall of TSR, Inc., the company that originally put out Dungeons & Dragons – of course, D&D was far and away their most popular and noteworthy product, so to a certain extent, a history of TSR is a history of D&D.

Fundamentally, though, Game Wizards is really the corporate history of TSR.

Wait…

Where are you going? It’s interesting, I swear!

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In brief, circa the early 1970s, most tabletop games consisted of miniature wargaming (think Warhammer, but with real historical armies; part of Dungeons & Dragon’s influence was legitimising Fantasy games) and the hobby was actually shockingly well-developed and widespread, especially considering that this is pre-social media, pre-Internet in general, pre-cell phones, and even pre-widespread cable TV and before the 24-hour news cycle really took off.

In fact, the history of Gen Con (the tabletop gaming convention) goes back to 1968. And it’s Gen Con where E. Gary Gygax (best known as “Gary”, I just really saying “E. Gary”) and Dave Arneson first met and started collaborating, setting into motion the events related in Game Wizards.

To boil down that collaboration and the origin of feud to its most simple, Arneson thought up most of the concepts and mechanics and Gygax codified those into the rules as written in the manual, and ultimately went on to found and run TSR – short for “Tactical Studies Rules” – a reference to the fact that most tabletop games at the time were sold as rulebooks rather than with boards and pieces.

This is explained in fuller detail in Game Wizards itself.

Fundamentally, it feels like Arneson and Gygax brought out the best in each other as game designers, but the worst in each other as people.

More on that later…

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The game that laid the foundation for Dungeons & Dragons was Chainmail, a historical wargame that Gygax helped develop and produce. As Gygax and the Chainmail team began developing and playing around with the concept and mechanics, most notably adding the Fantasy elements, Gygax eventually connected with Arneson and their modifications to Chainmail eventually became an entirely new game, eventually leading to the formation of TSR and the release of the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Incidentally, it’s not for nothing that a book about TSR is called “Game Wiards.” TSR’s motto was “The Game Wizards” and the company used a wizard as a mascot/logo.

From there, we get the creative differences between Arneson and Gygax that escalated (all things considered pretty quickly), to their falling out and Arneson’s departure from TSR and the subsequent basically endless feud between Arneson and Gygax, the meteoric rise of TSR as a business and Dungeons & Dragons as a Pop Culture phenomenon, TSR’s subsequent inevitable flying too close to the Sun and crashing down.

Notably (and rather fatally) nobody involved with running TSR ever really seemed to understand how to actually run a business.

As a creative who is running his own business – i.e. the one you’re visiting right now via this very website – I get it. But I’m also dealing with significantly lower stakes than TSR and I like to think I have the werewithal to know when to bring in somebody who knows how to do the things I don’t…

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Although TSR was successful for most of the 70s, Game Wizards relates a long history of unforced errors that eventually proved fatal.

Perhaps best summarised by the episode where TSR spent tens of thousands of dollars to help raise a shipwreck out of Geneva Lake (the town is “Lake Geneva”, but the lake itself is “Geneva Lake”) as part of what I think was supposed to be a publicity stunt.

Not exactly a resounding success, since most of the things I can find online about the actual ship give TSR a passing reference, at best…

On the one hand, TSR was hugely successful, Dungeons & Dragons did come to dominate the hobby (which is still does — seriously, name a tabletop RPG other than Dungeons & Dragons), but TSR was also poorly-run for much of its history, plagued by nepotism, never really seemed to have a plan beyond “make more money,” and managed its acquisitions and expansions poorly.

And then died.

Though the Dungeons & Dragons brand itself has been consistently popular for 50 years.

The story basically ends with Gygax being booted off the board of TSR, though the book does at least go on to briefly relate that TSR was then sold to Wizards of the Coasts in the late 90s — itself sold to Hasbro in 1999.

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Game Wizards focuses mostly on the history of TSR itself, though for the sake of contextualising that history, it does give us at least a sketch of the early lives and careers of Gygax and Arneson. And, of course, the years-long personal feud between them ends up being one of the largest aspects of TSR’s history — at its simplest, the feud can be boiled down to Arneson feeling he never got sufficient credit or acknowledgement from Gygax (also, in general) for his contributions to the development of early Dungeons & Dragons.

Now, Gygax is the more prominent and better-known of the two. His Wikipedia article is about 7,600 words to Arneson’s 3,300. Put another way, TV Tropes and even Britannica have articles about Gygax, but not Arneson. And, yeah, Gygax was also the more prolific of the two (especially where the history of TSR itself is concerned), but Arneson did have legitimate gripes with Gygax and TSR.

On the most fundamental level, though, Gygax was just more outgoing. better-suited to being a public figure, and actually spent more time as a public figure.

It reminds me of the Stan Lee vs. Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko feuds that Marvel went through. Yes, Kirby and Ditko didn’t get as much credit as they fairly should have, but Lee was not only the one in the public-facing role, but also one of the best and least subtle (self-)promoters of all time.

Ultimately, neither Gygax nor Arneson come off particularly well — tactless in their business dealings and personal interactions at best and outright jerks at worst. Despite collaborating on Dungeons & Dragons from the very beginning, that Gygax and Arneson never really got along is a recurring trend in the story.

Gygax is presented as something of a credit hog — basically, “I made substantial edits to your rules, that’s the real work, so that means it’s my work, so we’re taking your name off the credits.” — a bit greedy, or at least money-driven (though, to be fair, part of his ongoing concern with making money is because he had five kids to feed), and sort of just expecting the work to get done because someone else will do it for him.

Similarly, Arneson is a bit of a curmudgeon, has a constant stream of new ideas but no follow-through to actually realise any of them, entitled and demanding, and more than willing to criticise the shortcomings of other people’s work or products (notably, even when he’s been hired to endorse them). Now, some of this is justified. Arneson was legitimately cheated out of credit and royalty payments at times — in fact that it happened while working with Gygax is probably why he got so mad at Gygax.

Since Gygax was in charge of TSR, it’s not shocking that he gets more coverage. That being said, the chapters after his departure from TSR do give plenty of focus on Arneson contra mundum.

I, uh, I’m not exactly shocked here that two Nerd Icons weren’t great at interpersonal skills. And I say that in my own professional capacity as a Nerd…

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It’s almost frustrating to read, even though this all happened decades ago. All things considered, it’s probably easier to sympathise with Arneson more than Gygax, because, all things considered, Arneson probably isn’t as well-remembered as he rightly should be and Gygax is portrayed as going out of his way to provoke Arneson.

But whenever it seems like Arneson is the clear underdog being taken advantage of by Gygax the clear corporate tyrant, he does something, takes grave personal offence to something, and writes up an angry manifesto to alienate pretty much everyone – up to and including the reader – and establishing that, yeah, nobody involved in this story is the real hero, after all.

It’s a great warning about making creative types mad, though. Because you’re going to end up immortalised as some kind of awful, drooling idiot cyclops that future generations of gamers are going to be murdering in perpetuity.

And, honestly, who among us hasn’t contemplated introducing an awful, drooling idiot cylcops named Greg for our heroes to destroy?

[That was a joke. I’m sure all you Gregs out there are lovely people.]

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It’s easy to spin the story as “Brilliant Visionary vs. Entitled Perpetually Offended Former Associate” (basically Gygax’s point of view) or “Brilliant Visionary vs. Grasping Corporate Overlord Credit Hog” (basically Arneson’s), and somehow, both of those things end up being true.

Fundamentally, Game Wizards is a story of “Brilliant Visionaries Can’t Stay Out of Their Own Way.”

And, fundamentally, it’s a tragedy. Not just because Arneson and Gygax both got kicked out their own company and not just because that company flew too close to the Sun and got bought out.

To me, the biggest tragedy in the story being told by Game Wizards is that there’s no real closure to it. Arneson and Gygax’s feud did get less acrimonious over the years, but, ultimately, was never completely buried. Gygax died in 2008 and Arneson died in 2009 without the two ever really reconciling.

Though, for what it’s worth, the current sourcebooks credit both Gygax and Arenson as the co-creators of the original game. But, honestly, that might just be because it’s out of there hands now.

Which is actually a bit of a downer, in a way.

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If I have one major criticism with Game Wizards, it’s that it doesn’t commit to a bit.

Since the book is about the most famous tabletop game in Pop Culture, it tries to frame the history of TSR in terms of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign — maps of Lake Geneva and Minnesota are done in the style of tabletop world maps, each year is one of TSR’s turns, recapping what happened in that turn (most relevantly the “Players Eliminated”) and describing the yearly convention circuit (particularly the rivalry between Gen Con and Origins) as the combat phase.

It’s maybe a touch too clever for its own good, but ended up being less annoying as the book went on than I was afraid of. If anything, it’s most annoying specifically because it doesn’t go far enough. There aren’t enough of these RPG metaphors and they feel incongruous because the rest of the book is just a book.

It’s never dryly academic, but it does feel like a bit of an identity crisis.

On the other hand, it’s accessible and pretty casual in tone. There are a lot of names to keep track of, both of people and companies, though some of them will be familiar to people who are at least tangentially familiar with the hobby — Avalon Hill (also, incidentally, currently owned by Hasbro), Games Workshop (originally TSR’s UK distributor, now best known for Warhammer, specifically Space Warhammer), Tracy Hickman (a TSR employee, best known for his role co-writing the Dragonlance novels), Ed Greenwood (a TSR associate, best known for creating Forgotten Realms, and CanCon, by the way).

Admittedly, I couldn’t retain most of the names that I didn’t already recognise. But that’s at least partly on me. I’m not great at names…

Of course, recognising those names will be a nice little bonus for tabletop enthusiasts, but since the focus is on TSR, recognising “Hey, Games Workshop! They do Warhammer!“, then giving your collection of Orks a knowing glance doesn’t really add anything fundamental to the book.

There’s enough personal and corporate drama in Game Wizards that it’s sufficiently compelling enough in its own right to be interesting even without a vested interested in Dungeons & Dragons. Though, again, the nature of said drama means that there’s no clear protagonist to cheer for.

I don’t necessarily think Game Wizards is really required reading even for Dungeons & Dragons players, but the 70s — and honestly, even the 90s — are probably long ago enough that even people who’ve grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons weren’t around to experience that history for themselves, so there’s a clear historiographical value in the book and the story of Dungeons & Dragons going from basically two guys selling stuff out of their vans to dominating the industry to failing catastrophically is a fascinating read.

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