A Tale of Dungeons & Dragons and the Origins of the Game Platform
A Tale of Dungeons & Dragons and the Origins of the Game Platform
A Tale of Dungeons & Dragons and the Origins of the Game Platform
By Nicolas Lalone
September 16, 2019
Summary
This essay narrows the gap between analog1 and digital games by connecting Dungeons and Dragons or D&D to the origins of the video game industry.
The Platform Studies series has defined the platform as an environment that programming can be performed on15 and Nathan Altice has advanced the argument that analog games like playing cards can be viewed as a platform.
20 None of these are games in their own right, so how can we call a game like D&D a platform? What's more is that this definition is just as easily broken by calling upon the materiality of computation and its requisite electrical currents, silicon, and machined language.
With the publication of D&D, the role-playing game platform was born.
The first video game developers not making games based on toys or physics ported D&D's pseudocode into these new computational spaces.
The game pedit5 was one of the earliest D&D inspired games.
The name pedit5 was not the name of the game itself but the name of the "Lesson" file that the game existed on.
Inevitably, Rusty abandoned the game; however, the game had become so popular that others began to take the game's code and "Improve" it in some way.
They focused on making the game "Fun" more so than making the game a direct port of D&D. Whisenhunt and Wood were also administrators of the account that hosted their file.
The emotional and narrative quality of these sessions were not only shaped by the rules at the table, but co-created by the game master, the players, and the procedurality of the game system.
Reference
LaLone, N. (2019, September 16). A Tale of Dungeons & Dragons and the Origins of the Game Platform. Retrieved August 15, 2020, from http://analoggamestudies.org/2019/09/a-tale-of-dungeons-dragons-and-the-origins-of-the-game-platform/