Playing at the World by Jon Peterson

 

Spent Sunday and Monday evenings plodding through this. More than six hundred pages. Sloggy, often dry, occasionally digressive, but eventually informative. Probably only interesting if you're much interested in the history of TRPGs, why they are as they are. All kinds of historical perspective, both on the emergence of TRPGs from Avalon Hill-style wargames in the late 1960s/early 1970s (D&D was first published in 1974) and on the various influences as far as rules, setting/genre, and what "role-playing" and "character" mean in their context, and how those meanings came to be.