There’s one development that I kind of resent, and that’s the fact that what we used to call RPGs have now morphed into TTRPGs.

I understand that this is a development that comes from the fact that the digital version of role-playing games is now the standard version, and that table-top role playing games have been pushed to the side.

That is understandable, and it is in a way logical. But I still feel like being the old man who yells at clouds, shouting something about how without Kriegspiel, H.G. Wells Little Wars and (unfortunately in some ways) Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons, we wouldn’t be here. Digital role-playing games wouldn’t exist and the glory of TTRPGs might not either.

I think the issue is that I feel we’re losing sight of the history of role-playing games.

I’m not sure it’s such an honourable history. It’s kind of sexist, definitely racist, and it has been coloured in way too high a degree by the table top strategy games based on war that role-playing games came from.

But it is our history, and somehow that little change, that shift in importance – we no longer define digital games as the game type outside the norm – makes me sad.

Role-playing games was a huge part of my childhood and teenage years. It gave me friends and a hobby when I was an introverted, possibly neurodiverse, teenager with no idea how to behave among real people. Old woman yells at clouds. There’s nothing to see here. Please circulate.