For more academic-style writing about tabletop games, I highly recommend the series published by CRC and edited by Geoff Engelstein. Thematic Integration in Board Game Design (Shipp, 2024) and Cardboard Ghosts (Holland, 2025) are outstanding.
I have Graphic Design for Board Games and Worldbuilding for Game Designers on my TBR shelf.
Oh nice! Thanks for more recommendations. I'm definitely looking to supplement my normal reading with game writing like this every 2-3 books or so this year.
I think you gesture at this but I genuinely think that the problem with a lot of what I'll call popular/factional ttrpg theory is that it frequently begins with one's own play experience, and so takes as axiomatic what works and doesn't work before any theoretical inquiry even begins. That's fine if all you're doing is defining your own area of interest, but trying to spin up a grand unifying theory from those personal axioms strikes me as deeply self-indulgent.
On the bright side, something I do see increasingly over the past few years is folks saying some version of, "It's not for me, but plenty of people enjoy it, so I'll assume it works," which is deeply heartening to me. The scene could always be better, but it used to be much worse, so I'll take what I can get!
Yea, that's definitely true (though I haven't been in the scene as long as many folks) and I do appreciate the willingness to understand individual task against the broader things at play. I do feel though as well that many folks often use that thinking to sort of say not much at all at times. Like "I don't like these things but someone presumably does so who knows!" - I know that's not exactly what you described but I've found that similar realm of thinking to also undercut a bit of the value from discussions (not that I want the alternative to be true where we just yell at each other for liking something "wrong").
Oh 100%, ultimately I'd love to see people fruitfully engaging across boundaries of personal preference and communities of play and so on, that's really what I mean by "the scene could always be better", my perspective on all this is just that the current level of deescalation is a necessary step in that direction (hopefully!).
I always love reading thoughtful reviews of RPG reviews. You have to ask yourself a couple of questions: what is the reviewer's goal and how are they trying to accomplish it? I could get painfully honest about that first question but anyone who has earnestly been a content creator for any meaningful amount of time can probably answer that for themselves. As for the second question, it's one that can easily be answered empirically. Once you've digested the answers to these questions for any given reviewer or review, then there's no longer any mystery as to why you might be dissatisfied.
> "If anything has a comparison in film, TTRPGs—the books on our shelves, the products, etc.—are perhaps most like scripts because, at the table, we are required to translate and often transform vast amounts of a work."
In French an adventure module is called un scénario, a script.
Here's to hoping I can make the bandwidth to join y'all on this game theory book club
Interesting! Is there not the same difference between a "scenario" and "script" like we have in English? Or is there a different word that means what we mean when we say "scenario"?
Really depends on the context. Scénario gets shorted to "un scénar" pretty regularly in the script sense. I feel like "une situation" would be the usage for English use of scenario.
For more academic-style writing about tabletop games, I highly recommend the series published by CRC and edited by Geoff Engelstein. Thematic Integration in Board Game Design (Shipp, 2024) and Cardboard Ghosts (Holland, 2025) are outstanding.
I have Graphic Design for Board Games and Worldbuilding for Game Designers on my TBR shelf.
Oh nice! Thanks for more recommendations. I'm definitely looking to supplement my normal reading with game writing like this every 2-3 books or so this year.
I think you gesture at this but I genuinely think that the problem with a lot of what I'll call popular/factional ttrpg theory is that it frequently begins with one's own play experience, and so takes as axiomatic what works and doesn't work before any theoretical inquiry even begins. That's fine if all you're doing is defining your own area of interest, but trying to spin up a grand unifying theory from those personal axioms strikes me as deeply self-indulgent.
On the bright side, something I do see increasingly over the past few years is folks saying some version of, "It's not for me, but plenty of people enjoy it, so I'll assume it works," which is deeply heartening to me. The scene could always be better, but it used to be much worse, so I'll take what I can get!
Yea, that's definitely true (though I haven't been in the scene as long as many folks) and I do appreciate the willingness to understand individual task against the broader things at play. I do feel though as well that many folks often use that thinking to sort of say not much at all at times. Like "I don't like these things but someone presumably does so who knows!" - I know that's not exactly what you described but I've found that similar realm of thinking to also undercut a bit of the value from discussions (not that I want the alternative to be true where we just yell at each other for liking something "wrong").
Oh 100%, ultimately I'd love to see people fruitfully engaging across boundaries of personal preference and communities of play and so on, that's really what I mean by "the scene could always be better", my perspective on all this is just that the current level of deescalation is a necessary step in that direction (hopefully!).
I always love reading thoughtful reviews of RPG reviews. You have to ask yourself a couple of questions: what is the reviewer's goal and how are they trying to accomplish it? I could get painfully honest about that first question but anyone who has earnestly been a content creator for any meaningful amount of time can probably answer that for themselves. As for the second question, it's one that can easily be answered empirically. Once you've digested the answers to these questions for any given reviewer or review, then there's no longer any mystery as to why you might be dissatisfied.
> "If anything has a comparison in film, TTRPGs—the books on our shelves, the products, etc.—are perhaps most like scripts because, at the table, we are required to translate and often transform vast amounts of a work."
In French an adventure module is called un scénario, a script.
Here's to hoping I can make the bandwidth to join y'all on this game theory book club
Interesting! Is there not the same difference between a "scenario" and "script" like we have in English? Or is there a different word that means what we mean when we say "scenario"?
Really depends on the context. Scénario gets shorted to "un scénar" pretty regularly in the script sense. I feel like "une situation" would be the usage for English use of scenario.
Translation is pretty fucky