Trammell, Aaron. How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play. Duke University Press. 2026. ISBN13: 978-1-478-03904-4. $29.95.

I joined the Dungeons & Dragons world with the 1981 Basic edition but ended up as more of a reader than a player. I couldn’t find an interesting group in my part of rural Virginia and, as the son of a deacon in a Southern Baptist church, I didn’t expect to receive the newest releases for Christmas.

That D&D made it all the way from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to Mt. Crawford, Virginia attests to the game’s popularity. As the first massively popular roleplaying game system it stands to reason that it would have an outsized effect on what came after. In How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play from Duke University Press, Aaron Trammell of the University of California, Irvine examines that impact as the result of the system’s origins, the personalities behind it (correctly focusing on Gary Gygax), and the extension of and reaction to those founding influences.

Professor Trammell offers a brief overview of D&D’s history before examining the game’s place in the milieu of 1970s American culture. The countercultural movement started in the 1960s, a product of the postwar generation, was still in full swing but Trammell notes that Gygax and other developers “were deeply plugged into the predominantly male and politically disparate American wargaming underground; this multifarious group of hobbyists directly corresponded with the military strategists working at the RAND Corporation.”

Trammell devotes a significant portion of his book to the effect of quantification on society at large and gaming in particular. Wargames such as Axis & Allies or the super tactical and highly complex Advanced Squad Leader provide detailed statistics for each game element—that practice appears in D&D as the familiar six-pack of character stats: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. His critique of quantification in several sociopolitical contexts (the body, culture, and religion) offers significant insights into D&D’s working assumptions and impact.

Other conservative tendencies pervaded hobby gaming, in Gygax’s case mirroring his religious beliefs. In a March 2008 interview with Ben Sones, Gygax referred to himself as a “biological determinist,” which he interpreted to mean that men and women thought differently and that gaming was a male pursuit. It’s no surprise, then, that women were almost entirely excluded from design and development roles outside the game and as decoration within the game. One peak (there were many) in this trend was with the infamous “harlot” table from the 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide where you could randomly select a type/status of prostitute from a list of options (p. 192 in my copy).

Finally, I’ll note a new-to-me concept that Trammell puts to good use: the network intellectual. Trammell credits historians Fred Turner and Christine Larson as the term’s originators. To borrow part of Trammell’s quote from Turner and Larson:

“For network intellectuals, celebrity is not so much a matter of spectacular visibility, though they do sometimes achieve it. Rather it is a matter of developing a virtuous spiral of network and reputation building. This spiral generates individual fame and also creates new hubs of public intellectual entrepreneurship within the worlds of commerce, engineering, and academe.”

Turner and Larson identify Norbert Wiener (cybernetics), Stuart Brand (networked consumerism), and Tim O’Reilly (open-source software) as prominent network intellectuals who have achieved fame and significantly influenced the agenda and cultural style of post-Cold War technological development. I plan to read the Network Celebrity paper Trammell quotes—it seems even more relevant now than when it was published in 2015.

I enjoyed How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play. There is some repetition between chapters that stands out when reading the book in one pass, but I believe it was a good choice. As published, instructors can assign individual chapters of Trammell’s book without preparing supplemental materials or asking students to read three pages of useful background from another chapter.

I recommend How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play for general readers and highly recommend it for academic audiences.

Elledge, Jonn. A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. The Experiment. 2026. ISBN13: 979-8-893-03164-5. $24.95.

Published in the U.K. as Elledge, Jonn. 31 Inventions That Built Our World. Headline Publishing Group. 2026. ISBN13: 978-1-035-43276-9. £25.00.

It’s such a pleasure to read a well-composed book.

As a fellow writer, I appreciate the effort Jonn Elledge put into drafting and polishing A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions. I also appreciate his editors’ attention to detail, asking (several dozen times, I imagine), whether Jonn really needed that footnote, and the skill Matthew Burne showed in creating the minimalist but evocative illustrations at the head of each chapter.

I also appreciate how well the chapters connect within the text. Writing about 32 separate inventions that, as the U.S. title of the book indicates, contributed to the rise and success of cities, can lead to episodic coverage where concepts and facts are repeated rather than referenced. Taking care to braid the narrative threads properly turns a good book into an outstanding one.

The thirty-one inventions in the UK version start with the invention of the city itself, a settlement named Uruk where tens of thousands of humans gathered between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. From there, Elledge discusses walls, windows, water movement (I’d forgotten that Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London stands at the end of a 40-mile aqueduct originating in Hertfordshire), and other artifacts of early urban life. He rounds out the first section with coverage of parks, street grid layouts, as well as skyscrapers and their attendant elevators and escalators.

With that narrative (and physical) infrastructure in place, Elledge turns to transportation. There’s the usual discussion of cars and canals, busses, cars, and subways (shout out to the Central Line of the London Underground, which runs through the author’s home stomping ground of east London), but I have a special appreciation for the subject of the first chapter in this section: horses. I grew up in rural Virginia and have spent time around horses, but what I remember most in this context was cows.

Bear with me.

Horses, cows, and other animals that walk on four longish legs tend to see the entire world as their restroom. Until my brother and I were old enough to drive, we got off the school bus just up the road from a crossing where a herd of dairy cows would move between pasture and barn twice a day. As Elledge notes in the context of horses in London and other major cities, the “mud” on the ground was not, in fact, mud. If a herd of fifty or so cows produces impressive amounts of manure, imagine a city filled to the brim with horses.

The final section adds coverage of useful schemes such as street numbering, pedestrian crossing design, and the much-celebrated London Tube map. It’s famously not to geographic scale, a characteristic that helps navigation rather than hurts it. I’m not sure I want to see The Truth About Harry Beck, a one-hour dramatic piece about the map’s creator, but I will probably buy the playscript next time I’m in town.

A Brief History of Cities in 32 Inventions came out in the U.S. on October 13, 2026. The thirty-second chapter discusses what became known as the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy, which offered speculation on the reason for the Los Angeles streetcar system’s collapse. I was vaguely familiar with the story and appreciate the added detail.

Every chapter provides substantial information on its subject—there’s no weak link in the bunch. I recommend Elledge’s work without reservation.

Rasmussen, Seven. Cloudy With a Chance of Starships. Princeton University Press. 2026. ISBN13: 978-0-069-124622-2. $29.95.

The year was 1950 and, at a lunch meeting in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Enrico Fermi asked a famous question regarding extraterrestrial life: “Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?” 

Astrobiologist and author Seven Rasmussen waits until page 137 of her book Cloudy with a Chance of Starships to present Fermi’s question. I think it’s a great decision…the question is presented about halfway (physically and narratively) through the book and provides a useful touchstone in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Dr. Rasmussen focuses on the Drake Equation, which attempts to establish the probability that life exists on another planet within our Milky Way galaxy. The equation itself can be expressed as a product of seven values:

• The yearly rate at which new stars are born
• The fraction of stars that host planets
• The number of planets per star that could potentially host life
• The fraction of planets on which life evolves
• The fraction of life that becomes intelligent
• The fraction of intelligent beings that develop interstellar communication
• The average lifespan of a technological society

Simple, right? Absolutely not. As Rasmussen points out, we know a lot about a couple of these variables (star birth rates and the fraction of stars that host planets), a bit about how many planets could potentially host life, and discouragingly little about the rest. 

The author takes great care to provide the background knowledge and context for readers to grasp the implications of the Drake Equation and the information required to even begin to evaluate it. One could describe the Drake Equation reasonably well in a 3,000-word article, but Cloudy with a Chance of Starships assumes nothing beyond an intelligent reader. Rasmussen includes topics such as star and planet formation, water as a basis of life, amino acid formation, protein formation, biosignatures, technosignatures, various and sundry ways for civilizations to die, and the future of astrobiology.

I enjoyed Cloudy with a Chance of Starships, but my heart sank a bit when I saw the book’s title in the Princeton University Press catalog. The animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, based on a short story of the same name, was surreal fun that intended to entertain rather than educate. I worried the book would try too hard to be cute and funny, but Rasmussen pulled it off.

Humor is a ridiculously individual thing, but I quite enjoyed lines such as “Here on Earth, we have millions of different species, but only one has invented the air fryer.” That bit landed on page 137, two paragraphs below Fermi’s famous question. Rasmussen liberally sprinkles her prose with jokes that I’m happy to report pretty much always work and don’t seem forced. I’m glad. Getting the humor wrong would have undone the terrific effort to explain the Drake Equation and provide sufficient context to understand its implications.

Sorry...I almost forgot to mention that Rasmussen does provide and explain the current best guess as to the probability of at least one other intelligent civilization in our Milky Way galaxy. It would be unkind to spoil the surprise, so I’ll let you read Cloudy with a Chance of Starships and discover it for yourself.

Highly recommended.

Mailland, Julien. Soviet Blocks. The MIT Press. 2026. ISBN13: 978-0-262-05458-4. $35.00. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262054584/soviet-blocks/

I worked in the academic computing labs at Syracuse University from 1986-1990. My job consisted of checking out floppy disks in exchange for the borrower’s student ID card (WordPerfect, XYWrite, and Excel were popular), adding paper or toner to the few laser printers we had, and changing a lot of ribbons on the dot matrix printers.

Then, in 1987, Tetris arrived.

As Julien Mailland notes in Soviet Blocks, published by The MIT Press, Tetris snuck past the Iron Curtain via Hungary and changed gaming in the West immediately. I don’t remember my high score—it wasn’t very impressive—but several of my fellow lab rats had to take Tetris off their personal computers to avoid flunking out. The game’s deceptively simple controls and random shape generation made Tetris easy to play and quite addictive. This game, developed in a government research lab in the Soviet Union, irrevocably changed the character of casual gameplay.

Many authors have written or filmed popular histories of Tetris, though Mailland approvingly notes Jaroslav Švelch’s characterization of those works as “descriptive rather than interpretive, celebratory rather than critical.” Mailland’s goal is to offer a more complete history of the game and how it evolved from an uncopyrighted, freely shared computer program into an aggressively protected intellectual property.

The middle chapters of Soviet Blocks rely on contracts, legal proceedings, and interviews of the protagonists to trace how rights to the game were claimed, sold with and (according to Mailland) without actual ownership, and how the 2012 case Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive allowed the rights holders to expand their protection to include the use of pentomino shapes in computer games.

The fight for the rights to Tetris peaked in the United States for the first time in 1989 when Tengen, a Nintendo licensee, went rogue and published their own version of the game. Financial considerations aside, personal animosity between the respective heads of Tengen and Nintendo of America guaranteed a fight to the finish. Nintendo ended up being granted summary judgment, a ruling that many commentators, including Mailland, call into question. The judge’s reasoning centered on a distinction between gaming consoles and computers that seems quaint now but could have been plausible in the late 1980s.

After the Tengen ruling rights sales, assignments, and contracts continued apace. The 2012 decision in Xio Interactive cemented the entity now known as The Tetris Company’s hold on intellectual property rights that seem to protect public domain shapes (the pentominoes) and arguably functional elements such as spinning blocks to reorient them on the playfield.

Mailland offers thorough coverage of his topic, though his writing shifts from the overly casual (doing someone a “solid”) at the start to an approachable but more academic tone later in the manuscript. My impression is the author changed his mind about how far to take the looser language and didn’t catch every instance. It was a bit jarring to switch from very informal to more formal prose, but the book’s evidence and argument are of high quality throughout.

Soviet Blocks is an interesting book. It reveals much more about Tetris than the standard origin story and refuses to gloss over the hard-nosed battles to secure rights and revenues for the immensely popular game. As such it’s not as entertaining as the popular histories and documentaries, but it’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in Tetris itself, the history of the Soviet Union, and how court decisions affect intellectual property rights in gaming and beyond.

Highly recommended.

Sarah Cliston, David M. Berry, Anthony C. Hay, Mark C. Marino, Peter Millican, Arthur I. Schwarz, Jeff Shrager, and Peggy Weil. Inventing Eliza. The MIT Press. 2026. ISBN13: 978-0-262-05248-1. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052481/inventing-eliza/

Society has lost many valuable pieces of computer history. Digital media fails, websites go offline, and personal memories fade. Remembering or reconstructing the early stages of digital computing in the 1950s and 1960s is particularly difficult.

In Inventing ELIZA from The MIT Press, a team of eight authors created a valuable multi-lens analysis of the now-famous program ELIZA. The program, which was technically the ELIZA script running within the DOCTOR framework, simulated human nature and maintained a conversation by adopting the approach of a Rogerian psychotherapist. The source code of later versions of the program written in BASIC and other languages were available, but the code behind the original 1965 version of ELIZA had been lost.

ArnoldReinhold, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to good luck during an archival search, a printout of the original MAD-SLIP code was found, allowing the author team to dig into the code and its implications. After an insightful introduction by Janet H. Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck, the team starts their analysis with a biography of ELIZA’s developer Joseph Weizenbaum. Weizenbaum escaped from Germany in the 1930s, eventually ending up at MIT in 1963. His previous work on the Symmetric List Processor (SLIP) programming language offered the ability to manage text in ways not easily done before. Weizenbaum used those capabilities to create ELIZA.

After the biography, the authors devote a chapter to a close reading of the ELIZA code. And by “close reading” I mean a block-by-block, and in some cases line-by-line, interpretation of the code. I’m a scrappy coder at best and have never worked in the FORTRAN-based SLIP, which was overtaken by LISP for this type of work, but SLIP offered some distinct advantages contemporary programmers take as given. First, the MAD-SLIP language could handle text as symbols. Second, the language could dynamically allocate resources at runtime. MAD-SLIP also had double-linked lists, which meant that not only was there a memory pointer to the next item in the list, there was also a pointer to the previous item. Perhaps most importantly, dynamic allocation meant lists could contain other lists—most languages did not permit this type of recursion.

Throw in ridiculously small memory and storage capacity for programs entered using punch cards and it’s a miracle anything of substance got done at all.

ArnoldReinhold, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

After the technical analysis, the authors turn to the implications of ELIZA on human-computer interaction at the time of its release, how the mores and attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s affected the program’s construction and interpretation, and how ELIZA and similar programs such as MrMind gave rise to the chatbots and Large Language Models (LLMs) in use today. LLMs such as ChatGPT provoke concern because their probabilistic text generation will inevitably lead to inaccuracies. LLMs don’t have built-in calculation engines so their performance on math problems is even more error-prone.

At a deeper level, the so-called ELIZA Effect, where humans anthropomorphized the computer and sought, in the broader sense, to offload decisions to the perceived impartiality of an algorithm. As Weizembaum wrote:

“Science promised [humans] power. But, as so often happens when people are seduced by promises of power, the price exacted in advance and all along the path, and the price actually paid, is servitude and impotence.” [Weizembaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, p. 227]

NW7US, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s humbling to realize the inventors of human-interactive text generation systems identified the power and danger inherent in those tools so soon after their creation.

Inventing ELIZA is a groundbreaking book that serves the fields of computing history, sociology, gender studies, and computer-human interaction in equal measure. I’m glad I read it and enthusiastically recommend it.

Scott DeJong and Marc Lajeunesse. Their System, Our Game. University of Michigan Press. 2026. ISBN13: 978-0472-04026-1.

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) let participants create a shared experience. The form of that experience depends on the group of players (the “table”) and, usually, a referee that guides the action. Rules systems and scenarios can range from highly detailed affairs to the bare minimum required for storytelling.

No system meets every player’s needs, so there is a rich history of modifications through house rules and third-party products. Scott DeJong and Marc Lajeunesse’s new book Their System, Our Game from the University of Michigan Press looks at this “home brew” tradition for Pathfinder, a TTRPG known to accommodate such changes.

The authors set a group of “brewers” who range from the purely amateur to hired third-party content creators for Paizo, Pathfinder's publisher. It’s interesting to read about the brewers's motivations and approaches and contrast them with my preferred puzzle-solving approach rather than character-based theatrical storytelling.

Skipping forward to near the end of the book, DeJong and Lajeunesse use improvisational comedy terms to describe the approach used in Pathfinder 2E (second edition). In improv, the key to effective scenework is the “yes, and” approach, where all players accept offers by other players and extend upon them creatively. For example, a scene start such as “I can’t believe we went fifteen hours without talking!” could be “yes anded” by saying “Yes, and I have never felt more ready to sing an opera.”

The authors characterize a system such as Dungeons & Dragons as a “No, and” system, where specific actions are not allowed but can be handled by the rules if certain compromises are made. “I can’t believe we went fifteen hours without talking!” could have the “no, and” response of “I talked whenever you were out of the room, and we should continue with that in mind.” By refusing, or “blocking” the first player’s offer, the second player has brought the scene to a grinding halt. Pathfinder 1E (first edition) is a step toward the preferred improv approach but remains a “yes, but” framework. In this case, a response to  “I can’t believe we went fifteen hours without talking!” could be “Yes, but I don’t feel any different than before.” The second player technically accepted the offer but then immediately undermined any sense of progress. In system terms, this framework says “Yes, you can do that, but here’s how it has to work.”

Pathfinder 2E’s simplified rules (there are fewer tables and much less math) means the game relies less on adjudication and more on storytelling, a perfect mix for both a “yes, and” technique and a home brew campaign. Fewer inherent restrictions allows freer gameplay, though the gamemaster has to manage game balance and storytelling against players affecting the story in unplanned ways.

DeJong and Lajeunesse mix theory, their own homebrew learning, and the experiences of their brewer cohort effectively. Combined with discussions of TTRPGs in general and homebrew traditions from Pathfinder and other frameworks, Their System, Our Game offers a powerful description and critique of roleplaying through the lens of independent play. Highly recommended.