Review of How Dungeons & Dragons Changed the Way We Play

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.