I’ve just finished the new edition of Playing At the World and I think you’re mostly right. But there is a conversation throughout the book about the history of wargaming, with Wells’s book and its tradition of “war as a game” contrasted with what military professionals do as training. It’s also just super readable. You won’t be disappointed.
I’ve just finished the new edition of Playing At the World and I think you’re mostly right. But there is a conversation throughout the book about the history of wargaming, with Wells’s book and its tradition of “war as a game” contrasted with what military professionals do as training. It’s also just super readable. You won’t be disappointed.
I would be curious to compare the table of contents between the new version (both volumes) and the original one, just to see how they align. I very much enjoyed the first edition, and was a little disappointed to see they had split it into two. The pre-D&D stuff was the most interesting to me, personally (more than the "how D&D interacted with its fan community" stuff, which makes up a lot of the end of the book), and so I was (and remain) a little confused on how the "split" was done, given that volume 1's description from the publisher seem to emphasize the D&D aspects and volume 2 seems to emphasize the pre-D&D aspects.
I’ve just finished the new edition of Playing At the World and I think you’re mostly right. But there is a conversation throughout the book about the history of wargaming, with Wells’s book and its tradition of “war as a game” contrasted with what military professionals do as training. It’s also just super readable. You won’t be disappointed.
I would be curious to compare the table of contents between the new version (both volumes) and the original one, just to see how they align. I very much enjoyed the first edition, and was a little disappointed to see they had split it into two. The pre-D&D stuff was the most interesting to me, personally (more than the "how D&D interacted with its fan community" stuff, which makes up a lot of the end of the book), and so I was (and remain) a little confused on how the "split" was done, given that volume 1's description from the publisher seem to emphasize the D&D aspects and volume 2 seems to emphasize the pre-D&D aspects.