Early War Gaming and Wild West Role-playing
In 1913 H.G. Wells published Little Wars, a set of rules for playing with toy soldiers. His book would be the first in a new genre of gaming, commonly referred to as war gaming. In the 70’s, war gaming was adapted by TSR for the popular release of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. TSR’s second role-playing game, Boot Hill, was a Wild West RPG released the following year. While the Old West role-playing I witnessed in Second Life’s Sigil seemed very random at first glance, it proceeded a 30-year tradition of Wild West role-playing.
Eric Hotz has assembled an incredible online resource of Wild West Game Rules. The page acts as both a directory of Wild West role-playing and wargames, and also links to rules if they’re available online. There are so many games available that I’ve only begun to read about each one individually - their instructions even offer maps of how towns should be oriented and characters act. Eric owns a store called Whitewash City that sells 3D Wild West Paper/Card-Stock PDF models to use within these games. The image above is a town created using his kits.
The incredible variation in representations of historical architecture parallels the inaccuracies I’ve witnessed within Second Life - an uncompromising tendency to blend ideas of the past with modern-day architecture to create something holding salient historical traits but often out of context.
Posted in Dungeons & Dragons, H.G. Wells, Role-playing, West
I'm a digital humanist and graduate of American Studies, currently working as a web developer and