Daniel Reardon - The Digital Role-Playing Game and Technical Communication: A History of Bethesda, BioWare, and CD Projekt Red

The Digital Role-Playing Game and Technical Communication

The Digital Role-Playing Game and Technical Communication

A History of Bethesda, BioWare, and CD Projekt Red

Daniel Reardon and David Wright

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

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First published in the United States of America 2021

Copyright Daniel Reardon and David Wright, 2021

Cover design: Namkwan Cho

Cover image Ekkaphan Chimpalee/Shutterstock.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Reardon, Daniel (English professor), author. | Wright, David

(Associate professor of technical communication), author.

Title: The digital role-playing game and technical communication :

a history of Bethesda, BioWare, and CD Projekt Red /

Daniel Reardon and David Wright.

Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021000622 (print) | LCCN 2021000623 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781501352546 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501352553 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781501352560 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Electronic games industryHistory. |

Computer gamesSocial aspects. | Fantasy gamesSocial aspects. |

Fantasy gamers. | Video gamers. | Communication of technical informationHistory.

Classification: LCC HD9993.E452 R43 2021 (print) |

LCC HD9993.E452 (ebook) | DDC 338.7/6179484--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000622

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000623

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5254-6

ePDF: 978-1-5013-5256-0

eBook: 978-1-5013-5255-3

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Contents

Your authors, Daniel Reardon and David Wright, consider the emergence and development of digital role-playing games (DRPG) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This book can be associated with a growing wave of criticism and commentary concerned with the history of video games. Some noteworthy works in this movement include Carly A. Kocureks Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood in the Video Game Arcade (2015), Timothy J. Welshs Mixed Realism: Videogames and the Violence of Fiction (2016), and Michael Z. Newmans Atari Age: The Emergence of Videogames in America (2017). Dan and David contribute to the field by establishing a bright line trajectory for the DRPGs development across several decades. Their effort is informative and uncovers new ground for broader considerations of video games as objects that shape and are shaped by social developments.

This text is a thoroughly accomplished contribution to scholarly considerations of video games. Dan and Davids arguments can be used to consider and reconsider scholarship on games and gaming, and they can also be used as models for future work. This book has exceptional relevance, for example, for what at this writing looks like an approaching stormfront on the disciplines horizon: namely, the question of how the history of gaming might be aligned with productive considerations of identity and its significance to the players acts of play.