Book Review: The Digital Role-Playing Game and Technical Communication: A History of Bethesda, BioWare, and CD Projekt Red by Reardon, Daniel, & Wright, David

Abstract

Daniel Reardon and David Wright’s The Digital Role-Playing Game and Technical Communication explicitly works to “demystify ‘gaming’ so that we understand its broader cultural contexts” (p. xiii). The authors do so by situating the history of digital role-playing games (DRPGs) in a larger web of technological innovations over the past 50 years and analyzing social and capitalistic interrelations via social media and marketing. DRPGs, like Fallout and The Witcher series, are technological evolutions of role-playing games (RPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons. Throughout the book, the authors draw theories from a broad pool of sources, ranging from psychology, sociology, business, computer science, and game studies to rhetoric and technical communication. Maybe most notably, the authors make a unique argument for DRPGs as technical communication and demonstrate beneficial takeaways for both practitioners and researchers. Tracking the rise and fall of the video game giants Bethesda, BioWare, and CD Projekt Red over the course of eight chapters, the book provides a useful history of DRPGs. Chapter 1 begins that history by discussing struggles such as infrastructural limitations (comparatively low-power computers), technological diffusion (a lack of Americans with computer access), and generic adaptations (converting tabletop RPGs to a digital interface). The chapter illustrates this evolution of DRPGs from RPGs by explaining the features of the new genre that have descended from RPGs: “character creation, weapons and armor [customization] ... loot, and interesting nonplayer characters” (p. 6). This ancestral relationship caused many difficulties Book Review