
What is trivial for a custom auto shop-such as letting buyers choose what color paint to use-is cost-prohibitive for the other.” (p. “To put it another way, what the tabletop RPG is to custom manufacturing, the CRPG is to mass production. It’s a matter of manufacturing versus customization. It can create large maps based on sets of rules. However, a computer can also perform mathematics faster. They describe how, while players might ask all manner of questions to the game master running a game in a table-top role playing context, a computer might not be be able to answer.

Ironically, its original usage was, itself, marking what was seen, at the time anyway, as an important difference: there were table-top role-playing games (TTRPG) and computer role-playing games (CRPG).īarton and Stacks (2018) trace the rise of computer role-playing games to Dungeons & Dragons (1974). It goes that the acronym CRPG stands for “ classic role-playing game” instead of its original definition of “computer role-playing game.” People who argue for this usage look at modern games and point back to those classics, they proclaim, role-playing games made before 1995 for Apple II, DOS, or Windows environments. I’d be happy to educate myself and improve any future work in this space and context. For those who know of better histories that track technology trends across the history of role-playing games, let me know. While I have some resources available to me to compare international influences, I did not include as many games as I probably should have. A much larger part is, again, my own ignorance. A small part is due to a failing of many books, sites, and other resources in creating a false binary of “computer role-playing games” away from “Japanese role-playing games” for reasons that have their roots in racist categories. I recognize that this list is a collection of works with a focus on games developed in the United States and Europe. My ignorance is my own fault.Īll works of history are biased. On other topics, and is probably more often the case, I am simply not aware of important moments in the history of role-playing games. In some cases, I either did not own the game to take a screenshot or decided to skip something to move to another topic I was better able to describe based on the research and notes I have. I’m missing dozens of games and many important companies and technology improvements. Days later, I had to cut entries and stop myself from accidently writing what was starting to become its own book-length project on the topic. I started it, as I often do posts like this, thinking it would only take a few hours to take a handful of screenshots and write up some things I wanted to note. “Quick” is very intentional in the title for this post.
