The perfect book for a time of resurgent patriotism and military pride in the United States, it found a fan in no less elevated a personage than President Ronald Reagan, who declared it “my kind of yarn.” As the book topped the bestseller charts and the press rushed to draft their human-interest stories on the man who had written it, they learned that Clancy had gamed out its entire scenario, involving a rogue Soviet submarine captain who wishes to defect along with his vessel to the United States, with a friend of his named Larry Bond, using Harpoon, a tabletop wargame of modern naval combat designed by the latter. The most widely publicized early example of the phenomenon was undoubtedly the one which involved a humble insurance salesman named Tom Clancy, who came out of nowhere with a techno-thriller novel called The Hunt for Red October in 1984. By pushing against authorial fiat and the deus ex machina, it can give the whole work an internal coherency - an honesty, one might even say - that’s too often missing from novels of this stripe. It can keep you honest by forcing your story to conform to a simulated reality that transcends the mere expediency of what might be cool and exciting to write into the next scene. But for a certain kind of plot-focused genre novel - the kind focusing strictly on what people do rather than why they do it - prototyping the whole thing as a game makes a degree of sense.

Needless to say, basing your book on a game you’ve played isn’t much of a path to literary respectability. And, indeed, just such things were happening by the 1980s, as the first novels born from games arrived. In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that some of the stories generated in this way would make their way out of the gaming sessions which had spawned them and find a home in more traditional, linear forms of media. The games became vehicles for exploring the vagaries of history or the limits of the imagination - vehicles, in other words, for living out shared stories. When a group came together to play Squad Leader or Dungeons & Dragons, there hung over the plebeian kitchen or basement in which they played a shared vision of the beaches of Normandy or the dungeons of Greyhawk.

The paradigm shift this entailed was such that for many players these games ceased to be games at all in the zero-sum sense. These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game.

Betrayal at Krondor