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