Timeline Tree of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, celebrating more than 40 years game design innovations
A timeline linking over 1000 tabletop role-playing games with over 800 game design innovations from 1974 to 2020. Coded in dot language and compiled with GraphViz, it is curated manually and it is part of a « On the Shoulders of Cloud Giants » set of projects aiming to record, analyze and understand the cultural transmission and citation practices in the TTRPG publishing industry.
UPDATE 2024 : The project is now on ObservableHQ (in javascript). The data is extracted from Wikidata, processed, filtered, coded in dot and rendered online in svg. https://observablehq.com/@pascaliensis/ttttrpg
Download the PDF poster (4 Mo) (or the condensed version without the innovations)
This timeline is a part of the « On the Shoulders of Cloud Giants » (en français) set of projects. See also a Timeline Tree of Games and Board Games.
Another quantitative project of this set is « On the Shoulders of Cloud Giants: citation practices in the tabletop role-playing game publishing industry ».
I would like to work on the taxonomy of relations between published TTRPGs and this project is a first draft and essay. My ambition is to design a whole phylomemetic system to track evolution of cultural ideas. I will use the TTRPG published products as subject because it is offering a clear, defined and accessible set of items.
Send me corrections or suggestions at pascal.umontreal [at] gmail.com
Help me to compile the dot
source code graph to produce a more dense graph.
Improve Wikidata items related to tabletop RPG.
Export the data into GEPHY. Why ? 1) I want to try it ; 2) I think the database structure of GEPHY can help managing all the informations ; 3) It's open source.
Martinolli, Pascal. 2019. « TTTTRPG: Timeline Tree of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, celebrating more than 40 years of game design innovations. » Zenodo. Dataset and dot language code. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3492119
The source code is an adaptation of the code created by Todd Lehman for his “TeX Family Tree”.
The data sources of this work are numerous. You can have a look of the references used to select, check and analyze the TTRPGs.
Informations in the source code are pure facts, therefore they cannot be copyrighted. The curation of these informations, the links between them and the structure of their display are a work of edition. I will be glad you acknowledge my name if you want to reuse them.
Author / Auteur : Pascal Martinolli
Created / Créé le : 2016
Most recent version / Dernière version : 2020-12-31
Original format / format de fichier : DOT language for Graphviz (Open source)
License / Licence : CC-BY-NC-SA
Presented at, promoted through / Présenté à, diffusé via : Donjons & Données probantes 2018, Blogue Jeu de rôle sur table, ZoTrpg blog, ResearchGate, Academia, Twitter, Facebook: groupe Initiatives, Facebook: Role-play Theory Study Group, reddit/RPGdesign, Casus NO, Zenodo, reddit/rpg, WT:Social:TTRPG.
Contributors (so far) : People and works cited in the references, Éric Nieudan, Druuples, Steve Dempsey, James Wallis, Batronoban, Mark Sullivan, Veso_M, catnipandfish, PhasmaFelis, VonAether, DMMJaco, elijahbear8.
Comments and collaborations are welcomed at / Commentaires et collaborations : pascal.umontreal [at] gmail.com