Have You Heard of LitRPG Yet?
The latest Jumanji remake is LitRPG.
That new Ready Player One movie coming out this year? More LitRPG.
Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg? Definitely LitRPG.
Depending on who you ask, the term means Literary-RPG, Literary Role-Playing-Games, or Literature RPG.
Basically, it's a book genre about people playing games - including stats.
The term was coined by three Russian authors around 2010 - Alex Bobl, V. Mahanenko, and Dmitry Malkin.
LitRPG owes a lot to The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor and other works that dealt with video games in fiction in new ways. Over the years, it's evolved to include many different types of novels.
We're gamifying the new genre over at the LitRPG Forum.
I'm not sure that I really buy into the idea that LitRPG is a new and separable genre. After all, we've had very game-centric literary works for quite a while.
We could go back as far as MAR Barker and his Tékumel novels which proceeded in parallel with the development and play of the RPG of the same name. Not to mention all of the fine sci-fi/fantasy literature which directly derived from the RPGs of the writers, including Steven Brust and everything in the DragonLance saga.
Plus the term is just awkwardly backwards. It should be RPGLit. We need proper noun/adjective agreement, after all. We're rules lawyers.
Heh. I hear ya. The debate has been raging a while.
https://litrpgforum.com/threads/whats-a-good-definition-of-litrpg.150/
Guardians of the Flame came out in the 1980s, and I consider that LitRPG.
The switching comes from the fact it was the Russians who coined the term.
Some have been trying to start GameLit to replace LitRPG.
Thanks for the comment.
ETA: Some have said that to be "true" litrpg the stats must be a visible element of the work... Some of us aren't as strict, however...
I have never seen any fandom actually be able to coordinate decision-making about what is and is not part of that fandom, and I've been in the RPG industry in one way or another since the late 80s.
We won't even talk about the sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction/SF/high magic/low magic/steampunk/dieselpunk/you-name-it fandom communities, who all seem to spend about as much time trying to decide who to define out of the community as looking for things to be in it.
Not that I'm cynical. Never that.
Even worse? Someone (who didn't coin the term) is trying to trademark it.
https://litrpgforum.com/threads/stopping-the-litrpg-trademark.1667/
You know, to "protect" it from dangerous people. Scary stuff. That's one of the reasons I'm clinging to it - so Aleron Kong doesn't end up with final say on what is and isn't LitRPG. You wanna talk about cynical. ;)
Anyone that wants to do that deserves everything they get when they get exactly what they want. Which will ultimately be responsibility for maintaining and keeping up discussion around the term – which won't happen, because the be forced to defend the trademark lest it fall into legal limbo.
The worst thing that can happen is his own success.
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Having only recently come across this genre, I am still building my library. Whether or not it is legitimately a seperate genre or not, is meaningless. I believe it is, at the very least, a sub genre of fantasy and science fiction. Either way, these books have become one of my favorite to read/listen to.
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