The fourth book in the series. This continues to be an excellent reference guide to the roleplaying industry 2000-2009 ( )

This one was a struggle but I persisted because I have read the others in the series. However I found the subject matter, the roleplaying game industry in the noughties, and especially the writing style tedious. It is well-researched but neither well-written nor well-edited, with much prefiguring and back-and-forth. It looks as if it was originally written as a series of web articles. Like the others in the series it is organised by company, which doesn´t fit neatly into the decade structure. It also makes the games themselves secondary, like a laundry list. As a history it is light-on for analysis; an endless parade of companies form, have some success and go bust for various reasons. A large chunk of the book is devoted to the d20 boom and bust, which is a game I was (and remain) uninterested in. The other part looked at the 'indie' RPG movement. This was more interesting but was attributed to a few individuals from the USA. There were only passing references to roleplaying games in other countries, mainly UK and Germany. A plodder. ( )