I came across an interesting article yesterday at Gizmodo and I've been thinking about it since.  My upbringing in fiction and gaming was Tolkien and Gygax respectively. The books I read now and the games I play now are sprung from those antecedents, and are what I'm most comfortable with.  Of course, I've varied my tastes in the decades since, going from the narrow and deep to broad and well, not as maniacally deep as when I was a teen.  I've gained some perspective and shall I say discernment, and maybe even some taste.  But I still know what I like.  And what I like is Sword & Sorcery fiction and the games inspired by it.

For the tl;dr crowd, the article describes how modern fantasy fiction by younger authors has been inspired by the jrpg's (electronic Japanese RPG's like Zelda etc...) of the 90's and later.  I know there is a synergistic effect between the gaming community and people who read books, since there is a good bit of overlap in a community that tends to like the same things at the same time (i.e. Nerds).  For me, I started firmly in the analog camp, pen & paper rpg and the books that inspired them, but fantasy fiction had a firm head start of many decades before tabletop rpg's showed up in the 70's. The role playing gamers of that period were steeped in Conan, Fafhrd,& the GM, Elric, Hobbits and such, and their games looked like it.  Fast-forward, and now the games are influencing the fiction and the kids growing up with those games are now writing the books we read. 

It's this reversal in direction of influence that for me marks a generational difference between how I see gaming and what I feel is the get-off-mah-lawn proper way to do it, vs new school gaming that, go figure, is more closely based on cooperative tactics and a narrative structure that is less sand-boxy than old-school gaming. The jrpg's basically chucked the Euro-centric model (for the most part) and just did whatever they thought made a good story.  For me, this meant a disorientation because the game-play didn't reflect what I thought a game should be.

I'm not wanting to get ahead of my skis here, but I'll make my point in a second.  I am in a gaming group of mixed ages, I'd guess between 30's and 50's, and we've had some interesting discussions about the influences of old pulp S&S fiction on the setting and the game play of AS&SH.  And aside from the GM (my buddy Druvas), I was astounded to find that no one else had the fiction background I had, that no one really had the cultural touchstones that were what defined for me a game I enjoyed playing. So anyways I'm explaining the how's and why's of Hyperborea as seen through the lens of Dying Earth fiction like Vance and CAS and I find I'm unable to to make the connection for them, because they never read either author.  

This boggled my mind. I had a hard time understanding why someone who DIDN'T read those books would even want to play such a narrowly tuned game setting and system that was derived from fiction and games that the younger folks weren't even alive to experience.  Of course, my first thought was "Well, AS&SH is a pretty good game all by itself I guess!"  My second was that I needed to proselytize more about reading the contents of Appendix N.  My third was that would just annoy people even more.  Not only would I be accusing them of playing the game wrong, I'm telling them that only with some education they could be playing it the right way. 

Nope, gonna keep my mouth shut.  Anyways, read the article.