GameLit Origins

A Name for Stories that Play

By 2017, a generation of novels had grown up around games — stories where rules, levels and mechanics are not decoration but the engine of the plot. The shelf had one famous label, LitRPG, and it fit only some of them. The wider family needed a wider word.

On September 4, 2017, that word emerged in a conversation in LitRPG Rebels, the Facebook group run by Zachariah Dracoulis, among four authors: Zachariah Dracoulis, R. M. Mulder, Dustin Tigner, and John Ward. The word: GameLit.

gamelit.org — Live Within Weeks, Unchanged for Years

The definition did not stay in a chat thread. A home was built at gamelit.org — by Tigner's own account he grabbed the domain himself, before the definition was even put to a vote.

The Internet Archive's first capture: September 22, 2017 — 18 days after the coining — already carries the complete charter (the definition, the Science Fiction / Fantasy / Science Fantasy line, the LitRPG sentence, and the open-genre declaration), exactly as quoted above.

The homepage stayed byte-for-byte identical in archive captures from September 2017 through June 2019, and the definition still stands word for word in the most recent capture, July 12, 2026 — nearly nine years on. Tigner has looked after the site throughout; the current page points readers to him.

Four authors coined a word in a Facebook thread. The page they built for it has now outlasted almost everything else from that autumn — unchanged.

A Month of Debate, Then No Gatekeepers

The founders opened the discussion; it grew into a private working group — the GameLit Council — of more than two dozen authors. For a month, through what Tigner describes as thousands of messages, the Council debated a single shared definition and a plan to launch the genre.

The definition the Council produced is the one on gamelit.org. The launch plan paired the website with a magazine special edition. That magazine was SciFan.

The Council's own working channel survives as evidence of its own: a Slack workspace opened on September 8, 2017 — four days after the coining — where the debate and the launch planning happened. That workspace still exists today, its roster intact.

SciFan Magazine and the Special Edition

SciFan Magazine published ten monthly issues through 2017 — Issues 1–10, January to October — alongside special editions including April and May 2017 LitRPG editions. Publisher: R. M. Mulder. The magazine's Co-Producer was Dayne Edmondson — Mulder's partner in producing SciFan Magazine, and co-owner of its collections.

On September 11, 2017 — one week after the coining — the magazine's website carried Jared J. Fleming's story post Casus Belli – Part 1, tagged, for the first time anywhere on the site, #GameLit. An archive capture of the front page preserves that tag.

Issue 10 — Beyond Science Fiction & Fantasy, 206 pages, cover-dated October 2017 — was the magazine's GameLit edition. Announced September 23, 2017 by Mulder (designed to pay special tribute to the oppressions they have faced, and the strengths these authors possess); published in the last week of September 2017; the magazine's release post September 29, 2017 billed it as our special #GameLit Edition.

The Last Issue

In August 2017, the publisher announced openly in the magazine's community that the April and May LitRPG special editions were being withdrawn (they had not performed).

The GameLit launch, when it came, unraveled from inside. On September 19, 2017, the magazine's planned launch announcement was called off by SciFan's own editors. Issue 10 was published in the last week of September — and on its release night, September 30, the editors briefly withdrew the issue themselves; it was back on sale by October 14. No outside hand took it down. The Council that had spent a month building the genre's definition disbanded in the aftermath, leaving GameLit — in the spirit of its own charter — with no official group to represent it, free to grow or fail on its own. And after Issue 10, SciFan Magazine published no more. There was no Issue 11.

The magazine's website went dark; much of its archive disappeared. Whole posts survive only because the Wayback Machine copied them first. Some pieces were never copied: the magazine's own index of its issues is gone; Issue 10's story texts live on only in surviving print/digital copies.

The SciFan archive is being rebuilt now, post by post, from Wayback captures — each recovered article backdated to its original day and footnoted as restored — on the magazine's WordPress home.

Visit the restored archive

A Word, and the Group That Took Its Name

Two of the men in this story were connected long before GameLit had a name. Blaise Corvin, whose LitRPG Society was then the genre's largest Facebook community, had introduced Mulder to Ramon Mejia, host of the LitRPG Podcast — the community's review voice. SciFan Magazine had promoted Mejia's podcast, free, in its pages. It was Corvin's introduced reviewer who received the advance copy of Mulder's rewritten Conquest in May 2017 — and the review that followed scored it 2 out of 10 and declared it 'not LitRPG.'

When the four authors coined GameLit that September, no group founded it — four authors did, in a conversation. The Facebook group called GameLit Society, Corvin's, launched on October 12, 2017, five weeks after the coining, adopting a name that already existed. Announcing it, one of the four founders — Zachariah Dracoulis — referred to 'a little something called GameLit a few weeks ago.' The Society became a community that carried the name. It was not the founder of GameLit.

Corvin's own later account, published on his website in December 2018, cast his role differently: he wrote that the term had gotten no traction at all before he got involved, and that once he adopted it and threw the groups he had cultivated behind it, it 'got some movement.' That is the record of a man who popularized a word — a community carrying a name far and wide. The name itself was already five weeks old, coined by four other authors, before his group took it up.

In that same account, Corvin also wrote that nobody was quite sure who exactly coined the term — and an undated edit to the post later named a single coiner, "Justin Tigner" [sic], getting even his first name wrong. By the time Corvin wrote, the founders had been a matter of public record for a year: in December 2017, Tigner had confirmed that the coining was "just the four of us." And Corvin had heard of the Council from one of its own members within days of the coining — as the next section shows.

The Member on Both Sides

One member of the Council stood on both sides of this story. Dawn Chapman, a SciFan contributor, was part of the original GameLit Council — her name stands on the Council's Slack roster to this day — though she asked not to be named in the founders' public lists, and Tigner left her off them at her request. It was Mulder himself who had introduced her to Blaise Corvin.

While the Council planned in private, Chapman was also working as a moderator in Corvin's groups. On September 16, 2017, she told Mulder that she had told Corvin she had been invited to join the Council. On the night GameLit Society launched — October 12, 2017 — it was Chapman who cautioned Mulder, inside the new group, that many there were still bitter about SciFan. She defriended both editors in the Issue 10 weekend's aftermath. And that December, when Mulder sought to rejoin the community's groups, it was Chapman who carried back the moderators' answer: none of them would accept him back in — herself included.

Her messages of December 17, 2017 went further still. She told Mulder he had been "removed by Blaise the first and second times" — a claim he disputed on the spot; his own record shows a voluntary exit from some twenty-three groups in the first week of October, and no Society removal appears in the membership log. She said she would put his readmission to a vote of the moderators. That afternoon she reported the result — "sorry Richard, the answer is no, everyone says it" — and the conversation ended there.

Every junction of the controversy ran through the same person: the introduction, the confidence, the warning, and the closed door.

Why the Word Went Nowhere

Corvin's history explains the word's slow start simply: nobody involved, he wrote, had "the platform or experience necessary to get it off the ground." The record shows what happened to the platform that existed.

In August 2017, SciFan withdrew its April and May LitRPG special editions — a step Mulder told Chapman at the time was primarily Corvin's decision: Corvin had refused to sign the contract, and said he would prefer the editions taken down. On September 30, 2017, the release night of Issue 10 — the magazine's last — a warning reached the editors that if any of the big groups picked up on the issue's GameLit article, they would have "a virtual mob" at their doorstep. The issue was pulled within hours; it returned two weeks later, but the magazine never published again. Mulder has always read that warning as a veiled threat: the man who delivered it, he believed, moderated for one of Corvin's groups. And in December 2017, when Mulder sought to rejoin the community's groups, the moderators of Corvin's groups voted on it — and voted no (see the previous section).

Nor was Corvin's the only gate of that season. In the spring of 2017, Aleron Kong, whose LitRPG group was the genre's other center of power, had banned SciFan Magazine's promotion from his group, banned Mulder personally days later, and by June had banned Mulder's pen-name account as well. Mulder was not the only author shown that door: Tigner's published history of GameLit (2022) records that Kong banned many authors from his LitRPG Facebook group, and misused his moderator privileges on the genre's subreddit besides.

Corvin himself had publicly condemned Kong's other gate. In his December 2018 history, he recorded that Kong had twice attempted to trademark the word "LitRPG" itself, that several authors had been worried by the attempts — himself among them — and that he had grown tired of the entire mess before stepping aside from it into GameLit. His word for the episode was "fiasco."

The record thus documents both gates of that season: Kong's, which Corvin had criticized in public, and Corvin's own, where in December 2017 his moderators voted one of the genre's founders out of the community.

Mulder's own conclusion, stated as his: the word did not fail for want of a platform. Its founders were shut out of the rooms where it would have spread — the magazine pressured into silence, and its editor voted out of the community's largest groups.

See It in the Archive

Every document below exists. Each screenshot was taken from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine; each link opens the archived page itself.

Exhibit 1 — The charter, eighteen days after the coining

gamelit.org as the Wayback Machine first recorded it, September 22, 2017 — the complete GameLit definition and charter, already live.

Archived page

Exhibit 2 — The founder's account

Dustin Tigner's first-person history, What is GameLit? — the LitRPG Rebels thread, the Council, and the month of debate, in a founder's own words. First archived July 11, 2022; the history stood unrevised in the archive through 2024.

Read it liveArchived page

Exhibit 3 — The definition, still standing

gamelit.org as captured on July 12, 2026 — the 2017 definition, verbatim, nearly nine years later. The page also points readers to Tigner's article (Exhibit 2).

Archived page

The Word Outlived the Magazine

GameLit's story did not end with Issue 10. The group that took the name endured in its own right: GameLit Society, created new that October while the older LitRPG Society continued under a new name — RPG GameLit Society — remains an active community today. 2018: GameLit Expansion Pack (#GameLitXP) anthology — stories by Brian D. Anderson, Stan Faryna, Patrick Hodges, Dimitri G. Knight, R. M. Mulder, A. E. Scully, Anthea Sharp, Terry Spider, and James Wymore, organized by Mulder. In an October interview Mulder recorded that it held the #1 Bestseller spot in its Virtual Reality category for five weeks; its pages carried the debut of his DarkForce sequel.

Reader resource: GameLit Insider, a website and social feed devoted to finding the hottest new stories trending in the popular new genre known as #GameLit, a free resource for readers.

The charter page never went away — the definition still stands at gamelit.org today, the same words, open genre, no gatekeepers.

In January 2027 SciFan marks ten years since the magazine's first issue — the archive, the stories and the name it helped launch are all in print again.

Celebrating 10 Years of SciFan… And Beyond?

A Personal Note

What followed was a very dark time for me. I tried once more, with the GameLit Expansion Pack anthology, and it failed — primarily, I believe, due to the shadowban. Over the years that followed, I rewrote my story into three books. The manuscript of the fourth is finished; it has gathered dust for years, through depression. The fifth — the capstone — remains in draft.

— R. M. Mulder