Larry Niven and Steven Barnes's Dream Park (1981) has a setting of LARP-like games as a kind of reality TV in the future (2051).
Early examples are Terry Pratchett's 1992 Only You Can Save Mankind, Piers Anthony's 1993 Killobyte, Tad Williams's 1996–2004 tetralogy Otherland, Conor Kostick's 2004 Epic[5] and Charles Stross's 2007 Halting State.
[9][1] Many of the post-2014 writers in this field insist that depiction of a character's in-game progression must be part of the definition of LitRPG, leading to the emergence of the term GameLit to embrace stories set in a game universe but which do not necessarily embody leveling and skill raising.
[21][22] Some of the earliest examples are Chris Van Allsburg's 1981 Jumanji, which is a children's book about a magical board game;[23][24] Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, which introduced the term metaverse;[25] and the Guardians of the Flame series (1983–2004) by Joel Rosenberg in which a group of college students are magically transported into a fantasy role-playing game.
[26] More recent examples include Ernest Cline's novels Ready Player One (2011) and Ready Player Two (2020), which depict a virtual reality world called the OASIS that is filled with arcade game references from the 1980s and 1990s;[27][28] Marie Lu's books Warcross (2017) and Wildcard (2018), which are about an online bounty hunter in an internet game;[28] and Louis Bulaong's sci-fi books Escapist Dream (2020) and Otaku Girl (2021), which tell the story of a virtual reality world where geeks can role-play and use the powers of their favorite comic book, anime, movie and video game characters.