"finding somebody living in your area who shared your very peculiar hobby was not an easy task"

Last year I finally finished Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, a history of roleplaying games as they grew out of a surprisingly long and rich history of tabletop war games.  I thought it was longer than it needed to be, but as a well-sourced academic work it's hard to criticize.  This interesting article by Giaime Alonge gets into some of the cultural context surrounding the rise of modern war board games in the 1960's simultaneously with the anti-Vietnam war movement:

"Should we assume that there was a morbid fascination with Nazism among wargamers? I would say 'yes', at least in part. One of the most important sections of the aforementioned magazine The General was the 'Opponents Wanted' page. In the pre-Internet era, finding somebody living in your area who shared your very peculiar hobby was not an easy task. Wargamers used ads to find playing mates. Several of these ads clearly state a preference for playing the Germans – or even the Japanese – in games on World War Two. Some ads go even further, like one from a 1971 issue, which reads: 'The Fuehrer desires a good Joe to crush in Stalingrad.'[17] Actually, some of the interest in playing the Nazis has strictly technical reasons. Besides games specifically devoted to the last phase of the conflict, in World War Two games the German player is usually the one on the offensive, at least in the first part of the game, and one could argue that wargamers normally prefer to attack. In some ads, authors say that they prefer playing the Germans in games where the Axis has the initiative, but want to play the Allies in Anzio (1969), a game about the Italian campaign, where the Germans are on the defensive from the very beginning. Moreover, one of the main pleasures in playing a wargame is achieving a result that is different from the historical outcome. You thus might want to win World War Two with the Axis, as you might want to win the battle of Waterloo with the French. It would then mean that you would have been 'smarter' than Napoleon. Nonetheless, dismissing this whole phenomenon with simply technical reasons would be naïve and misleading. There was a fascination with Nazism. After all, in the 1970s, Nazi paraphernalia were widespread in American and European popular culture. Susan Sontag’s well-known 1975 essay Fascinating Fascism elaborates on this point in detail.[18] Wargames were following the current."

The article also reminds us that Dungeons and Dragons, a game where you roleplay a violent vagabond, kill monsters, and take their stuff, was created in part by Gary Gygax, a lifelong pacifist and Jehovah's Witness.