How 'Dungeons' changed the world
FOR A WHILE, it seemed, I was part of a generation with no discernable
qualities, no great contribution to American culture. Too young to be boomers, too
old to be "Gen X," this generation was a product of the burned out
excess of the seventies married to the surface glow of the eighties. But here
in 2004, I realize I belong to the luckiest generation, and not only that, I am
part of the luckiest sub-culture within. Maybe we didn't give the world the
Beatles or John Updike, but we gave the world Dungeons and Dragons.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the beloved, much maligned, often
misunderstood role playing game developed in 1974 by Dave Arneson and Gary
Gygax. Without CGI graphics, surround sound, or flat screens, they invented an
immense and complex gaming system that requires only pencils, graph paper, and
some oddly configured dice. Arneson and Gygax paved the way, but let's face it,
my friends and I changed the world.
It started innocently enough. With a copy of "The Fellowship of the
Ring" at my side and Styx on the record player, I was looking for
something to help me rise above being bored, lonely, and unfulfilled. One day
at school, a kid approached me. Having sensed in me an ally -- the same urgent
need to avoid getting beat up that day -- he timidly asked if I wanted to play
"D&D" after school.
From then on, I never had another forlorn afternoon. And to think, from that
first fateful day when I decided I would be known as the half-elf wizard
Vendel, I was joining a revolution. But what exactly were we transforming?
To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination
as a kid's best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden
toys and things "they had to make themselves" has now become my own.
Looking around at my toddler's room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I
want to cry out, "I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided
die!"
Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents
feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of
story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives
to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in
scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures.
Even sports, the arch-nemesis of role-playing games, is a splendid tale of
adventure and glory. Though my friends and I were not always athletically
inclined, we found agility in the characters we created. We fought, flew
through the air, shot arrows out of the park, and scored points by slaying the
dragon and disabling the trap.
Our influence is now everywhere. My generation of gamers -- whose youths
were spent holed up in paneled wood basements crafting identities, mythologies,
and geographies with a few lead figurines -- are the filmmakers, computer
programmers, writers, DJs, and musicians of today. I think, for the producers,
the movie version of "The Lord of the Rings" was less about getting
the trilogy off the page and onto the screen than it was a vicarious thrill, a
gift to the millions of us who wished we could have dressed up as orcs and
ventured into catacombs and castle keeps ourselves. Only a generation of
imaginations roused by role playing could have made those movies possible.
Dungeons and Dragons is seeing an increase in popularity as a whole new
generation raised on video games begins to look for a way back to the more
personally and socially engaging pleasures of sitting around with a bunch of
friends and making stuff up. Imagine, parents, that some of your kids are
actually turning the TV off to talk to each other, to play something that they
have to "make themselves."
I am getting ready to introduce the game to my son. In a little drawer I
have an unopened box of those funny-sided dice, not exactly a family relic, but
a tradition to pass on nonetheless. And let's not forget that even though we
are talking about a world of basilisks, knights, and talking trees, Dungeons
and Dragons can help us make new stories out of the very world around us.
Democrats, you better get yourselves a magic shield, because in Congress,
Bush has plus three to hit.
Peter Bebergal is a writer and teacher. 