Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who

by Ewalt, David M.

  The villagers, however, did not care to participate. “As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us, with a gaze focused several yards behind,” Clifford wrote. “The indifference, of course, was studied; the villagers were watching every move we made . . . but they acted as if we simply did not exist, which, in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did not, or anyway not yet.”

  It’s not easy to win the trust of a group of strangers, particularly if your appearance or behavior seems strange. But what broke the ice for Clifford and Hildred Geertz is the same thing that’s worked for thousands of geeks over the forty-year history of Dungeons & Dragons: joining the strangers in their favorite game.

  Ten days or so after the anthropologist’s arrival, a large cockfight—a favorite pastime among the Balinese2—was held in the public square. Clifford and Hildred attended and, in the excitement of the event, found themselves drawn into the crowd, where hundreds of people “fused into a single body around the ring, a superorganism in the literal sense.” When the police arrived to break up the match, the Geertzes fled in terror with the villagers, even though they could have easily stayed and simply shown the police their official papers.

  The next morning, the village was a completely different world. “Not only were we no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of all attention, the object of a great outpouring of warmth, interest, and, most especially, amusement,” Clifford wrote. “It was the turning point so far as our relationship to the community was concerned.”

  Author and blogger Cory Doctorow found that games helped him make friends among a different kind of tribe. “I grew up in this very politically lefty household,” he says. “Normally when I encountered people from the far right, they’d be shouting ‘Get a job!’ or ‘Go back to Russia, you hippies!’ when we were out demonstrating. But when I was eleven or twelve years old, I started going to game stores . . . and there were a ton of military and ex-military guys playing D&D.”

  As he became a regular at Toronto’s gaming hotspots, Doctorow got to see that his political opponents weren’t just one-dimensional villains. “These were people who were wearing badges that said ‘Nuke ’em all, let God sort ’em out’ and ‘Better dead than red.’ Serious weirdo ultra–right wing nut jobs. But they were nevertheless part of the same thing as me. A whole social group kind of appeared out of nowhere; it was really very interesting.”

  Humans play games for lots of reasons, but the fact that they so easily bring people together must be near the top of the list. Most of us form our closest relationships through play; it’s irrelevant whether that play takes the form of make-believe in the schoolyard, simulated combat on a chessboard, or two angry chickens pecking at each other. They’re all games, and they all transport us to a different world.

  When a group of people play a game together, they enter a sort of alternate reality where friendships form at an accelerated rate. In part this is due to the structure of the game itself: The players have limited time, so things have to move quickly, and they’ve got a specific goal, so they focus on winning, not on the normal rules of social interaction. Then, as the game picks up, the players become engrossed in the experience; they stop being anxious scientists and become fighting birds of prey. Lost in the game, behavioral norms are forgotten, and emotional defenses weaken. Players begin to feel—and act upon—unusually strong impulses.3 Emotions run high, and they keep getting higher; joy, anger, excitement, fear, even the terror of (simulated) death. In this artificially accelerated and emotionally heightened social environment, bonds are forged quickly and forged strong.

  And even when a game is over, the bonds that have been created persist. “A play community generally tends to become permanent even after the game is over,” wrote Johan Huizinga, one of the fathers of academic game studies. “The feeling of being ‘apart together’ in an exceptional situation, of sharing something important, of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the original game.”

  Whether you’re a young nerdy kid or a happy adult, this kind of experience can be profound. It’s the reason why so many people build their strongest social connections with people like sports teammates or members of a D&D campaign. The people that you play games with become your clan. They share your experiences, know your strengths and weaknesses, and help protect you from a dangerous world.

  I knew we were in trouble as soon as I saw the pyramid.

  The ancient documents described a desert oasis, a city of fabulous riches. But the vampires destroyed most human cities during the Nightfall, so I’d expected to find the oasis in ruin. Instead, someone—or something—had kept the city standing, and even protected it behind new stone walls. Off in the distance, the glassy black pyramid appeared unmarred and unbroken; dozens of tall buildings surrounded it, sprawling out for miles.

  We couldn’t see any movement or make out any living creatures, but something had to be there. So we made camp about a mile from the city and waited for dark. Graeme is small and stealthy, so he volunteered to go closer and scout.

  “Don’t worry,” he told us as he slipped into the night. “I’ll stay out of trouble.”

  A few hours later, he returned.

  “You’re not going to like this.” He sat on a pile of rubble and rubbed his balding head. “I kept my distance at first, at least a quarter of a mile, and worked my way around the walls looking for doors. There’s one on the far side from us. But it’s closed, and there are guards on the walls. They looked like they could be human, but they were wearing black hooded cloaks, so I couldn’t really tell.

  “So I decided to sneak in closer. I was sure they hadn’t seen me, but when I got about sixty feet from the gate, I heard a voice—well, not heard, exactly, more like felt—a voice in my head. It said, ‘Who goes there?’ I didn’t know what to do. Then one of the guards stepped off the wall, into thin air, and didn’t fall . . . it slowly floated toward the ground. So I ran. It didn’t follow me, and I wasn’t about to go back for a closer look.”

  We couldn’t agree on what we should do. We’d dealt with creatures with psychic powers before and knew we were relatively powerless against their attacks; Jhaden carries a magic amulet that hides his thoughts, but it only protects the person wearing it, not all of us at once. He wanted to find an unguarded section of the city walls, climb over, and scout the city himself. I argued for more caution—I could summon a magical creature, perhaps a hippogriff, and fly high over the city to get a better look. The merchants just wanted us to shut up and get their treasure.

  Finally, Ganubi ended the debate. “Listen, it’s simple,” he said. “When the sun comes up, I’ll just walk up and knock on the door.”

  Games help you make friends. They certainly worked for me when I was a kid. But that doesn’t explain why I got addicted to D&D—and not once, but twice. Games, in general, have always been my favorite and most frequently indulged-in pastime, but I usually don’t get obsessed with board games or video games. So why is D&D so uniquely powerful?

  Part of it, I think, is cultural: In his book The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, author Michael J. Tresca argues that the game appeals to an American sense of individualism—you build your own world, with your own values and rules. There’s a little bit of manifest destiny in the mix, too: “American culture has some nuances that are unique to it, one being the notion of limitless growth for businesses, consumer buying power, and the economy. In Dungeons & Dragons, this ideology is true of dungeon exploration too. There’s always a monster with treasure around the next corner, always a new area to explore, always a new frontier to conquer.”

  But fantasy gaming is popular all over the world, not just in its place of birth. D&D’s true appeal goes deeper than international borders, class, or creed: It connects directly to the structure of our psyche.

  Because they have a narrative form, role-playing games
frequently echo Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the classic hero’s journey. Campbell saw that the same basic story kept repeating, across time and cultures: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” He believed that variations of this story keep appearing because it springs from the collective unconscious, the deep structures of the mind that are present in all human beings. The classic examples of the hero’s journey are the myths of Prometheus, Osiris, and Moses; modern audiences might recognize it in Star Wars, The Matrix, and Harry Potter.

  Stories that follow the form of the monomyth resonate because they tickle something deep in the unconscious mind. So imagine what happens when you’re not watching or reading that adventure—you’re experiencing it. That’s what D&D does: It doesn’t just tell a story, it puts you in it. You become “the hero with a thousand faces.” The experience penetrates deep to the core of your being.

  And it’s therapeutic too. Because the players are active participants in a story, role-playing games produce many of the same benefits as psychodrama, a psychological treatment method that uses dramatic reenactments to provide insight into its actors’ lives. “I see role-playing as an opportunity for people to learn more about themselves,” physician Leonard H. Kanterman4 wrote in a 1979 issue of the game magazine Different Worlds. “By exploring the possibilities of different courses of actions, even to the point of different morality systems, through the ‘safe’ medium of fantasy, people can learn who they are and why they think and act the way they do.”

  Role-playing games provide a chance for people to work out different aspects of their personality, and no one needs to do that more than an adolescent kid. I think that’s a big reason why I spent so much of my childhood addicted to D&D and games like it.

  Of course, I was also a big nerd, which doubtless contributed to the attraction. Some research suggests smart kids are drawn to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons because they need them the most: In a 2011 study of middle and high school students, education researchers Gregory Harrison and James Van Haneghan reported that gifted children experienced higher levels of insomnia, anxiety, and fear of death than their peers. The researchers also found that encouraging these students “to engage in fantasy game play such as Dungeons & Dragons” could be an effective therapy, allowing them to work out their problems “in stimulating and enjoyable ways.”

  When morning came, we hid and watched as Ganubi approached the city gates. We sent him alone, wearing the protective magic amulet, because he’s the most diplomatic—and charming—member of our group. If the creatures in the city were friendly, he’d be the best person to make contact. If they weren’t, he’s light on his feet and could run like hell.

  He approached the gate and, just as Graeme had described, stopped about sixty feet from the city walls. A black-clad figure slowly floated down to greet him. They stood there for some time, not moving . . . perhaps conversing? We couldn’t tell.

  Several minutes passed. Jhaden nervously palmed the hilt of his sword. Then the city gates opened, and Ganubi and his new friend walked inside. As he entered, he gave us a subtle wave. Friends, not foes.

  Still, I couldn’t help but worry. Hours passed, and Ganubi did not return. As we hid, roasting in the desert sun, Graeme and I debated our options for entering the city in case we needed to rescue our friend. Jhaden napped, unperturbed.

  Finally, as dusk fell, the gates opened, and Ganubi emerged—alone, and smiling.

  Dungeons & Dragons players dread facing psychic-powered creatures—probably because they prey on the thing we value the most.

  It’s obvious why role-playing game fans might respect brains over brawn: D&D is a cerebral game, after all, played almost entirely in your head, and as established, the hobby tends to attract smart people. But the connection between intellect and role-playing goes deeper than the disposition of its audience. Smart people play D&D because D&D makes people smart.

  If you think that sounds like an excuse for getting addicted to role-playing, you’re not off the mark. When I was in high school, I convinced myself to not feel bad when I didn’t get invited to the cool kids’ parties, because I was doing something more important: “Sure, they get to drink and have sex, but when the apocalypse comes they’ll wish they’d spent more time role-playing disaster scenarios and mastering urban combat strategy. The zombies will eat the jocks while the nerds are busy building fortifications, and then we’ll have the cheerleaders all to ourselves.”

  Obviously I was delusional,5 but I was right that my hobby had educational value. Games like Dungeons & Dragons require and encourage study; you have to learn the rules, of course, but you also must learn real-world skills in order to understand them—particularly math, statistics, and vocabulary. “I got a perfect score on the SAT verbals in high school in part because of D&D,” Morgan told me. “One of the questions involved the word ‘comeliness,’ and I knew the word because it had turned up in a D&D book, as an optional stat.”6

  Morgan also says that D&D has helped him advance his career in advertising. “The thing about being a DM is that it forces me to improvise,” he says. “It’s not possible for me to plan for every contingency. So when you ask me a question about some aspect of the world that I have no idea about, I just have to come up with something. I find myself doing that same sort of thing in business meetings—actually noticing that I had to come up with an answer, on the spur of the moment, based on the narrative that we’ve created for a business. And I thank my D&D experience for that.”

  I feel the same way. Every time I had to figure out how to reach a goal in an adventure, it helped me develop real-world problem-solving skills; all the time I spent playing with friends taught me how to collaborate with colleagues at work. And as the games grew more complex, so did the lessons: There have been times in my career when I’ve been overwhelmed by the size of a project, but then I remember the Shadowrun campaign where Everett Meyer and I spent months perfecting a plan to invade and conquer Seattle. No magazine story will ever require that much work.7

  “Doing an adventure for your friends is actually a relatively rigorous undertaking, especially for young people,” says Jerry Holkins, writer of the web comic Penny Arcade. “You have to essentially give a three-hour extemporaneous speech—and that’s in addition to the calculations and the planning and all the narration. There is a ton of work to be done in sustaining a universe.”

  Holkins started playing D&D regularly when he was a teenager, and tried without success to get his friend Mike Krahulik—now Penny Arcade’s artist—into the hobby. But years later, after their comic became a hit with gamers, Wizards of the Coast paid the two men to play D&D as part of an advertising campaign, and Krahulik was instantly addicted.

  “I had played one game of Dungeons & Dragons, then I started my first game as Dungeon Master,” Krahulik says. His games—documented in a series of blog posts on the Penny Arcade site—soon reached epic levels of creative effort: In one session, he built a tabletop puzzle that required his players to navigate their miniatures through a maze of actual working laser beams. For another, he constructed and painted a series of 3-D “planets” out of Styrofoam and had the players jump their minis back and forth between the orbs as they “floated” through space.

  “I joke with my players that the reason we play D&D is so that I can go to Michael’s every weekend and buy Styrofoam,” Krahulik says. “Some sessions were superelaborate—I spent a month, at least, on one of my games.”

  Educators caught on to the benefits of role-playing games quickly: During D&D’s heyday Gygax was invited to speak at teacher’s conventions, and many schools launched extracurricular D&D clubs. Steve Roman, a librarian at the public library in DeKalb, Illinois, has hosted a role-playing game program for teens for over a decade and seen the benefits firsthand. “I
use it as a gateway into the reading programs and the book discussions,” he says. “I tell them, ‘If you really like this, try reading The Hobbit.’ ”

  Roman says it can be a challenge getting kids raised on video games to understand open-ended games like D&D, to accept that they can do whatever they want and aren’t limited to a set of preprogrammed interactions. But when they get it, the kids blossom. “They challenge each other,” he says. “They encourage each other to be creative by example.”

  As he is sometimes wont to do, Ganubi described his venture into the desert city with an impromptu bardic song.8

  Way down through the mountains past the zombie scene

  Way back up in the desert where the worms are mean

  There stood a walled city where the fortune’s good

  Graeme couldn’t get inside but Ganubi could

  He never ever worried that it wouldn’t go well

  Just walked up to the door like he was ringing a bell

  Go go, Ganubi go go

  Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go

  Ganubi did good

  The creatures that lived there spoke inside his head

  But he had a magic necklace so he felt no dread

  Oh, their skin was pink and slimy and their eyes were white

  Tentacles round their mouth made them quite a fright

  The creatures passing by would stop and say

  They’d like to probe his mind, but he said no way

  Go go, Ganubi go go

  Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go

  Ganubi did good

  His new friend told him they had never seen a man

  And took him to the leader of their monster band

  The big boss welcomed him to the town

  And said Ganubi’s friends could all come round

  The humans won an ally in their vampire fight

  ’Cause Ganubi did good that night

  Go go, Ganubi go go