In some random gambolings around the internet, I unearthed this great piece about E. Gary Gygax from The Believer. As I was reading, I could almost smell my pal's mildewy basement rec room (along with the lingering scents of sexual frustration and Doritos). Looking back, I'm sure that much of Barry Trotter was lifted directly from my hours as a teen playing D&D. So blame that, if you wish.
The line in the article that particularly struck me was, "in a society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural..." It certainly felt that way to me, as I played it way back when. D&D had its roots in war games, and could often devolve into fantasies of rape and rapine--but like improv, its outside hides a core of authentic rebellion, the kind you get whenever someone is given a method to tap into their unedited self.
Dungeons and Dragons' authentic power in this regard--in its unleashing of the imagination of its participants--is as plausible a reason as any for the anti-Satanist anxieties that accompanied the peak popularity of the game. Remember, this was the Reagan-era Cold War, a time of binary choices: capitalism or communism, God or Satan, Coke or New Coke. Never mind that it was a false choice--that the USSR wasn't primed to roll across Western Europe, or that the "Leave It to Beaver" lifestyle was a much a fantasy as free-love, or that New Coke was a brazen hustle designed to increase market share. The Sixties and Seventies were still fresh in everybody's minds; we all saw what happened then, didn't we, when people got a little too creative, a little too cute...I'm just riffing here, but is it any wonder that a game based on imagination, and cooperation--where the whole point is to envision a new world, and working together to succeed in it--would threaten the authorities of this one? The irony is that D&D is above all an orderly world; for me, playing it never felt like a trip through chaos. More like time serving under a different God. Characters who acted before they thought, or were merely self-indulgent, usually didn't last long.
The backbone, the self-sustaining myth of our current junior-varsity dystopia is simply "that's the way it is, always has been, has to be." That's crap, of course, but it's not crap to fear the power of the liberated mind. To imagine is an attack on the flaws of the present. And, as ineffectual as it seems, the mother and nourishing root of any change. Just as every tyranny comes from apathy and stupidity, every innovation is born first as a whim. So I think the more imagination humanity can generate, the brighter our collective future will be. I wonder if they could teach D&D in schools?
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