Holly Bash
Ms. Templeton
English 1020
8 February 2015
Dungeons & Dragons: Shaping the World Today?
“Man up and just roll the d20!” That is something you would most likely hear if you were enjoying a wonderful night of Dungeons &Dragons(D&D). D&D has paved way for many new things. It really kicked the Role Playing Genre (RPGs) into to high gear. The most common thing that people think about when they hear that someone plays D&D is that they live in their mom’s basement and are not social at all. Which in fact, they are more social. D&D also has formed another version of itself without the Dragon-slaying, Facebook. In Adam Rogers’ “Geek Love” he talks about how Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeon & Dragons has shaped geek culture today. We should be praising D&D for all of the many things which it has indirectly break down walls for.
Rogers’ talks about how people get the misconception that anyone who plays D&D would rather be antisocial than social. D&D is hugely a role playing game. It really brought the RPG genre to the light, by inspiring “Dungeon Crawlers.” It also inspired lots of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMoRPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. Rogers strongly believes that D&D has inspired things outside of geek culture too. He says that D&D has inspired the mainstream Facebook, just without dragons. “Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeon & Dragons , this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.” (Rogers 268) In many games nowadays, you can “finish” a game and most of the tim, you can still continue to keep playing the game after the last story mission. Gamers call this “New game plus.” In a sense, the player would be playing not to win, but just enjoy what the game can offer.
D&D has influenced video games since the 80s. Games got released that vaguely followed the same guide lines as D&D. The games evolved over time into RPGs. Both the genre of games and D&D itself focus on the same thing, role playing. The idea was to make you feel like you were really there or crafting a tapestry of tongues telling beautiful stories. You could simplify into one word, imagination. When more games of this RPG genre were made you could see all of the imagination going through the creators’ heads. One of the most recent games that you might have heard of is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The game seemed to be well liked by critics. It was an open-world adventure game telling the store of the “Dovahkiin.” Dragons were closely related to the main story line. That follows the idea of imagination and dragons. Skyrim is only one type of examples on how D&D has shaped video games. The other example is MMoRPGs. You may have heard of the game World of Warcraft(WoW), it’s one of the biggest MMoRPGs. (CNN) One of the key points of MMoRPGs was communication.
In MMoRPGs you either would talk to people through an in-game chat system or through a microphone into a chat channel. The whole idea of talking with other players is to work together as a team. Even if you have never met the person in real life, you could still get the sense that you knew them closely. In WoW players have the abilities to go on raids with random people of ten or twenty-five, or a large group of 40 players that get split up into eight groups spilt into five player parties. In these raids, communication plays a huge part. Someone could be in charge and telling everyone else what to do, and then other people would be saying if they needed help. MMoRPGs and D&D both have a reputation for being very anti-social, but one of their main purposes is to get people to connect with one another. So people are really just wrongly stereotyping people who enjoy these games. The same thing could be said about people who enjoy using social media networks a lot.
Some people tend to stay on social media networks, such as Facebook or Tumblr, more than they actually physically socialize. Their way of socializing may be different, such as making long posts to grab peoples attention. That still counts as socializing, either through speech or text, they are trying to reach out to someone. This closely relates to how socializing works with D&D or online games. On Facebook, your profile picture can be anything you want. In sense, people hide behind their pictures. You might not ever know the real person, but they tell you what they want you to believe about them. It is almost like they are creating an online persona. The person who uses this new persona is practically role playing. Sometimes, people really just have role playing Facebook accounts, they go as far as to making their whole page looking like the character would have it set up.
A huge part of D&D is becoming the character you create. You become attached to that character. The next step would be to act like the character. Get other people involved to make it feel real. D&D really made it acceptable to role play. In many different cases, D&D has indirectly paved new roads creating ideas.
Works Cited
Rogers,Adam. “Geek Love.” Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing.Ed. Diana George and John Trimbur. New York: Pearson, 2012. 265-68.Print.
"40 Years Later, 'Dungeons & Dragons' Still Inspiring Gamers - CNN.com." CNN. Cable News Network, n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2015. 
