How Dungeons & Dragons changed the world...

Mark, from his place in France, has written about computer games. But first he tells us where it started:

I suppose it started at uni, with Dungeons and Dragons. This role-playing combat and treasure-hunting game is based on a map, figurines and rolls of the dice. And lots of rules, looked up in a book, for how armour, weapons, magic spells, and everything else in the fantasy world actually work. (How much time, magical energy and money does it take to develop a micro-fireball oven?) We'd collect together of an evening around the boards, dice and a considerable amount of beer, and play through the night.

To which I respond: Boards? Figurines? Before settling down and remembering the thousands of hours I spent playing the game. And playing didn't just involve turning up for a few hours and rolling some dice (well, absolutely thousands of dice if truth be told) - we also created the dungeons from scratch including new monsters, traps and fiendish puzzles. I once designed (I think that's the term we use these days) an entire assassin's guild complete with its constitution - my career direction was set even then!

The idea that you could create a functional model place into which players could bring their own imagination, creativity and very large two-handed swords may seem unremarkable in this age of on-line gaming, but back in the 1970s Gary Gygax's innovation was quite the opposite - remarkable indeed. Never before had there been a game that put those childhood make-believe games into its system. And, though there'd been plenty of team games, Dungeons & Dragons was the first game to have both team and individual competition - you worked with other players to slay monsters, solve puzzles and run your fingers through the loot while acting as an individual player. D&D even provided a framework - the alignment chart - to allow such individualism to range across all the variations in human character.

D&D begat a host of other 'role-playing games' (RPGs) from Traveller, which involved romping about in space, through other fantasy games like Runequest, and even a Japanese samauri game called Bushido (with by far the most over-elaborate rule book). RPGs were designed based in the wild west or capturing the incipient madness in H P Lovecraft. All these took the same model - create a character, place that character in the game when he, she or it interests with other players, and explore scenarios created by a 'game-' or 'dungeon-master'. But, while each of these games picked up flaws in D&D, the basic combat and magic system remains hard to beat (and the basis for combat systems in a pile of popular computer games).

For me, the biggest thing about D&D was - and is - the character you create as this is central to the game's ethos (not, of course, that slaying bug-eyed monsters controlled by evil priests isn't fun). I wrote about it some while ago:

What you have is a cardboard cut-out character that would suit the typical Hollywood blockbuster based on some comic book. But this is Dungeons & Dragons and you can do better. Your level one male ranger (OK you chose that because you fancied Aragorn maybe) has to round out by interacting with the other players - perhaps he's a bit grumpy when he doesn't get his way, maybe he never buys a round, or has a tendency to quote bad poetry. While doing this, of course, you have to stay alive which means you need to co-operate - even with the righteous lawful good cleric.

By the time Aerosmith (or whatever your ranger's name is) has survived to be 4th or 5th level, you know what he's like, how he'll respond to other sorts of character, his foibles and preferences. And with his recently acquired Sword of Daemon (+2, +3 vs evil things from hell) you have a real character. For sure, some of the character is the player themselves (we aren't all Constantine Stanislavsky, after all), but you'll have wrapped your mind round how to develop a character. And the wonder of this is that, for all there's a dungeon and a dungeon master controlling the game, the success or otherwise isn't just about the quantity of goblins slain or giants hacked to pieces but about having created, with a few others, a game within that game.

Looking back it sometimes seems childish to recall long conversations about what an imaginary character might do in a given situation - indeed, I'm sure that the worldly folk who though D&D was naff would make this point strongly. The thing is, however, that those conversations explored - through the medium of a game - a pile of concepts (what we mean by good and evil, the search for power, the benefits of collaboration) that would otherwise only get considered in the abstract. You learn more about evil by asking what a supposedly evil character would do than through argument, however reasoned. And it isn't simple, you quickly get past kill everyone and take all the gold (although I've done that too).

Dungeons & Dragons stretched the boundaries of the game (or at least the formal game - children had always, and still do, play games of imagination, what we'd now call RPGs) by allowing fantasy, in its widest sense, to arrive into the board game. The game became about personality, conversation, survival and growth rather than, in the old board game sense, winning or losing. Nobody dies when boys play cops and robbers but the idea of death is there as is questioning what is right and what is wrong. The child giving her dolls names, characters and roles does the same and we see it as a valuable way for that child to explore what it is to be human.

But, when children get to big school or thereabouts all this childishness has to stop. Games are either an entertaining means of passing time or else a simple matter of who wins and who loses. Outside drama classes and the school play there's none of this role-play and even the drama class wants you to be the person the playwright wants you to be not the role you want to try out. In the 1970s, for a bunch of mostly boys, mostly a bit nerdy and dorky, Dungeons & Dragons allowed them, without embarrassment, to play those games of imagination again. By making the games of young childhood fit with adult themes, D&D reinvented what grown-ups understand by a game, helped pave the way (along with complex war games from the likes of Strategy & Tactics) for computer gaming, and placed imagination right back at the heart of play where it belongs.
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How I lost god and found Dungeons and Dragons

The other day I bumped into this article entitled 'How we won the war on Dungeons & Dragons'. It was about the excitement generated by Christian conservative groups in the USA about the role playing game:

My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren't getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.

An awful deal of fuss and bother (not to mention damage) created by a game. And the children so mistreated by schools and parents had no defence against the "Dungeons and Dragons is just devil worship" line - they were just kids playing a game.

We didn't have quite the same problem in the UK. Our Christianity is altogether more calm and moderate and, while there were some who complained (we saw them rise again like some form of undead when the Harry Potter books were published), they were few and far between. As far as I know there weren't any kids kicked out of school or sent to bizarre indoctrination camps to expunge the influence of devil worship or the glorification of witchcraft.

What I do know is that Dungeons & Dragons changed my life. I'd had a pretty orthodox catholic upbringing, I'd learnt the catechism, I attended mass faithfully and I thought I got the religion malarkey. But what I'd never done in all this certainty and absolutism is consider the meaning of good and evil, tried to understand what these terms we gaily bandy about actually mean. Much of the religious discussion about evil, for all its invoking of demons and condemnation of magic, is more precisely about actions - outputs, if you prefer. Evil is defined as doing things that 'we' (the religion in question) disapprove of.

So I arrive at university and get stuck into playing Dungeons & Dragons. And, because it is inherent to the game, we talk about this:

This is the D&D 'alignment chart' and it's really important if you play the game. Since it's a role playing game you have to try and play your character in character (we used to hate the sort of game playing where player interaction was shoved aside for the sake of vast armouries of magical goodies). And this means that, if your character is evil, you need to understand what evil means. Not in terms of actions but in the context of feelings, motivations and behaviours - at least enough to make the game fun.

We spent hours discussing, for example, what 'chaotic neutral' meant - was it a sort of carefreeness on steroids or something more profound, more religious. A rejection of order - the Dice Man of the fantasy world?  The answer doesn't matter, what mattered was that we talked about good, evil, the meaning of law and how these could be personal. It was a far better moral education than the platitudes of RE at school or the banalities of the typical catholic homily.

If you want to live a good life, it has to be on the basis of understanding what that means. You can get out the book and read the (often contradictory) guidance from the ancients or else you can work it out from first principles. And the D&D alignment chart seems to me a good place to start - it tells me that executing the adulteress for her sin may be lawful but it is probably evil at the same time and that saving that adulteress - however sinful she may be - is a chaotic act but also an act of goodness.

Religion told me none of these things. I learnt that god is good and the devil is bad. And that if I follow the rules I will live forever. I learnt nothing about what all this meant, about whether there's a devil or whether that god is all he's cracked up to be.

This doesn't make me an atheist. Nor does my favourite D&D creation, a neutral evil mage called Tim with a withered hand, make me evil. And I don't want to make out that fantasy role playing is the route to salvation - unless your idea of salvation is spending 30 hours clearing out one of Chris Barlow's slightly manic dungeons.

But for me, playing Dungeons & Dragons, taught me more about good and evil than all the priests and brothers who'd taught me about god. And, although I didn't realise it at the time, those months in 1979 were when I lost god and found Dungeons and Dragons.

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