D&D and Life

D&D and Life

Salon posted an article last week called How Dungeons and Dragons Changed My Life. It's a decent article by Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, a book offering a relatively pleasant and gentle look at gamers, geeks, and fandom in general. My only real objections to the article are the same objections I have to the book. There's a supposition there that gaming stopped in the 80s and is only coming back now. First of all, many of us never stopped gaming. And second, even if you disregard that, if it's going to focus on a nostalgic gaming resurgence, I think it's a bit late to the party.

Allow me to elaborate a bit on the second point. You can make a good argument that at the end of the 1990s, tabletop role playing gaming was about dead. D&D, the market leader, was selling like, well, whatever the opposite of hotcakes are. When we were commissioned with the development of a new edition of the game in 1997, it was do or die time. If 3E failed, D&D would be done, and it would very likely drag rpgs in general down with it. Without D&D to stock on game store shelves, stores focused on rpgs go away and other stores just forget about rpgs entirely. We know this to be true (or at least having been true at that time) because at the end of its life, TSR stopped publishing D&D product for around half a year and the lack of new stuff didn't help the sales of other big rpgs at the time (like Vampire), it hurt them. At the time, the truism of "as goes the market leader, so goes the rest of the market" was very true.

The story of 3E's sales success is well-known in the hobby. I think it's pretty clear, however, that much of that success had to do with a "right place, right time" kind of situation. Gamers from the 80s were now older guys with cash and a fondness for their childhoods (or were dads with kids just getting to be old enough to share a hobby). It was right around that time (early 2000s) that we saw D&D references begin to show up in television sitcoms. GE used it to help sell washing machines. Sure, the game was shown to be geeky and silly, but at least there was none of that Satanic nonsense that people feared in the 1980s. D&D was suddenly recognized by a nostalgia-hungry public as one of those "kinda cool" things from their youth, along with New Wave music, Star Wars action figures, and Joust.

Today, of course, we still see D&D depicted in pop culture, but it's no longer shown to be a purely nostalgic thing. Nor is it purely nerdy, or rather, the fact that it's nerdy isn't seen as a bad thing. Look at the recent entire episode of the sitcom Community that devoted itself to the game. Look at geek culture icons mentioning the game casually rather than ironically or humorously. Take, for example, Iron Man director John Favreau openly crediting D&D in helping teach him how to tell a story. D&D isn't experiencing some kind of nostalgic renaissance, it's settled in nicely to a comfortable and well-accepted niche.