This year is the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the popular fantasy tabletop role-playing game. Half a century is a useful marker to consider what effects the game has had for scholars and practitioners who work in international relations, not least because so many have played the game.
The impact of the game extends well beyond entertainment. For 50 years, D&D has fostered imagination, social skills, and problem-solving abilities among its players, including those in academic and policymaking circles. The game also reflects and challenges cultural norms, especially around issues like race, by evolving its portrayals and mechanics. D&D demonstrates how popular culture can shape and influence broader social, academic, and policy discussions, offering lessons in empathy, collaboration, and critical thinking.
The creation of Dungeons & Dragons – and the great Satanic panic
D&D was created out of a small wargaming community based primarily in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Using miniatures to play out historical wars on tabletop battlefields, a handful of individuals began creating new gaming systems that increasingly gave players more independence to explore different scenarios.
In 1971, Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren created Chainmail, a game of miniature medieval wargames that included a supplement containing fantasy elements such as magic and creatures like elves and dragons. It was melded with Blackmoor, another fantasy role-playing game developed by Dave Arneson. Arneson and Gygax eventually collaborated on the first Dungeons & Dragons game, which came out in 1974 as a three-booklet set.
The game quickly became popular. By the 1980s, D&D converged with other social trends, prompting a “Satanic panic” in the United States, Canada, and parts of Europe. The fact that youth immersed themselves in alternate universes and interacted with mythic creatures and monsters convinced a lot of people that D&D was a form of devil worship.
But here’s what these efforts to resist the game’s attractiveness missed: D&D offered players a wide range of cognitive, emotional, and social benefits that went far beyond the game itself.
How pop culture, academia, and policymaking shape each other
There has long been an interactive effect between popular culture, on the one side, and academia and the policymaking world on the other. Each can shape developments in the other arena. Pop culture references, because they are so easily understood by a large audience, are used to describe “real world” events and objects.
Think, for example, of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. This was a missile defense system that was meant to include, among other things, particle beams to shoot down incoming missiles and space-based installations to help maintain a protective shield around the United States. It was known colloquially – and critically – as “Star Wars,” a reference to the popular science fiction universe.
Science fiction has often been used to represent our fears and hopes. It has been used to challenge hegemonic ideas, and can tell us much about the practice of world politics, such as emerging global norms on the use of autonomous weapons. The reimagined TV series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was in part a critique of President George W. Bush’s War on Terror, for example. The series also demonstrated the negative effects of long-term war on democratic processes and norms.
D&D can teach us to deal with real-life problems
Yes, a board game like this can have a profound impact on players. First, D&D helps develop imagination, the basis for thinking about how to resolve humanity’s dilemmas. At her National Book Award acceptance speech in 1973, fantasy and science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin remarked, “it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.” Some studies have shown that the game can be beneficial to those recovering from mental health challenges. Role-playing can enhance feelings of self-worth, anchor identity, and give a sense of personal control over things.
Second, D&D creates a sense of community among its players, something academics and policymakers also acknowledge as an important benefit and skill. Teamwork develops social skills, sharing of information, and conversations about ideas and policies. That’s one big reason national security organizations around the world often turn to the game – and similar role-play exercises – to boost team decision-making processes.
Third, players learn how to react to a variety of situations, from puzzling through a booby-trap to negotiating one’s way past an unfriendly group of wizards to coordinating a military response to a horde of monsters. The game gives players agency – the knowledge that they can make their own decisions, and that those decisions have consequences, good or bad, for themselves and for others.
Reflections of race and racism
Fourth, the game both teaches us about the world, and exposes changing cultural trends. This is most clearly demonstrated on the issue of race. Reflecting the popular normalization of racism in the 1970s and 1980s, D&D, as in fantasy more broadly, contributed to an understanding of race in which racial groups bore an automatic and inherent identity with a static set of characteristics and behavior (there were very few exceptions). The evil races like goblins, for example, were never able to change; their members had to pursue violence, theft, deception, and resistance to anything positive. The “good” races also didn’t get along with the “bad” races; there was a “natural” dislike between them.
The overt racism in these fantastical assumptions is overwhelming. N.K. Jemisin, an award-winning speculative fiction writer, once said that she has no interest in writing about orcs, given the fact that these dark, corrupted monsters represent violent, mindless, brutish creatures that deserve to be killed or enslaved.
This kind of understanding closes off minds to empathy and understanding, and the importance of meeting and interacting with different peoples. Eventually, the owners of D&D recognized the deeply prejudicial nature of these assumptions. The 2024 Player’s Handbook has now removed “race” from the game, substituting the term with the more neutral “species.” In this way, the game is challenging players to rethink long-held and unquestioned beliefs.
Fifty years after its creation, D&D is still attracting new participants around the world. Millions of people play the game. It might seem easy to dismiss the game as mere fantasy, with no connection to the real world. The evidence – and the legions of players worldwide – suggests otherwise.
