Overview

For my final project, I would like to write a research paper that will investigate and explore the ways that Dungeons & Dragons has historically intersected with the fields of fantasy and political ideologies through its multiple editions. More specifically, I would like to analyze Dungeons & Dragons through the lens of critical race, queerness, and imperialism and how all the game has evolved through its 50-year history. This would be an extension of my class presentation in which I take a deeper dive through the game.

Throughout my study of these games, I want to take a much deeper look at the ways that Dungeons & Dragons has worked to perpetuate and exemplify ideologies of Western imperialism and contrast it with the attempts to address those ideas and evolve into more modern viewpoints. One of the first ways that I will do this is exploring the game’s relationship to wargaming and how the practice is both upheld and subverted by Dungeons and dragons. Afterwards, I seek to engage with how D&D presents ideas surrounding race, gender, and queerness within its character creation and the acts of mimicry that are essential to playing the game. Finally, I want to explore the ways that Dungeons and Dragons has intertwined with popular culture throughout history, moving from a game for “Satan-worship” to a much more mainstream format and what factors contributed to it.

Methodology

Dungeons and Dragons, first published in 1974, has had multiple editions in the last 50 years. To help keep my research paper more organized, I’ve decided to focus on the main editions of the game and exclude most other expansions. This means that I will be investigating the following sources:

• Dungeons & Dragons – Original Edition (1974)
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons – 1^st Edition (1977)
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons – 2^nd Edition (1989)
• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons – Revised 2^nd Edition (1995)
• Dungeons & Dragons – 3^rd Edition (2000)
• Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 – Revised 3^rd Edition (2003)
• Dungeons & Dragons – 4^th Edition (2008)
• Dungeons & Dragons – 5^th Edition (2014)
• One Dungeons & Dragons (2024)

While looking at all these games, I will examine the mechanics and character creation processes for each edition and the thought process behind changing each of them with every edition. I also plan to read articles concerning how each of these editions were made and the purpose behind changing aspects of the game. Through this, I hope to gain a better understanding of the game through the lens of capital and culture.

As for sources to help me with my analysis, I found the following to help guide my studies with the intention of finding more.

• Michaud, Jon (November 2, 2015). “The Tangled Cultural Roots of Dungeons & Dragons”. The New Yorker. Archived from the original on March 9, 2020. Retrieved February 25, 2020.
• “Foreign War Games”. Selected Professional Papers Translated from European Military Publications. Translated by H. O. S. Heistand. Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office. 1898. pp. 233–289.
• Reagan Yessler & Bethany Craig (31 May 2024): Dungeons and Dragons: Gender, Race, and Power in the Fantasy and Storytelling Space, GeoHumanities, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2024.2352528
• Atherton, Gray, et al. “A Critical Hit: Dungeons and Dragons as a Buff for Autistic People.” Autism : The International Journal of Research and Practice, 2024, pp. 13623613241275260-, https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241275260.

Upon finishing Miguel Sicart’s, “Playing the Good Life: Gamification and Ethics,” I took a moment to consider the ways that I have personally connected my life to technology to make it “good”. As someone that is admittedly fairly self-invested and relatively obsessed with productivity, so much of my daily life is connected to the ways that technology helps me improve. This includes a productivity tracker to track all of my action items, a workout spreadsheet populated by my health stats for keeping track of how physically active I’ve been, and meticulous calendar updates to make sure that my whole life is scheduled ahead of me. With that said, I’ve been reflecting on what exactly is a “good life” and how one might, as Sicart calls it, “flourish”, and how I think that can intersect with the ideas of transhumanism and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Sicart describes the good life as “the life experienced as a process in which we perform the best of our virtues with the goal of flourishing, of exploring our potential as human beings”. His case study is with Nike+ and how it connected to running. For my example, I’ll take a look at Todoist. Todoist is a productivity application that allows a user to create projects and set goals with distinct deadlines, levels of priority, and subtasks to complete the larger goal. It’s basically a fancy, digital checklist that keeps all of the things I need to do in a single place. I can’t overstate how essential this application has become in my life. It sets my agenda for my work life, my theatre life, and even my personal to-do’s. When I indicate that I’ve completed a certain number of tasks, I get rewarded with a little “productivity medal” and another day in my accomplishment streak. Overall, if something doesn’t make it to this app, I simply do not do it. In many ways, I think that this has allowed me to set and achieve many of my personal goals since I never would’ve been able to remember this much without it. By organizing all of my tasks like this, I’m always motivated to stay active until the entire day’s list is completed (much like a video game character attempting to finish a quest).

With that said, it also sometimes feels like this falls into the philosophy of transhumanism, or the belief that humans can evolve primarily through the use of technology and artificial intelligence. In an article written by Emile P. Torres, Torres mentions how the concept behind Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is fundamentally transhumanist as it seeks to implant computers into our brains to achieve previously unexperienced skills and potentials. This theory implies that human beings can never just exist – we need to constantly integrate ourselves further and further with technology until we essentially “ascend” to another state of being. However, it’s intriguing to me how the ideas of ascension tend to be deeply conflated with becoming a more useful member of a capitalist infrastructure. Looking at most applications that track and aid with our lives, so many of them are geared to making us more productive, more active, and more ready to keep on running (both figuratively and literally). I would even argue that the idea that we are constantly reaching for the good life implies that we are never truly there, so we can never be satisfied with the way that we are. This isn’t to say that being productive or trying to be better is necessarily a negative quality, but considering that the continued existence of many of these gamified technologies relies on making money and constant activity, I question the framework that we look at this issue.

According to the Pew Research Center, about one out of every ten adults first met their partner on a dating site or application, and three out of every ten adults have reported using a dating application at some point. As someone that used to be relatively active on dating applications, I kept drawing parallels between those platforms (such as Grindr, Tinder, and Hinge), gamification, and surveillance while reading Jennifer R. Whitson’s “Foucault’s Fitbit”. In this blog post, I seek to explore how online dating has become gamified and the ways that we willingly govern and regulate ourselves in the pursuit of love and sex.

Grindr is the largest gay dating application in the world, and a lot of its popularity is due to its ability to give its users the chance to locate and connect with other people in the area. We can draw a lot of comparisons between some of those features and popular games. Grindr features a geolocation feature that, unlike Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, or similar swipe apps, displays all profiles within a certain walking distance. As you walk through an area, the profiles on the screen change, along with a distance counter that can track how many feet away the user is from another profile. This isn’t incredibly unique from how Pokémon Go works, with the one difference being that you can run into potential dating opportunities instead of Bulbasaur on a nightly walk. Grindr also gamifies characteristics of its users, much like an RPG. Not only does it ask users to input their height, weight, and ethnicity, but also asks everyone to classify themselves by “Tribe” (usually defined by physical characteristics), vaccination status, testing status, and HIV/AIDS status as well. These characteristics allow other users to search and filter for their potential partner based on any of these answers. Additionally, the “tap” system on the Grindr allows anyone to press the fire emoji if they find another user’s profile appealing, which are then compiled into a sum to be presented to a user as if to say, “Look how many people found you interesting!” whenever you log in.

Having such precise data can be fun, but it presents opportunities for unwanted surveillance on an already marginalized community. Nivedita Sriram in “Dating Data: LGBT Dating Apps, Data Privacy, and Data Security” covers when discussing trilateration and how there was a huge lack of security when it came to Grindr’s servers. Examples included a researcher being able to pinpoint where any user was down to a few feet despite the user having their location sharing on the application turned off in 2016,  a website collected all the private data from the phones of anyone with a Grindr profile in 2018 including finance information, and another researcher able to uncover the HIV data from everyone in their area and where they lived as well. It’s through this level of surveillance that this game of dating endangers all its users, especially who might not be in the most queer-friendly spaces. How much do we need to play before we’ve given too much of ourselves away, and how have the game-makers creating a space that may further perpetuate queer oppression?

I’ve loved Alice in Wonderland since I was a little kid, so the prospect of creating a playable version of it was an exciting opportunity. This was especially true because of my wonderful groupmates who made the process of collaborating on this assignment particularly fabulous! After the groups were assigned, we met and discussed the ideas, influences, and general design philosophies for our game. It became clear relatively quickly that the Cheshire Cat was the character that we gravitated towards the most, and in true Murray-kaleidoscopic-storytelling fashion, we conceived of a branching narrative where the user inhabited the Cheshire Cat as he guided Alice through her Wonderland journey.

We divided up the workload, with me focusing on coding and developing the game we would present during class. While everyone else in the group wrote the script, made the design maps, and created our assets, I set off to bring the game to life. I started by creating a directory in a remote server I already owned to host our program. Afterwards, I coded a skeleton version of the game where the user could simply read the story and go through all the text. Brandon’s game map inspired this section, as it helped shape the text reveal function on all of the pages and the image reveals of the Cheshire Cat in his multiple stages.

I then added the buttons and organized my functions to create different pages that would take the user down the different narrative branches based on how they decided to make the Cheshire Cat act. It was at this point that I went to the script that Leila and Alex had produced to learn the narrative shape of the story. Using what they wrote, I replaced my filler text with Alice in Wonderland and made the actual decisions since I had already finished building the mechanics.

With this completed, I started adding crucial design elements to adhere to our new framing device, which was a futuristic retrospective of the classic text. This included adding the title screen and having a cyberpunk aesthetic and framing each piece of text either in “the book” to signify that it was a part of the original story or a part of our diegetic framing device. Ironically enough, it was during this part of my coding process that my real-life cat, Willow, jumped on my computer while I had briefly stepped away and caused a slight delay since I had to debug all of her new additions to the project.

As I kept programming our project, there were other design ideas that I tried to implement to help create this idea of a living game rather than just the book in digital form. This included using the incredible assets that Travis made to constantly highlight, move, and adjust the images of the characters to communicate which characters are actively moving, talking, or making decisions during the game. I also found some great royalty-free music to add as a background track, along with sound effects that I plugged into the game whenever the user clicked on anything. By this point, every action had a dedicated visual or auditory response so that it was clear what could be played with. When I was done coding everything, I pushed it all online, emailed it to my group for comments, and then made some quick revisions before class!

The biggest thing that I learned throughout this experience was that the process of collaborating was play within itself. There was so much possibility and play throughout my time working with everyone, and it’s definitely something that I would have missed if we stuck to just reading about play instead. I’m wildly grateful for my teammates, and I look forward to the second half of the semester!

Two years ago, my boyfriend and I were about to embark on the six hour plane ride from Los Angeles back to New York City after an enjoyable and exhausting vacation in California. Since we had to go to LA separately due to our own personal obligations before the trip, this would be our first ever flight together as a couple. I always like to download at least five movies before going up in case I don’t like what the airplane offers, so I checked in with him with some options that I thought he would like. Josh is a huge horror movie lover, so I was pretty sure that he would go with something scary. His answer surprised me.

“Really?” I asked. “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile? The Shawn Mendes crocodile film?”

“Oh c’mon, like you aren’t also curious.”

Admittedly, I was. However, I was also worried about feeling trapped with Lyle if the movie was bad. It was then when I came up with an idea.

“Alright, so let’s play bingo boards then while we watch.”

“Bingo boards?” Josh looked at me, slightly confused. “How so?”

Since neither of us knew anything about the movie or any lore behind Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, I suggested it might be fun to make wild predictions about fun things that could happen in the movie. We’d then take those predictions, put them on bingo boards, and then see how many of them became true. Josh agreed, and we ended up having so much fun that we played the game throughout the entire plane ride. In case you were wondering, the five squares that made BINGO for this movie were “Talent Show”, “Joke About Being Eaten”, “Disproportionately Very Tragic Backstory”, “Song Sung While Doing Chores”, and (my favorite one) “Car Chase”. Josh and I still play that game for new movies to this day.

Ian Bogost’s “Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games” reminded me a lot of this game. The floor jumping game and our movie bingo are both born from creating enjoyment from limitations and rules. To quote Bogost, “To treat things with respect and intrigue, we don’t need to understand their motivations and inner lives – whatever knowing the inner life of a tangelo or a floor tile would mean. We just need to pay enough attention to discover what they do and how they work – to discover what they obviously and truly are-and then to make use of them in gratifyingly novel ways” (Bogost 9). In my above example, a lot of the fun of my bingo game with my boyfriend is due to us recognizing that a film like, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is a genre piece that we can make predictions on and be amused when we get the plot correct and delighted when we’re surprised. We noticed that obvious and decided to fortify it with rules to make play. I’ve noticed a similar pattern when DM-ing for my campaign in “Dungeons and Dragons”. Oftentimes, my group has a lot more fun when there’s a set structure that allows them to figure out how to solve problems rather than if I just nebulously set them loose on a town. Specificity, structure, and commitment to the bit are what makes our adventures fun and lifelike!