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Why Is ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ So Misunderstood?
At 50, the game is more popular than ever, but its core appeal is still a great secret.
In the summer of 1979, the New York Times reported that a 16-year-old student at Michigan State University named James Dallas Egbert III had gone missing while playing a “bizarre intellectual game.” In his dorm room, campus police had discovered a suicide note as well as a corkboard covered in thumbtacks that seemed to map out the school’s underground steam tunnels. “The mind would cease from excitement and turn now to a cooler region, where the dawn breaks grey and sober.” Yet the flame of immersive fiction, as the scholar Gerald Nachtwey writes, would burn brightly all through the 19th century — from the exotic imaginary landscapes of Romantic poetry to the gripping entertainments of the adventure novel. “They were my friends & my intimate acquaintances & I could with little labor describe to you the faces, the voices, the actions, of those who people my thoughts by day & not seldom stole strangely into my dreams by night.” I do not mean D&D always inspires some sort of pathological relationship, as imagined by its early critics, though I often do find myself fiddling like Frodo with the magic world in my pocket.
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