(The image is from Culver 2020) The game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), with a Dungeons Masters who create and guide players through worlds filled with monsters, treasure and intrigue, and with dice rolls deciding key outcomes. At its core, D&D is about collaborative storytelling with friends.
Book: King, Brad & John Borland (2014). Dungeons & Dreamers: A Story of How Computer Games Created a Global Community. ETC Press. 2nd ed. (March 15, 2014).
To the generations that have grown up associating games with screens, keyboards, and multi-buttoned controllers, the book Dungeons & Dreamers: A Story of How Computer Games Created a Global Community is a great book to help them understand how Dungeons & Dragons started as a tabletop game with the pencil, graph paper, twenty-sided dice and developed into a computer game with digital swords and magic spells, chain guns and rocket launchers, clans and guilds, etc. and later MUD (multi-user Dungeons) networked game through the efforts of a series of game players, designers and game developers, and how it made its contribution to create one of the world’s largest entertainment industries and some of the most vibrant global communities in the new digital environment.
Brad King and John Borland, the two authors of the book, have interviewed more than a hundred people, including designers and players, game-business and technology-company executives, and cultural commentators, etc. Among them, the most representative people are Gygax and Arneson (who started D&D from tabletop game), Richard Garriott (the one who changed this tabletop game to a computer game), John Carmack (id Software’s co-founder, and, in many ways, a foil to Garriott in the game-design world). The two authors were excited to write it into a story that illuminated the complexities and importance of the industry’s burgeoning virtual worlds, from a social rather than a business or technological perspective.
However, after the first edition published in 2003 (Dungeon & Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic), this second edition, originally planned to publish in 2007 was delayed for various reasons. From 2002 until this 2014 edition was published, many changes happened to some major players, including Gygax’s and Arneson’s death in 2008 and 2009 respectively.
I. Authors
Brad King earned his master’s from the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2000, and then worked for Wired and Wired.com. In 2004, he was the producer and senior editor for the MIT Technology Review Web operation. He’s been an advisory board member for South by Southwest Interactive for more than a decade. King is currently an assistant professor of journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where he’s also the director of the university’s Digital Media minor.
John Borland has been writing about technology and its effects on popular culture, politics, and communication since the mid-1990s. A graduate of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, he worked for CMP’s TechWeb and then CNET News for nearly a decade.
II. About the book:
The book starts with the tabletop games Dungeons & Dragons created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, from which the game pioneers such as Richard Garriott, John Carmack and John Romero got so much inspiration for their future programming and business on RPGs and MUDs.
The first four chapters (Part I) focus mainly on the individuals the authors choose to symbolize early gamers: Richard Garriott, and his Ultima series. Part II has a chapter on John Carmack and John Romero of Doom & Quake, another on the communities the games created and the rise of the gamer; and a return to Garriott with a focus on Ultima Online.
Part III Connecting Communities looks at online gaming in general with the booming of online network services. From the beginning when D&D as tabletop game, to D&D computer games, and later Doom and Quake as well as Ultima Online, there is one thing in common, that is, the players are always gathered together to play games, either in someone’s living room, garage, or hundreds of people showing up at the motels, thousands of people carrying their computer or laptops into the convention center. When MUD and online network services developed, numerous communities and networks are developing both inside the game and around its margins.
And Part IV is about the dark side of games, and there’s a chapter on game violence in the wake of Columbine. When people, especially parents, began to blame video and computer games for violence in society, and assume gaming made players in isolation, game industry was strongly impacted. However, the research by people such as Henry Jenkins and David Walsh provide rational representation for both sides.
The final part explains how games are no longer in game maker’s control once they are published. Game makers never have control over what the gamers would do or where the next game would head to. The player’s unpredictable behaviors with modding or shooter-style multiplayer games might bring any unexpected outcomes. Especially with massively multiplayer online (MMO) game era falling into place, the game creator’s traditional role as a god figure who determined the course of the story and the history of a world would diminish and in some cases vanish altogether. This part also introduces other forms of online gaming, including Everquest and the Sims, and ends the book with a prediction that the next big game will turn gaming mainstream, right before Second Life and World of Warcraft were released.
The book is not only about history of gaming by exploring the interplay of creative genius, technology, and business in the creation of D&D as Role-playing Game, its transition to the digital world, and its evolution into virtual gaming communities, but also a social commentary by delving into the social dynamics of role-playing, leadership, and community-building. It is written in a relaxed narrative style that makes it a page-turner. Although the intended audience is those experienced with computer gaming, the book, written in a relaxed narrative style, is also a page-turner for any outsiders like myself.
III. My comments on the book
1. Dungeons & Dragons: the source for the inspiration of the following computer games and online games
Before the multibillion computer game industry, Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974 captured the attention of a small but influential group of players.
It’s almost impossible to overstate D&D’s role in the rise of computer gaming. Looking back to almost any game developer who worked between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, we can easily find a vein of role-playing experience. Richard Garriott’s landmark Ultima series was originally based directly on his high-school D&D games.
With the subsequent emergence of the personal computer, a generation of geeky storytellers who also gravitated to the computer networks arose and translated communal D&D playing experiences into the virtual world of computer games.
The book has emphasized the features of D&D as both role-playing games and storytelling games. Role-play games need all players’ imagination to fill into the storytelling. “D&D is also a great creative outlet, allowing us to craft our own fictional characters, worlds and adventures,” as mentioned by Nathan Stewart, vice president of the D&D Franchise. The same imagination and creativity took the game players and designers onto the path of the game industry. The developers of computer games, mentioned in this book, all started their game design for fun, and then they overcame all kinds of difficulty to finish their designs. It is only later when they were considering gaming as their career did they start to work toward developing it as business, either selling their game design to bigger company and being hired by it, or finding more friends or partners or business owners who appreciated their games and then either sell the game design to their companies or start their own company together with them.
This is shown in the book title Dungeons and Dreamers. Dungeons are their RPGs and they are the dreamers who use their unusual or abnormal imagination to play/design games and create communities in both virtual world and real life.
2. Social community in person and online
Gygax and his Lake Geneva circle of tabletop gamers knew well that people are searching for a place that feels like home surrounded by others who understand them. “Games tend to answer a lot of deep instinctive things,” Gygax said. “Maybe it’s men’s male aggressiveness that makes them want to play games. There’s a competitive aggressiveness to games, even Monopoly. You’re there to win.” But whoever was playing, D&D created the kind of communities sustained by simple physical presence.
One of the readers of this book described how he was surprised by his recent experiences when he witnessed a game night at a bookstore, where table after table with maps spread out, and players had only notebooks and tokens in hand. The scene was filled with teenagers and young adults, male and female in almost equal proportion who were laughing, talking, sharing, and occasionally commiserating in a party atmosphere. The absence of modern technology and the level of social engagement, as he said, were a phenomenon which has been ignored in the recent 40 years.
According to this book, the spread of D&D and D&D-like games onto computers and computer networks changed the boundaries of the paper game by opening up geographic borders and linking people from around the world in ways barely imaginable before.
All the D&D gamers, designers, and developers interviewed in this book eventually became connected as game players, business partners, or co-designers, though this community is created without their intentional creation. Today’s massive global community of players, through games, have forged very real friendships and built thriving lives in virtual worlds.
It is mentioned in Culver (2020), when D&D released its fifth edition, its strategy was to “reinvigorate the tabletop game”. Especially in 2018 and 2019, in an age where screen time is synonymous with free time, tabletop gaming surrounded by friends is making a comeback. Humans are social creatures, Stewart said. D&D just provides an excuse to come together – like a poker game or a movie night, only with dice and maybe a few kobolds (Culver 2020).
3. Game ethics become the ethics of social communities created through games
When reading the detailed narrative about Richard Garriotte, which is also what I like most, what impressed me most is when Richard’s intentional design to introduce game ethics into his game Ultima. Most games allowed their protagonists to act with little fear of consequence. The most evil characters in the games usually wanted nothing more than old-fashioned world domination, while players came into the world, killed virtually everything they saw, stole money from anyone or anything that had it, and walked off with smiles on their faces.
Richard thought, “the hero of an adventure should be held to higher standards.” With Ultima IV, he decided to introduce a system of ethics into his game world, making people think about the consequences of their actions. He decided the game would incorporate eight tests of virtue, focusing on honesty, compassion, values, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality, and humility. Players whose Avatar failed the moral tests would find themselves unable to complete the game as effectively as those who had acted to uphold the land’s system of virtues. He wanted his games to reflect the spirit of a community, but also wanted every individual to consider his or her place within that environment.
The dark sides of gaming, such as violence, sex or pornography, ignorance or violation of virtues, confused standards of rightness, have been people’s major concern or hesitation about playing games. By incorporating social ethics into games, games can be the promoter of social ethics instead of violator. It will bring more positive influence in players’ real life. However, the authors did mention toward the end how games could be out of the designers’ control once they were in gamers’ hand.
IV. Conclusion:
Though I was born in the 70s and grew up almost together with the development of gaming from tabletop games, to computer games until the online games, I have more personal experience with traditional games, board games paper games, tabletop games, outdoor games, but little in my life has been crossed with computer games. This book is a historical overview of gaming fandom and the growth of developers, designers, gamers and entrepreneurship in over 40-year game industry. It becomes an eye-opening guide to take me into the history/biography of gaming. That’s also the reason I would recommend this book to the outsiders or newcomers of D&D because I realize D&D combines the features as tabletop game and computer game in its collaborative role-play and storytelling format, and as a result, playing this game would help create the global community.
References:
1. Culver, J (2020) “Dungeons & Dragons had fallen on ‘troubled times.’ The role-playing game’s fifth edition changed everything”. USA Today.
2. Dungeons and Dragons In The ESL classroom (http://www.indiethoughts.com/dungeons-and-dragons-esl-tefl/)
3. How to Tell a Great Dungeons & Dragons Story (https://youtu.be/RRVTgKU91kU)
4. How to play D&D with kids (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1WWgYGU43o)
5. Tabletop RPGs, PC games & More (http://WASD20.net)
Design Just For You 