Monday 26 September 2016

D&D in the Media Watch and the End of Social Media

D&D gets a mention in this article in The Grauniad today. "[R]ole-play titles such as Dungeons & Dragons, in which players imagine themselves as heroic warriors and wizards in imaginary, fantasy worlds..."

There is a typically Guardian spin put on what it calls "the rise and rise of tabletop gaming" - the writer attributes it at least partly to the fact that apparently board games nowadays allow everybody to be nice to each other and cooperate, rather than those horrible traumatic competitive games of yesteryear like, er, Monopoly and Cluedo. (Trigger warning for competitiveness!)

The fact that board games are sociable and allow us to re-connect with the physical world is surely more to do with it. One should never make predictions, of course, but here's one: board games and RPGs are going to grow in popularity and this is going to be correlated with larger numbers of people quitting or taking "detoxes" from social media and smartphones.

7 comments:

  1. I *knew* eurogames were godless communism!

    Well, hands off of our disreputable murder simulators, do-gooders! Go home and gentrify your fair trade latte macchiatos.

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  2. Wouldn't that be nice. Social Media and depression are soulmates. I'm an old Internet junky: Back in the days of chat, a large group of us from all over the world became addicted and the funny thing is that we all lost our jobs at about the same time. We ended up creating a private BBS and that fixed the problem.

    Was what we did social? We came to the conclusion that it wasn't. It was only social when we had real-life meet-ups, which were always outrageously expensive, but a lot more satisfying. We can edit things online, we might not mean too, but we do. We project what we want the world to see, which isn't truly us. Social media is a good way to keep in contact with people that you care about, but it shouldn't be depended upon. Even we introverts need to get out and bump into people on a regular basis, if we don't it is incredibly unhealthy. Playing D&D at a real table, with real people can be enough to cure depression associated with our tendency to isolate ourselves. People who don't physically interact with anyone go insane, that is just what happens.

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  3. Ugh, the Guardian is like a rag a boarding school for young ladies would put out.

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  4. Yeah, agreed on both counts. Also, board games have a huge replay value, perhaps even more so than RPGs. As the world economy hits another rough patch, expect that sort of value for filling leisure time to become more attractive.

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  5. Sean Robert Meaney26 September 2016 at 08:28

    Or you could up your monopoly game to effect the lives of real people thus creating that rough patch experience by the global economy.

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  6. Everything's sharply political nowadays, the Guardian just led the way. I may have to give up American Football to avoid ideological politics. Maybe board games will be better. Maybe there's no escape: you will be made to care.

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  7. There's also the fact that RPGs, unlike social media, require imagination and creativity. Could that be part of it as well - the idea of rebelling against the role of passive consumers?

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