Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2018

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life are suspended and new laws come into play. No game illustrates this better than Gary Gygax's tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, Phil and JF use D&D as the focus of a conversation about the weird interdependence of reality and fantasy. Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons) WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE Official homepage of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game Critical Role web series Another RPG podcast JF failed to mention: The HowWeRoll Podcast Demetrious Johnson’s Twitch site Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (documentary) Chessboxing! Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America Peter Fischli, The Way Things Go Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom Lawrence Schick, ed., Deities & Demigods: Cyclopedia of Gods and Heroes from Myth and Legend Article on Mazes and Monsters, a movie that came out of the D&D moral panic of the 1980s Phil Ford, “Xenorationality” Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element of Culture John Sinclair, [Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with the MC5 and the White Panther Party](https://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Army-Revolution-White-Panther/dp/1934170003) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:21.8	For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Weird Studies.F. is a big D&D nerd, and I'm saying that in the nicest possible way.
0:55.4	He's been playing for decades, and by his own account, many of the events that stand out most
1:00.4	vividly in his memory, events that have even shaped his life, happened while he was on D&D campaigns.
1:08.7	Most weeks, for several hours, J.F. and his friends sit around a table and agree to
1:14.5	inhabit an elective consensus reality that they co-author.
1:19.6	Now, maybe that sounds like fun to you, or maybe it doesn't, but at the end of the day,
1:24.9	it's just a game, right?
1:27.0	As you'll hear in the conversation that follows, there is no just about it.
1:32.6	Games share a porous boundary with the everyday world.
1:36.1	Things imagined in games can shamble into the daylight.
1:39.9	Maybe not quite as they do in the Netflix series Stranger Things,
1:44.1	but things can happen,
1:45.6	whose consequences spill outside the charmed circle of play, or, contrary, real life can get into
1:52.9	the game. Play a game long enough, and at a certain point it's not even a game anymore.
1:58.7	Say you're a claims adjuster who does Sailor Moon
2:01.3	cosplay at fan conventions. Being Sailor Moon is your game. But if you never take your
2:07.2	costume off, then who are you? Which is the costume, the claims adjuster, or Sailor Moon?
2:14.5	Which is real and which is the game. We hope you enjoy our conversation. Just keeps going a little too long.
2:43.2	So.
2:43.8	I feel like I could do that, actually.
	...

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