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In 2022, The New York Times declared: “Everyone’s been playing [the fantasy tabletop role-playing game] Dungeons & Dragons without you.” How and why did D&D, where players invent courageous characters for themselves and generate stories of their adventures, become so ubiquitous—such a cultural touchstone—in 21st century America? This seminar attempts to provide answers to this question by offering a cultural history of late twentieth-century America through Dungeons and Dragons. The course will be divided into four, interrelated sections, each of which intersects with D&D’s history: (1) the first part provides theoretical tools for the remainder of the course, with readings on foundational theories of “play” and “gaming” and more recent “presence”-oriented approaches to such cultural phenomena; (2) the second section investigates the postwar rise in popularity of tabletop wargames and Baby Boomers’ post-Sixties rediscovery of myth experience; (3) the third part focuses on various medical and supernatural panics over cults during the 1970s and 1980s; (4) the fourth part turns to the relationship between Gen X, Y, and Z and the increasing “digitization” of existence from the 1990s to the 2000s. At the end of the seminar, historical reasons for the post-millennium renaissance of tabletop role-playing games will be entertained. |
