Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions
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 megaphone.fm/adchoices