Anderkoo

Nerds of the world unite: There’s no shame in proclaiming your love
of Dungeons & Dragons in a major American newspaper. Yeah, us
Gen-X’ers may be the powerless, weenie generation stuck between booms
and doomed to political irrelevance, but we’ve got our 12-sided die and Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some
parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm
of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating
narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing
stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology
of mythical creatures. Even sports, the arch-nemesis of role-playing
games, is a splendid tale of adventure and glory. Though my friends and
I were not always athletically inclined, we found agility in the
characters we created. We fought, flew through the air, shot arrows out
of the park, and scored points by slaying the dragon and disabling the
trap.

Sure, I haven’t touched the stuff since ‘89, but I’ve met some of my best friends through D&D. And I still hold out hope that one day a computer game will be as good as the paper-and-pen experience of yore.