The last time DND was wildly popular was during the recession of the 1980's.
DND stands for "Dungeons and Dragons" and it is a popular role-playing game. One player is the "dungeon master" and each player assumes a different character in the game. They all roll this multi-sided dice and who gives a flying fuck anyway? It's just a stupid fantasy game that was dumb during the Reagan administration and is just as dumb today!
OK, Bob, breathe! It's all OK. Just relax!
Sorry, but I don't go for any of that "middle earth" crap, with dwarves and orcs and wizards or whatever. I never got into Tolkien - I was into Science Fiction - hard science fiction - the future, not the past. Fantasy is a different genre and it pisses me off that they lump SciFi with all this middle-earth crap in the bookstores and online.
And even middle-earth fanatics know this. A friend of mine was into the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy franchise and took me to see a couple of the movies. He admitted that the entire plot was about a plucky band of adventurers on a quest, who would meet a bad guy and then, as he put it, "Sword, sword, sword! Run, run, run!" until they met five bad guys. Then it was "Sword, sword, sword! Run, run, run!" and then they met 20 bad guys. And so on and so forth until they met like 1,000 bad guys and our plucky band of adventurers defeated them all and I forgot what the point of their quest was in the first place (just a McGuffin to drive the plot).
BORING! I mean, the one dwarf guy was cute and all, but that's it.
But like I said, it was a big deal back in the day, and parents freaked out that their kids were practicing Satanism or something and that made the tsk-tsk evening news. The game died out for a few decades - I guess no one in Hollywood thought to monetize this with a movie franchise or something. Maybe if they did, they could have usurped Star Wars, which, come to think of it, was also popular back then - and again today. We seem to be re-living the Reagan era, don't we?
So I wonder whether there are other parallels. Maybe people - young people in particular - are embracing fantasy as a way of avoiding dealing with reality. Back in the 1980s we had 10% unemployment, and 14% mortgage interest rates - and double-digit inflation to boot! Oh, right, your generation has it so much harder than anyone ever before on the planet. Yea, houses were cheaper back then - in price - but you've never made payments on a 12% mortgage have you? Life sucked back then. Today is much better, even with all our "problems" (most of which are easily solvable, but we choose not to solve them).
As we enter another recession (which like the last one, was preceded by a booming economy) maybe it is a sign of something that "kids today" are dusting off this old fantasy game and retreating from reality.
Or,maybe it is just a coincidence. Nice some folks have the hours in a day to play a game.
Good on them!
