Dungeons & Dragons and the Debt Society Owes It

Everyone's heard of Dungeons & Dragons. Whether you think it's the bee's knees, a factory for making Satan worshipers, or just think it's only for the most socially inept of nerds, you've heard of it.

Well, what if I told you that much of the cultural fabric of the past thirty years owes itself to many a night huddled around tables with character sheets and dice sets and various soft drinks and snacks? What if I told you that without Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's creation, modern pop culture as we know it would not exist?

First, the obvious. All role-playing video games owe their existence to D&D. From character creation and development to quests to the monsters you fight, every RPG video game owes at least some part of itself to D&D whether they're in the vein of Skyrim, Final Fantasy, or World of Warcraft. However, that's just the obvious.

If you go to Wikipedia's page on Dungeons & Dragons in popular culture, you'll find at the bottom a list of public figures who have played or still play D&D. Not only are these people successful in many different fields, but they are also influential in said fields. George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books, not to mention the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones, have profoundly changed not only what people expect from TV shows, but from their fantasy literature (although I personally could do without all the graphic sex and violence).

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Felicia Day launched her career with a web series based on playing an MMORPG, and in doing so, made all RPGs a little more palatable to the mainstream public's taste. Two Pulitzer Prize winner's are on the list if you want more "highbrow" reading (Junot Díaz and David Lindsay-Abaire, in case you want to know). Plenty of other actors cut their creative teeth on this game, from action stars Vin Diesel and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to comedic talents Mike Myers and Patton Oswalt to the gone far to soon Robin Williams. Anderson Cooper is a 60 Minutes correspondent. Stephen Colbert now hosts The Late Show. Steven Spielberg is one of the most lauded directors in the US.

And I am thoroughly convinced that not only would we not have the "Simpsons did it!" joke (thank you, Trey Parker) if not for D&D, we wouldn't even have the Simpsons (thank you, Matt Groening), and thus other adult cartoons like Family Guy and Rick and Morty probably would have never even been given a second thought. Though I suppose we could have done without the Szechuan sauce scandal.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend watching the above TEDx talk with Ethan Gilsdorf. It is excellent in explaining how playing D&D can help you in social interactions and creative thinking. But don't just take my word for it.