I suspect that many of my readers — like me — "wasted" their teenage years playing Dungeons and Dragons. But it turns out that it wasn’t a waste. The D&Ders of the late 1970s and 1980s now are driving much of mainstream culture. In the Boston Globe, Peter Berbegal has written an op-ed about this. A sample:
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.
