Like a lot of people my age, I was a nerdy teenager who played Dungeons & Dragons. I’m sure it did things like stunt my athletic skills and keep me away from meeting girls. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem to matter that much. So it’s a little sad to see the inventor of the game, Gary Gygax, died today.
I think I’m a lawyer today in part because I was a D&D geek when I was a kid. The basic skills involved in the game are a comprehensive understanding and manipulation of a fairly dense and very complex set of rules, and the ability to use oral communication to convey and understand information about the world in which the game is set. You’ve got to get inside other people’s heads to play the game right; and if you’re going to be the leader of the game (the rather suggestively-named “Dungeon Master”) you’ve got to acquire the ability to communicate the probably very complex ideas in your head to the players efficiently and effectively. These are skills that I use in court all the time. As a young man looking around for career options, I recognized that these were skills that I possessed and had developed by playing D&D, and that they were skills that the legal profession demanded.
I also forged some friendships playing D&D which endure to this day, although I suspect that I would have forged such friendships with other activities, as well. Having this as a common activity, however, ensured that my friends and I placed at least some value on mental achievement and the periodic exercise of the imagination, which I find to be continual sources of great pleasure and enrichment in life even though we’re no longer throwing around twenty-sided dice. Sure, we were all a bunch of dorks. But teenagers are going to be dorks one way or the other. We’ve all pretty much made good despite having been dorky teenagers, just like the dorky teenagers before us and after us did (or are doing).
