This past January marked the 40th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, a story-based tabletop game. The game’s release, which came during the nascent stages of Internet community development, captured the imagination of the first generation of computer programmers.
Throughout the next four decades, it was nearly impossible to find influential computer game designers who hadn’t come of age playing D&D. The result: The communal elements of that tabletop game has infused computer game worlds, from Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) to single-player games and eventually massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Those worlds, in turn, helped shape the ways in which people expected to interact online.
Today, the term gamification has been neutered, turned into a single descriptor for using basic game mechanics to entice (or trick) people into collaborating. Lost is the idea that gamification once included ideas of shared experiences, role-playing, and problem solving. The work of Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of gamers was the first major work to unpack just how computer role-playing game developers were creating virtual sandboxes that did more than simply move people through a maze.
This paper examines the community elements of Dungeons & Dragons, explores how those elements permeated through computer games, and explains how those communal elements have impacted social interactions beyond the computer game communities, from message boards to Facebook.
About the presenterBrad King
A Ball State professor since 2009, King earned his Masters in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. After graduating, he worked for Wired magazine, Wired.com, and MIT’s Technology Review as a reporter, editor, and senior producer. He’s written one book — Dungeons and Dreamers: A story of how computer games became a global culture — and he’s working on a second — So Far Appalachia: An American Mythology.
His research interests focus on long-form storytelling, digital publishing, and using technologies to expand the ways we reach audiences. As part of that work, he’s an editor and advisory board member with Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press, a small publishing house that uses emerging technologies to experiment with new models for distribution and funding. He’s also on the advisory board for the Indiana Writers Center, where he teaches courses on digital publishing and works with elementary and secondary school boys who struggle with reading.
Along with his teaching and research, he’s been an advisory board member for more than a decade with South by Southwest Interactive, one of the largest and longest running creative technology conferences in the world. For the past 6 years he’s been the finals emcee and a judge for its Accelerator program, in which startups from around the world pitch their companies to venture capitalists, early adopters, and entrepreneurs. Finalists have gone on to receive more than $600 million in funding.