Researching the Correlation between Dungeons & Dragons and Racism

  Clements, P. J. (2015).  Roll to save vs. prejudice: Race in dungeons & dragons  (Order No. 1605773). Available from Ethnic NewsWatch; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I. (1752236031). Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/docview/1752236031?accountid=14506 Crawford, Jeremy, et al. Player's Handbook, 5th Edition. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast LLC, 2014; 2014.   Garcia , Antero “ Privilege, Power, and Dungeons & Dragons: How Systems Shape Racial and Gender Identities in Tabletop Role-Playing Games”,   Mind, Culture, and Activity , 2017,   24:3,   232-246,   DOI:  10.1080/10749039.2017.1293691   Gilsdorf, Ethan. “Why Dungeons & Dragons Is Good for You (In Real Life) | Ethan Gilsdorf | TEDxPiscataquaRiver.”  TEDx Talks , YouTube, 21 May 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=26&v=6PaHJqpQnyw .   Gygax, Gary. "Players Handbook (Advanced Dungeons & ...

Shoutout to Pivoda for making this last blog more of a thing.   Lets just map out this website really quick. Should I use the mind mup thing? Why the hell not!    D&D and Racism Mind Mup . That'll be up for like 6 months.   Really, this has been a trip, so I'm glad all of my reader could be here for this journey. Like I said, I have an idea of how to continue this blog after this project is done, but right now, I'm just finishing up this. I'm almost done...   I hope...   Adios.

  So at this point, you might be asking what D&D is. I mean, I kind of hope not, because I've been writing about it for what feels like a full semester but in actuality was only like 3 or 4 weeks and only sporadically, but if you're still asking, that's fine.   Dungeons and Dragons is a table-top role playing game (RPG) set in an imaginary world based loosely on medieval myths and legends.  The game is run by a Dungeon Master (DM) who lays out a story before their players using words, pen, and paper. The players use their imagination to see what the DM is telling them and use their own characters, written on a character sheet, to interact with the world. As players perform actions, they use polyhedral dice (read: weird shaped, see right) to act. If you want to attack, run up a wall, play a lute, seduce the guard, or any other action you can think of, these dice are how you do it.   The DM can run a story either from pre-made modules (such as the 5th edition sta...

  Contextually, this may be all over the place, but it's all about how games are biased in their own ways and how we can learn about those biases by learning the game.   "[...] understanding the foundational depictions of race, gender, and power in a nondigital gaming system highlights how cultural-historical approaches to understanding learning within systems must begin with an understanding of the implicit biases of these systems" (Garcia, para 5).   "Considering their creation by individuals, biases and inherent inequalities are both consciously and unconsciously embedded within systems" (para 11).   D&D is " a fantasy game of role playing which relies upon the imagination of participants, for it is certainly make-believe, yet it is so interesting, so challenging, so mind-unleashing that it comes near reality” (Gygax, 7).   "Regardless of which edition of the game is explored, the fundamentals of how to play D&D still revolve around the ...

  Found a phenomenal dissertation on Racism and Dungeons & Dragons. Rather, my girlfriend found it and told me about it. I think even sent me the link for it. But, I was right from my first blog, I did hear the name Roll to Save vs. Prejudice, and it was from this.   Being a dissertation, it is a phenomenally long paper. 93 pages, including a title page, acknowledgements, and a table of contents (which in itself tells you how long this paper actually is). I have not gotten through it yet, because its just about crunch time in the semester. I will get through the rest of it while working on the Website portion of my final.   "Taking on a different racial identity in the real world had never appealed to me, and I rolled my eyes at my cohorts who appropriated African American culture. It seemed idiotic and offensive to me for a bunch of white, middle-class kids to pretend to be “street” or “thug” without experiencing any of the hardships that had produced those identi...

  I've been struggling with finding out why I'm working on this. Why am I writing this? What's the point of the research blog and the associated website? I mean, really what I'm after is a passing grade, but that's just an associated end to my means. More of an after the fact if you will.   We're talking about this in class right now. Like literally as I'm typing this sentence. My professor is asking "Who are the people who should care about my argument? What difference does it make?" The problem with my brain is that at the moment I really don't know. I have thoughts that maybe nerds care, maybe people of color, shit, maybe even just regular old racist people, but do I care who cares?   I should, shouldn't I? But I'm having a hard time convincing myself that others care...   Templates are fun. These ones are ripped right out of our They Say I Say book by Graff and Birkenstein (ooo cool, I have a new source). I like this one the best...

  In a forum post on Something Awful, Steve "Malak" Sumner talks about the idea of playing an orc in D&D to be revolutionary. Until they were introduced as a playable race in 3rd edition in 2000, orcs were always just the faceless evil that you had to go kill to rescue the princess, or retrieve the loot, or just because they were a plain nuisance.   Basically they were undesirables (or in keeping with the theme of the topic, they were a stand-in for undesirable minorities).   "Unless played very carefully early Dungeons & Dragons could easily become a proxy race war, with your group filling the shoes of the noble white power crusaders seeking to extinguish any orc war bands or goblin villages they happened across. Goblins are metaphors for the Vietnamese, by the way, but that’s a different conversation for a different time. Oh, and before you say it, Drow are not black people too. I hear that all the time from people who don’t understand Drow and it bugs the cr...

  My current working thesis statement:   Racism is defined as prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior. This affects the lives of people all over the world, but players of Dungeons and Dragons may be unwittingly fighting against it.   Is your thesis statement a complete sentence?   As you can see, my thesis is multiple sentences, so yes.   Is your thesis a statement and not a question?   My thesis is very much a statement.   Is your thesis just a personal statement that isn't debateable?   Personally I think I have a bit of debateability here.   Does your thesis relate to your topic?   It is absolutely on topic.    Is your thesis statement clear and specific? Is it still broad? How could you make it narrower?   My thesis statement may still be a little broad and maybe a little wordy. I don't think I need the whole definiti...

  I found a video through the DnD subreddit while I was looking at maps and character designs. More specifically it was a TED Talk. Ethan Gilsdorf talks about life skills that you can learn from Dungeons & Dragons. It wasn't quite about racism in D&D, though it did have a section entitled Empathy and Tolerance. "You can play someone who is like yourself or you can play someone who is not like yourself. And because of the immersive narrative of the game, you and your fellow players are constantly put into situations where you're interacting with other people, and other creatures [...] and you can imagine what their predicament is, what their situation  is, what their point of view is. So this is why these fantasy role-playing games are the perfect empathy training machine for the real world" (Gilsdorf, 16:52-17:23). There was a quote that really spoke to me in this video before the section I was talking about: "Character building builds character"...

  So, before spring break, our teacher (professor? just Katherine?) told us we should think about field research. I thought about it and I think the best kind of field research (on top of my weekly games, which you could probably call observation by immersion...) would be a survey. I would hand it to friends that I game with and around hobby and game shops. It would look something like this:   Hello friend and gamer. We have a survey for you today. It is entirely anonymous, so please try to give us your most honest answers.   Do you play Dungeons & Dragons?  Yes [  ]     No [  ] If you answered No, you're already done, otherwise continue on.   What edition? __________   What is your gender?  Male [  ]    Female [  ] Other [  ]__________   What is your race?  White [  ]    Asian [  ]    African American [  ]  ...

  We can't just look at this issue from a purely Dungeons and Dragons standpoint (unfortunately) and if we were to, we'd probably come to an early conclusion of "well, it used to be kind of racist, but it doesn't really seem to be anymore", which isn't really what we're after.     So, lets talk a bit about racism.   I started looking into racism, and what causes it, and while looking through the 10,000+ articles in the Nexis database, I got really really really bored (or overwhelmed?) and decided to play with Google. Google brought me to a lovely little article entitled Tolerant Tykes: Small Children Aren't Inherently Racist, which is about a study done by Tara Mandalaywala about race in early childhood. The main goal of her study was to examine three main questions: "(a) To what extent do young children hold essentialist views of race; (b) how do these beliefs develop; and (c) what are the implications of such essentialist beliefs for the early...

The Wizard from the PHB Why Play a Human?   As explored in my previous post, through the 4th Edition of the game there were only 2 pictures of non-white adventurers in the entirety of the Dungeons and Dragons Core books. In 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons (which is the best edition, fight me) there are eight non-white humans in the entire 293 pages of the Players Handbook (PHB) alone, not to mention the six in the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) Which is an upgrade, but we'll talk about the seemingly more forward thinking writings of the 5th Edition a little later in this post.   The biggest question in 5th Edition is "why play a human?" In first and second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D from this post forward) humans don't get any bonuses to their stats, because they are the only classes that could reach level 20 in their chosen class, as well as the only race that could multi-class or take the paladin class. In 3rd Edition D&D, ...

Image from the cover of the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide,   Alright, back to blogging. I was pretty sick for the past week which is why nothing got posted and I've decided I'm making up for it this week. Woo extra blog posts!   I read an article by Chris Van Dyke entitled Race in Dungeons and Dragons  which I found while doing my initial research and seemed to really nicely delve into the topic at hand.   He starts off by associating the standard human adventurer to a run-of-the-mill white male, with quotes from the Player's Handbook (which, when paired with the Dungeon Master's Guide, makes up the D&D bible), as well as mentioning that in ALL of the first 4 editions of the game there are only 2 non-white characters denoted in the core guides. This made me want to do a bit of my own research on my edition and see if any players are non-white, but since I don't have the 5th Edition PHB or DMG in front of me, I'll update this blog post later with t...

Turns out I already did a bit of a boolean search in my last blog, and may not have gone into enough background research, but we're pushing forward. So I went to the Auraria Library website (more specifically  https://guides.auraria.edu/az.php ) and searched Dungeons and Dragons: nothing. Roleplaying games: nothing. D&D: actually got me a hit, but it was thinking I meant D&B. But then I thought about it and was pretty sure I was doing it wrong. Turns out I was getting ahead of myself and searching for my topic before the database. I'm kinda new to this. So, I jumped in the Nexis Uni database (as recommended by my teacher) and searched dungeons and dragons, and lo-and-behold, I got over 10000 hits. I'll need to narrow it down a bit obviously, but the second article is about a Dungeons and Dragons Dominatrix. That just seems like an interesting read. In order to narrow it a bit more, I added a search term: racism. Down to 323 articles, but so far we don't seem ...

So, I have this question in my brain, and its pretty easy to guess what that question is, since it is basically the title of the blog, but just in case you don't want to look at the top of the page, the Question is "How does Dungeons and Dragons Affect our Understanding of Racism?" Not a bad question if I do say so myself, but in order to begin finding an answer, we have to do some background research. First stop is the Google, at which I type in Dunge to which Google immediately responds "You're looking for Dungeons and Dragons aren't you?" Yes Google, stop knowing what I want... I opened Wikipedia, because while it isn't a good collegiate source, it is a source to find a good source. Also, we can get general information there, which is what my we are after for this blog post. Learning some stuff real quick: D&D was designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. They're two very white guys, we'll learn more about them later. T...

So I guess I'm writing now. My blog is going to be dedicated to dungeons and dragons and how it might correlate to racism. Does it affect it? I don;t know but I'm gonna try and find out. I first thought of this idea when I started playing d&D back in 2000 and,... um... like.... 15? 16 maybe? I didn't give it a lot of thought, because I had giants to kill, but it kind of dawned on me later, especially afteri had started dming that I was treating different races differently based on their diffreentness because the game said that elves thought themselves better than everyone and so did humans and dwarves thought they were better than elves and orcs were inferior to evereyone but only because they were more savage and I really kinda didnt think that was fair and oh gods this is a lot of typing but im glad most of my words are spelled correctly and I think this is going to be a fun topic because I love d&d and i love spouting off about d&d and gods I really wish I wa...