Background Research

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.
  • There are currently 6 editions of the game, D&D Original, Advanced D&D, D&D 3rd Edition, D&D 3.5, D&D 4th Edition, and D&D 5th edition
    • The community does not like 4th edition. According to the older, long-time players, it goes 3, 3.5, 5
On the Wikipedia we have a good contents page but the one I'm interested in most is going to be 2.5 Controversy and notoriety, which itself has a tab to a different page entitled Dungeons and Dragons controversies.
And might I just say, holy shit, the amount of controversy surrounding this game is kind of staggering. If I need to change up my thesis, it's definitely going to be in this wheelhouse. However I'm not seeing anything about racism, so we're going to change up our search.
A Google search of "dungeons and dragons +racism" brings up more results.
  1. Dungeons and Dragons is way more racist than you realize: a blog post from Mark T. Hrisho
  2. D&D as a racist tract: on "Raph Koster's Website," looks like another blog
    1. Links to an essay, which I googled and found yet another blog but it has SOURCES
      1. This essay does link back to the previous essay?
We're just getting started on the research process. This should be fun though

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