How Dungeons & Dragons Helps Build Empathy
How Dungeons & Dragons Helps Build Empathy
How Dungeons & Dragons Helps Build Empathy
By Marcus du Sautoy
November 20, 2023
Summary
Perhaps board games and role-playing games like D&D tap into the very human need to sit around a campfire and tell stories to each other.
Although the idea of collaborative board games wouldn't formally appear on the scene until the early twenty-first century, Dungeons & Dragons exhibited a shift in mentality.
Later collaborative games like Pandemic have clear goals, and you either win as a group or the game beats you.
The game of Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D as it's fondly known, became a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, but as computer games became ever more sophisticated, the power of code to navigate your way through the multiple choices involved in exploring a fantasy world took over from the need for a human to do all the work of preparing the world in advance.
With people exploring different gender identities, the possibility of playing a different gender in the environment of a game has the potential to be super liberating.
Amazing how a game can provide a common space for such diverse individuals to interact.
Ultimately perhaps board games and role-playing games like D&D tap into the very human need to sit around a campfire and tell stories to each other.
Reference
du Sautoy, M. (2023, November 20). How Dungeons & Dragons Helps Build Empathy. Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/how-dungeons-dragons-helps-build-empathy/