Over the past two decades, people increased their time online, spending twice as much time as before, with a full 24 hours out of every week spent in front of a screen. Competitive video game playing, now known as esports, has even become a billion-dollar industry.
However, one decidedly low-tech relic of the past is making a comeback. On its 45th birthday, Dungeons & Dragons may be middle-aged, but it’s somehow more culturally ubiquitous than ever.
The fantasy-themed role-playing tabletop game requires repeated hourslong sessions for weeks on end to complete an adventure. It doesn’t seem like an obvious fit for a world dominated by virtual connections and a collective obsession with Instagramability. But somehow, the shameless dorkiness of D&D has found a widespread audience both among Gen Xers reviving the game and millennials embracing its emphasis on person-to-person connections, storytelling, and strategic lessons.
The game’s recent visibility is in no small part due to the internet popularizing the game through streaming on Twitch and rendering its guidebook easier to navigate. But D&D’s surge isn’t just in its online viewership and universality. Wizards of the Coast, the D&D publisher that was acquired by Hasbro 20 years ago, reported four consecutive years of at least 30% annual growth of the game’s sales as of last year, leading to record sales of the game.
Many months back, I recall being surprised when Robby Soave, an associate editor at Reason, told me he ran not one but two different D&D groups.
“I think of D&D as collaborative storytelling,” he reflected. “As the dungeon master, you have an idea for where the story is going, but your players might have different ideas: like immediately murdering the shopkeeper you just introduced. Some players want to fight every monster they encounter, others eschew violence at all costs. Still others want to know what the monsters’ civilization is like and whether it has heard about capitalism yet.”
Streaming is also part of this low-tech renaissance. The Adventure Zone, a podcast featuring three brothers and their father playing D&D, is the 28th most downloaded comedy podcast on iTunes.
Automation may be the future of the workplace, but people still crave regular person-to-person connection. It’s easy to delete an app. But bail on a weekly session in real life? It’s a lot harder to forget your friends.
