In Which I Thank Gelatinous Cubes, Displacer Beasts, and Blink Dogs

Since I refuse to interact with anyone under the age of twenty-five, I seldom have any idea just what’s going on beneath all the ridiculous floppy hair of today’s young’uns. Joe Abercrombie recently blogged about a conversation with a young boy in which the boy denied any and all awareness of Dungeons & Dragons. Reading that sparked this week’s Black Gate post that has me reiterating many of Abercrombie’s points, only in a slightly less amusing and far less famous way, although I come up with a few original points of my own, such as rhapsodizing about office supplies:

What other activity could get kids excited about school supplies? I went from viewing the stationary aisle at the grocery store with utter dread — for it was forever the herald of the coming school year — to acquisitive joy. Graph paper, mechanical pencils, note cards, spiral note books, drawing pads, three-ring binders with dividers — a rich array of office supplies to feed the D&D beast.

Of course, no post of mine would be complete without the realization that the world is turning into a horrible place peopled exclusively by mumbling illiterates:

But video games only satisfy part of the thrill of p-n-p play, and almost none of the creative experience of such a hobby. The way I see it is it comes down to the difference between two forms of media, the old ‘analog’ world of printed books, complete sentences, and sustained thought, and the new digital one of instant gratification, diminished attention spans, and leetspeak. In our brave new world, AD&D has been replaced with ADD.

I go on to talk about what I got out of playing D&D and reading and re-reading the books as a kid; the vocabulary, the introduction to fantasy tropes, the spur to my own creative world-building. Not to mention a love of graph paper. Basically, the whole BG post can be distilled down into one simple sentiment, expressed in the title itself: “Thank You, D&D.”