Dungeons & Dragons In Popular Culture
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a fantasy role-playing game that was first published in 1974. As the popularity of the game grew throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, it became more frequently referenced in popular culture. The complement of games, films and cultural references based on D&D or D&D-like fantasies, characters, and adventures has been ubiquitous since the end of the 1970s.
D&D, and tabletop role-playing games in general, have exerted a deep and persistent impact on the development of all types of video games, from "first-person shooters to real-time strategy games and massively multiplayer online games", which in turn play a significant and ongoing role in modern popular culture. In high-tech culture, the term "dungeon" has since come to mean a virtual location where people could meet and collaborate. Hence, multi-user dungeons emerged as a social virtual reality. By creating a means for players to assemble and explore an imagined world, the D&D rules provided a transition from fantasy literary settings, such as those of author J. R. R. Tolkien, to fully virtual worlds.
Among the public figures who have played D&D are comedian Stephen Colbert, musician Moby, and actors Vin Diesel, Matthew Lillard, Mike Myers, Patton Oswalt, Wil Wheaton, and Robin Williams.
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Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, dungeons, dragons, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“In dark places and dungeons the preacher’s words might perhaps strike root and grow, but not in broad daylight in any part of the world that I know.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)