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 dungeons, dragons, popular and/or culture:
“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)
“Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.”
—Henry David David (1817–1862)