Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Others Play At Dice: Friendship And Dungeons And Dragons, Jeffery Nicholas

Jeffery Nicholas

D&D garners exemplify Aristotle's claim that "no one would want to live without friends" (1155a5). The popular view is that a gamer is a loner or maybe even a loser, someone without friends, who maybe spends his time in a room alone or, if he has managed to find other losers like himself, in his mom's basement until he's 40, unemployed, and still a virgin. Movies like Saving Silverman or Shaun o f the Dead play with this stereotype, some- times reinforcing it and at other times resisting it. Yet garners in fact value friendship highly. One might even see …