 Well, hi, I'm Jonathan Zetrin. I'm so pleased to be here with Ethan Gilzdorf To talk about Dungeons and Dragons life and the law Just so everybody knows we are being webcast live to an indeterminate number of people maybe it's determined but secret but a number of people there's food in the back so if you're not on the webcast you should help yourself to some snacks and Anything you say can and will be preserved forever and indexed and referenced back to you. So Geek pride be ready to own the fact that you have come to this event So so pleased to have you here, Ethan and Before you started on a little bit of an opener Just tell us a little bit about how you came to write fantasy freaks and gaming geeks an epic quest for reality among role-players online gamers and other dwellers of imaginary realms Well, thank you Jonathan. Thank you all for being here. Thanks to the center. Thanks to Harvard Thanks to the PowerPoint. Should I start today click Dan's gonna work on making it So your computer doesn't think that you are idle if you should not be near it for even five seconds. Yes Well, you're sort of telegraphing It just shows you that geekiness in one area does not translate to geekiness in other areas ma'am turn on your radio Yeah There did something happen did I get louder? Do I sound more authoritative? So thank you again now we're officially Michael do that again. Thanks again Jonathan Thank you to the Berkman Center and to Harvard for inviting me here We had a wonderful adventure on our way over here from your office which included going through the secret tunnels Yeah, I thought we had to take the tunnels to I don't know if I'm allowed to say that But it turns out there are secret tunnels beneath the law school here And they look exactly like the corridors of my high school In Durham, New Hampshire, it's a bit weird And that actually is a good excuse me good starting point for the story about my book fantasy freaks and gaming geeks So I'm a journalist a memoirist a recovering poet and other other hats I've worn but you laps into pentameter will exactly you'll understand exactly some kind of heroic couple it's about my 17th level paladin or something So the the origin of of my book fantasy freaks and gaming geeks really comes from that time actually of high school when I was a young geekling or a geek in training and Played a ton of Dungeons and Dragons In the 70s and how did you get introduced to it by the way? Did you see an ad in the back of a magazine? Was there an older brother character? It was sort of like an older brother It turned out to be a neighbor. This is one of these classic stories I think for those people in the audience who played D&D or who played D&D We should just ask actually we should do that. Yeah our former D&D ears What's that? Just just former let's start with the just just form we're gonna out the formers and them For the record Bruce Schneier is already working out the Venn diagram of these questions, so how many people are former D&D ears Yeah, how many people are current D&D ears? Wow alright a number how many people are just D&D curious Okay, that's let the record show it's about a third a third of that's pretty good. That's pretty good That's a nice. That's a nice spread. I don't know if you had this neighbor had this neighbor So the classic story for many of us is that somebody taught us how to play You know if you did play the game or or or Remember the origin story for your gaming experience It's really hard to walk into the hobby shop and pick up the book and just start reading it and playing it I know lots of friends who bought the books and never played but they loved just reading the books You know, but they just didn't have any to play with or they couldn't figure out how it really happened It's kind of one of these games that you play by doing so long story short a friend of a Neighbor in my in my neighborhood my small little town in in rural New Hampshire about an hour and change north If you're just, you know moved into the neighborhood out of nowhere It was like one of these magical moments new kid in the on the block has a different experience comes from a different part of the World and he says if you ever played this so far, this is the plot of the Stephen King book needful things. Yeah, exactly Okay, it gets better And and he said have you ever played this game Dungeons and Dragons before and of course I hadn't never heard of it at that point this was 1979 so I was 12 or just about to turn 12. It was the summer of 1979 and We literally just entered into this, you know classic, you know Teacher-student relationship and he and you brought the rest of your friends along or it started out with a very small core group This is I was in eighth grade or just about to enter eighth grade two or three kids in the neighborhood played And then that next year was the was the high school year and we joined up with other other kids We found each other somehow through the before the internet This is again, but those of you out there who don't understand what life might have been like before the internet That you know you it was by chance encounters that you would meet fellow gamers It was a little harder to chance encounters at the hobby store. Exactly, right chance encounters Just in the neighborhood you roll on your you're wandering geek chart And if a geek happens to wander by in gym class, then you give him the or her in my case him The the signal and then and then maybe maybe you talk about something later So we we found a few other people in the little town that I grew up in which was adjacent to a university town Which helped this is in Durham, New Hampshire, which is where the University of New Hampshire is and it really started from there And I got completely completely sucked into playing this game and were your folks cool with it or yeah They were fine with it. I think that it beat the alternative which was math yeah, exactly math or you know in those days probably beer or something and And it kept me sort of you know under watchful eyes and we literally had a regular gaming group a gaming Night every Friday from about eighth grade till senior year in high school I played with these guys 5 p.m. To 11 p.m. And my parents knew where I was and other parents knew where their kids were and was all very cool So we weren't driving around you know getting into trouble and they they thought it was cool They thought it was they didn't really understand it of course parents never really did they would you know I would play the game and coma at night and and someone would say so who won You know who won the game of D's and does or whatever they just had no conception So for me it was it was a really important game for my for me in my development And I was quite shy and introverted kid at the time and I didn't have a whole lot of social skills I'm still working on that as well as a 47 year old, but The the that was kind of like the gateway for me into a whole world of of this kind of stuff And of course it companies Tolkien and companies other kinds of fantasy and science fiction And then largely I gave it up. I really kind of went away to put away childish thing put away childish things phase which happened a discovering girls having a girlfriend senior in high school and going off to a certain alternative liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts and Deciding that I didn't want they're about seven exactly right where I didn't want to be you know for whatever reasons wrongly I think now retrospectively I attached the negative Conventions to that time of my life, and I really wanted to be a new guy I wanted to you know be this sort of cooler guy wanted to be a filmmaker magic the gathering exactly right totally left that behind and And and and I really had completely left it behind for many years and then long story short Around the time I turned 40. I discovered Lord of the Rings Rediscovered it through the movies and then I found it We'll see a couple slides here of some of my stuff that I had literally forgotten about some of my old dungeons and dragons paraphernalia So show us which sat in the box So we'll take I guess a short little tour here. This is a Quote actually that that you found that maybe you can introduce Those that are really curious With having remembered it nearly verbatim So that's a little way in so what is D&D for those you don't know I think most you do know what it is But I'll just say before I sort of go into the historical part just to remind everyone that this is the 40th anniversary of the game It's an important year for the hobby It's an important year for I think a lot of people who are around my age who are in their 40s and now we're thinking back About what were our formative experiences? It was really the first commercially available. It was the first commercially available role-playing game Of course kids have been playing cops and robbers and you know princess and prince and cowboys and Indians and other non-pc Role-playing type games, but never with a rule set never with a strict kind of game rule set and so The key being here are this this innovation of that you play the game with some dice and some apps But largely it's happening here in your minds in the creative collective You know the imaginations of those people seated around the table and that you really do play it face-to-face Or in the case of young adolescent boys, you're not really making eye contact with each other But you're sort of making eye contact with them and there's a referee called the dungeon master who who is sort of the arbiter the rural rule setter the world builder and We might talk a little bit later, but one game to it can I mean typically You would you would play with the same dungeon master and the same group of players for more than one night And we would play games what we would call campaigns if you're not familiar with the lingo Which is the other big innovation of the game is it's not like risk or monopoly where you play three or four hours in the case of Risk seven eight hours twenty five hours, whatever it took you to finally, you know make your last stand in Australia or whatever That that you know The game did have an ongoing story and that it didn't have to end You know at 11 o'clock when your curfew hit you could you could park the story a neutral and come back to it a Week later and that was the kind of the real appeal for for for me I and in between the game There was all kinds of things I could do in my mind and I could draw maps and I could continue to Sort of inhabit this world that I'd created and sometimes and I was the dungeon master That was what was so much fun for me was was was in was creating those those worlds and imagining that in other cases I enjoyed being the player And of course, it's this elaborate What I what I think now in retrospect really important formative experience for me in terms of teaching me about about creativity and storytelling And when when we talk about D&D in this presentation, I think what I mean to say is just all role-playing games It's just easier to say D&D D&D the one is the one that I got hooked on but for those of you That's avoiding a denominational war exactly right. Yeah, and you know, there's all kinds of rule arguments and sort of you know Skirmishes amongst different factions who prefer different versions of D&D and then there's a whole other battle to be fought about is D&D, you know been surpassed by other role-playing games And then it's really genre agnostic at this point you can play a role-playing game and choose your milieu You know the Wild West James Bond steampunk, you know It would be interesting if there were a Google translate kind of thing so that people could play the same campaign But each act would be translated to their milieu. That's a good. That's a cool idea. I like that It's called Gerps Gerps there you go Once again, Bruce Nyer knows Gerps and so this is the this is the Some of the ephemera from my world when I was I don't have a photo in the presentation But the Kickstarter for this book this this book fantasy freaks in gaming geeks was this sort of Er moment of being around 40 and going to my parents basement, of course Where else does one make these sort of journeys to and discovering that there was this box in my parents basement that I had Not seen in many years and it actually completely forgotten that it had existed and it was this big Coleman Camping cooler, which I had stored some stuff I've moved around a lot in our 20 in my 20s and 30s as many of us do and forgot about some stuff and things disappeared And I open up this box and lo and behold in the box was a series of stuff that I had not seen since around 1984 Which is the year I graduated from high school back in the dark days of the Reagan administration And so this was the basic set that we first played with this is the Dungeon Masters guide that I played with back in the day and That's a certain Surley teenager circa 19 approximately 1982 1983 we're not exactly sure And to give you a little bit of a taste of kind of what that world was like for me We're gonna try to play this movie. I might need to actually get up and hit it or maybe you can This is a before you had played maybe Jonathan just a brief I mentioned before I was I was also a budding filmmaker I'd wanted to be the next Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, so I went off to this was about to go off under this College experience was gonna be a filmmaker, but I had had the super eight camera all through middle school and high school And I was making animated movies and Goofy home movies and literally had forgotten I'd made this movie in about three years ago some couple years after my book came out In some ways, I'd wish I'd discovered this before my book came out But I found this again in another box of stuff that I'd forgotten about and this is a document from that era So you can hit play Jonathan if you would please We'll see what happens and this is a this is a an actual Session of D&D from the 1980s from 1981 Shot very poorly by yours truly it's verite. It's exactly. Yeah all in camera editing there's no, you know, this is before I move you obviously just kind of wing this and It's quite blurry and it's not in a great not in great shape but I found this thing and projected it on the wall and It did not have sound the sound you would hear is just basically the projector going It goes with it, but the the Area there's me in the middle. There it is. There's the sound and these are some of the guys Little stop motion fun here And as you can see this is just this is just us hanging out it was somebody's birthday It might have been my birthday. So there's birthday cake that makes a Appearance here, but we're just sitting around the table and we've got our dice in front of us There's me rolling some dice and there's Eric in the background slugging some Mountain Dew or Joel Cole or something It looked like Bill was smoking there something I think he was just holding a dice up to his mouth Anyways, it's a short clip But in my own way, I was trying to capture that world that you know, I spent so much time immersing myself in and As I mentioned it was a kind of time It was a real time that I think we've in some ways lost in it There were no Interruptions, you know, there was a phone but the phone was an analog phone that had a cord and was attached to the wall and Someone might call or an older sister might wander in their room and all the boys would Look over for a second and then go back to the game. That was pretty much all it was in terms of interruptions and And and this wasn't really a franchise or something to buy or any kind of I don't know Movie sequel to sort of, you know experience on on on On the internet or something it was it was a very it was a very sort of DIY kind of experience and for me I found it to be incredibly Impactful and of course at the time I didn't really understand how much it had changed me and how much how important it was to my development It's only in retrospect as an older guy looking back that I see some of this stuff This is my group today Wbur did a story about my gaming group last week a reporter came to my living room and this is what we This is what we're doing and interestingly enough, although he's not pictured in this photo my The guy who taught me how to play D&D is now my brother-in-law His name is JP and he now lives in Boston. So he's the same age as I so here it is 30 Can't do the math whatever it is 32 years later And we're playing D&D again So that part of it hasn't changed for us anyway Do the natures of your disputes around the table change? Well, one of the things rising from the game that they don't I mean, I think what that what I what I think for me anyway what I find In ways better. It's a better experience for me in some ways. It's less immersive. I it's a little hard for me to get back into that complete Sort of suspension of disbelief moment that you have think is easier as a teenager But what I love about playing now is that there's not all this sort of bullshit You know young adolescent boy power struggle stuff going on We really just wanted to tell a good story and have a good time So that if you know what all how the game is played the dungeon master is quite a power and Can set the tone for the game and we'll talk about this some more later about sort of is the DM a kind of Real stickler for rules or rules lawyer or like I'm gonna just only do what's what's what's Yeah, abide by the rules are in the book or are they going to yeah, is he going to kind of You know cut some corners and make it so that the game is fun Yeah, and I feel like what we're doing now in this in this situation. We're really just I feel like we're all Telling a story together. We're writing a novel together and in fact not unsurprisingly a lot of us are writers So it was a perfect training ground for us as writers Maybe I should yeah, sure go to the next one. This is another photo that was dug up Yeah, I dug this out of my archives here. That was my Dungeons and Dragons which one is Jonathan. I Do that immediately and what's cool about as you'll see here This is the dungeon master's guide. It's a little blurry for you guys But and I was able to identify the module that the gentleman in the back is holding up Which is a off-the-rack dungeon that you can buy is called white plume Mountain S2 If you guys know the terminology, but I was like wait a minute. That's so cool So this is for real. This is you can't you can't really fake this in Photoshop Well, you probably could but I I trust that it's genuine. No those were good times Yes, what about for you? What was your experience like at this time and how will do you in this photo? Well? I'm probably 12. Yep Yeah, I'm probably 12 and I found that there was certainly a varying degree of commitment To the campaign to the yeah, yeah, and so you'd have some kids with attention spans that were on the low side. Yeah, and so Trying I think to Titrate out the game in a way that satisfied them and at the same time satisfied the sticklers for Procedure people were getting different things out of the game Yeah, yeah, and trying to satisfy all of that Maybe is a meta rule a meta job of the dungeon master not just to run the game But to determine the nature of the game. Yeah, but at sometimes it might not be reconcilable Yeah, this is obviously a moment. We're not actually playing the game. We appear to just and there's a million of you That's a that's just a just a crowd control level. It's it's amazing that you would able to sit down and there's like nine of you We're ten of you yeah, yeah exactly Well, I think that that points to a really interesting divide in the game, which is this feel free to move to the next slide. Yeah, oh, sorry Okay, maybe the next slide is blank the the sort of dichotomy or divide in the game between those like me who are mostly interested in the I Can never remember it's right brain or left brain, but the sort of creative sort of more ephemeral kind of Storytelling sides of it versus the others is it left brain or right brain a camera with the other brain to people who are more Interested in the in the the rules and the numbers and the statistics and the logic side and for me I was I was never as much of a stickler for you know Let's look at this chart and let's make sure that absolutely the role was made and let's spend 20 minutes arguing over this rule What page in the dungeon master's guide was it? Oh, it's it's on page 79 and no no no It's this contrary guy gags himself can contradicts himself on page 123 I mean whatever that the William Shatner comes out and tells us all to get a life that's right and That was the kind of the pole there were some kids in our group who were quite Dreamy like me and loved the art and the making of the maps and imagining the backstories in the worlds And and there were those who just wanted to go in and kill shit They just wanted to get into the dungeon and start killing as much and leveling up as much as they could and becoming as powerful and We had one player in our group. We had three guys named Bill actually Bill S Bill K And Bill T and Bill S was a new player and he's like okay When do we you know when do I get to fight you know Odin or something like that? I mean immediately was like he wanted to play and he wanted to become a God and become like all powerful And that's very attractive. What's he doing today? I don't entirely know. I know he I know he lives in in the area But one of one of the somewhat menacing I'm realizing this is this is broadcast across the Internet to be careful what I say Bill with your out there Is I don't hurt him One of the one of the things that's interesting is to think about where you know Where some of the guys who I did play D&D where they are today? Yes, and sort of how people how many people did pursue? Traditionally geeky sort of careers like it or or computer science How many people went to the arts or went into music or writing or something like that? but so that gets in some ways to the question of You're ready to make the claim not just we all kind of do fun stuff as kids and then we end up growing up And we look back fondly on it, but that there's something Distinctive about these this form of gaming and play that actually Shapes life later in a positive direction and can you put your finger on what that is? I think it I think it has a lot to do with the the I spoke earlier about the tension between The right and left brain types and also the sort of rules interpretation side But I think I think what's also part of it. What's wonderful about the game is it it's much like if you read Lord of the Rings or some of the Fantasy writers who have developed these very elaborate worlds is that they have they've created the groundwork They've gone deep into many areas, but they've left a lot of areas unexplored or undefined And so as a reader of Lord of the Rings, you're wondering, okay Here's where the fellowship is going but just off the path a couple hundred leagues There's some other cool thing going on that Tolkien never got around to writing about and D&D is sort of that same way There's all these rules and there's all the stuff They can you can get up and and and go and play immediately you can buy something off the shelf and start playing But it encourages you to imagine what if what next you know, what is sort of the next phase of this? Scenario that can happen. What what are the sort of outcomes or possibilities and in that way? It's a perfect, you know all kinds of simulation games are great for this anyway And many of you I'm sure played simulation games in school But the idea of teaching us how to think creatively about how to solve a problem how to imagine Alternative outcomes and I think I would argue alternative points of view and I think the experience of role-playing Both other races and other genders and other people who are not like you You know no one wants to play a wimpy Teenage boy in one of these worlds because you'll get slaughtered in you know in the first 20 minutes of the game So you play someone who is not like you and that's an empowering experience for for a kid for sure and and to a certain extent an adult but also that process of doing that creates a kind of training ground maybe for empathy or for understanding other people so So that's certainly part of it and I think also that the The the demands it places on the imagination because it isn't a game like I'd not that I'm against video games I played a ton of video games in my day and would spend more time playing video games if I could afford to do so But the the idea of is that is the the experience you're participating in Something you is pre-visualized for you Or is it something that requires you and the and the artwork or the story you're creating to meet it halfway and in the imagination much like reading a book I like to think is is on some level a better or yes Say better, but a in some ways a more a more a more Involving experience and watching a movie or something like that People will probably disagree and you feel free to disagree later we can well in fact I'm curious even right now if there's anybody who wants to put something on the table who has played or does play that either compliments or Is in counterpoint to the game as it's been described so far anybody wanting to Say anything about also we can also roll this These are any disputes to see yes, we'll just see what happens and then we'll fight it out You know somehow that's how it works, right? Yes That's a 20-sided. This is a 20-sided. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It bounces to which is kind of nice. It's handy non-lethal I'm so interested. Is there anybody who wants to Say anything or people are feeling shy all of a sudden We can we can yes, sir and tell us some When you played and who your character was So I played primarily in high school and early college and then every now and again. I have a relapse of sorts Particularly at like Pax East or something like that. I'll jump into a PAX East the big convention that's in Boston Is it not that is correct? Yeah, so and I would typically play the Ranger because I always like the idea of two swords But and a ranger is one of those kind of specialty characters. That's that's Yeah, it was like fighter variant Think of think of Strider slash Aragorn that's sort of the quintessential so more rules and kind of more in-depth But a lot of interesting ideas But I think what was always fascinating to me and kind of what really made me grow create Creatively based off of this that I still kind of use today just in the practice of law Is that D&D kind of forces you to take all sorts of different people's ideas and all sorts of different things is true And then you have to weave all those together into Some sort of a narrative that makes sense and comes alive and jumps off the page by other people's ideas Do you mean different? Legendary a different or you mean more like what they want to have happen in the game I think a little bit of both But primarily the second one where's one of your friends says well, I want to do axe I want I want to go I want to sneak behind the monsters and surprise them And then you have to kind of roll with that and you have to incorporate Tactical level as the group is making a decision well not even just that it's just it what their character ideas are what their Philosophies are like all this stuff you have to weave it all together into one narrative And the narrative is not just something that one person spits out and has total control over you have to be kind of very creative and very almost like a Like improvisational and Defining the story as you go along and did your dungeon master run a tight ship? Typically not we we didn't get too much playing that at times But did you ever get a mulligan if something got rolled and everybody's like well that was too bad Let's just roll that again. Yeah, there's a lot of times where it was like well But here's here's actually the interesting part is that that's kind of the easy way out because sometimes what we found is Time went on is taking them all again That doesn't make for a very good story because it just came out how everyone wanted it to what was more Fun is to deal with the failure and say all right well my character has just fallen down this crevasse for example And now like I'm hanging on by like by the roots of my fingers What is what is everyone else going to do to save me and then that makes them be creative? And then somebody screws up on that and then there's another layer of creativity. I'm so kind of rather than just Having the story always come out that you want you kind of see the beauty in Having to deal with the story not always coming out as you want, but still telling a Fascinating and fun story. Uh-huh as long as it's not a total party kill. Yeah, nobody dies and that's part of it, too I think that I think that we As storytellers we want, you know We want we want good outcomes and D&D is a great game because it does offer that chance like you roll a 20 And anything's possible Even if you're the you know to use a Lord of the Rings equivalent like even if you're the lowliest You know sort of most insignificant hobbit you still have a chance to go do this incredible feat and Cast the I love how you fired once the you know the fires once it came you couldn't build a die with more Sides than 20 and really have at work or can you there is like a 50 sided or 100 sided die There's multiple multiples of something that work. Yeah, but yeah, but I just like have one out of 20 is like so Well that was what it was a really interesting innovation with the game is that you know Obviously most games have the six-sided die and those are your options Which you kind of run out of possibilities mathematical possibilities, and I believe that Gagax or Arnes and one of the two founders, you know found some You know polyhedral Geometry supply store or something like that and came up with they all we can you know we can use this instead of just Pulling little pieces of paper out of a Dixie cup, which was another way to randomize things But that that sort of tension between there are strict rules, but there's always a chance, you know, right? There's there's chaos and anything can happen. It's a huge fantasy world worth theoretically and it can happen It's magic you can do anything But no you can't because if you can do anything then everyone's gonna be 100th level and have 18s and everything and this is no fun Right, so there has to be that chance or you're gonna fail But you get to get up again And if your DM is kind you you get a resurrection or you come back and you learn from your mistakes Which is a lesson maybe one of the lessons here lesson. I forget I came up with 15 lessons But you know if I did this list again, I'd probably come up with nine or and we're gonna roll to see which Exactly, I know I should have been 20. I don't know why I didn't think of that but the idea that you know You do you do sort of learn this idea that you you you know it gets better, you know that you do start at level one But it does get better What you mean do what you say well one of the things in D&D that is and there's probably a courtroom equivalent of this but you know You're in the dungeon and you're you know deep down below and and one of the players says okay I take out my You know my my mirror and I reflect you know back the gaze of the gorgon or something like that and the DM says well Is is a mirror written down on your character sheet? Did you say you brought a mirror with you and there's an argument? No, no I always bring a mirror. Did you say you know or or like what order did you you know? Did you go into the room or did you just say you were about to go into the room? Oh, you can't talk to him because he's 30 feet away You know all the things that we imagine is happening versus what you're really saying right and at the same time You know backing that up with action. I think is an interesting idea So you're not just what happens in oftentimes in the game is there's a kind of in character talk And then there's a meta talk sort of there's the rules talk What what are you doing and then there's a moment or get into character what's actually happening in this moment? What's what's realistic that could really happen With six or ten people or seven people in your party in this environment What is that physically gonna feel like and I think players are quite adept to good players I think are adept at jumping in now that was pretty yes Why don't we leave the rules the lessons sure up here, and I'm just curious if there are others who want to share a thought Bruce why don't you go ahead and then we'll pass it back No, you would you want I think you want to know when we started I started playing D&D in 1976 when I was 13 and how were you introduced to it? We discovered it. I mean this is back before those books came out and when the books before those the rules fundamentally made no sense So everyone who played had to invent their own rules the first thing you did as a DM was invent your systems And then play them the standardized systems came years later character Back then I don't remember the character I play now. I start I started playing in 1981 And I'm still playing is a 16th level MU Magic magic user, and we play twice a year. We we started playing in college We still play twice a year Is it a point of pride by the way that they're called magic users rather than wizards musicians are like magic you like Isn't a sword user so that that's what that's what they were called in the books The reason was the levels all had names and wizard was a particular level. I forget which one so they use the generic and that's just Magic user is the circle. No, no, no, it was different different levels. Yeah, that was the name That's what we use like using DM instead of GM It depends on when you hit the game which which game master not general motors, right? Yes But DM is your name and those of us playing in the 70s still use that So The thing with different in the early days was inventing your own rules because the rules didn't make sense I mean you've got the three books you got Greyhawk But you still had to make sense of the rules because they didn't actually work sounds a lot like lesson 11 here Right, but it's different. It's not make up a new rule It's it's make up the new rules before you start playing you don't use those books you write your own and There are several of those that came out at that time David Hargrave did one Severely in sorcery was one of those and I was in trolls right all of those I guess the point I want to make is I think one of the things the benefits of doing this as a kid is What D&D gives you what you don't have is agency That by role-playing in someone else's story you can affect the world in a way you can't you learn how You practice being an adult being someone with agency because in the story you have it and that's Incredibly empowering for a geeky kid for someone who's you know Just it's going to school and doing nothing and you think if you maybe don't do it You might be less inclined to realize your own agency later It's it's it's practicing agency. I think you'll realize it later, but practicing it gives you a leg up You have it's it's interacting with others other adults as an adult adult situations as an adult dealing with a rule set Rules lawyering is is something you know you learn how to do Even if you're you're in the I mean I think you had to a left-brain right-brain gaming I always thought of it as three there. They're the tacticians. They're the storytellers and they're the role-players There's been types of DMs looking at it. Yeah And you know Which are you the game we play now is Fundamentally a tactical game with with also with storytelling elements in games We'll have all three, but I think one is always the forefront We'll do battles that last no joke 12 hours of real-time which is which is idiotic Every possible level but we've been doing this for 30 years and we can't stop And are you doing it without distractions then it's like bonus and privacy mode right now? You know there's the internet. They're always distractions Uh-huh, but actually when a game less 12 that when a battle less 12 hours You cannot pay attention of that long fundamentally. It's impossible But it's it's It's something we do and I have done it and it holds a group of friends of mine together And it's a thing that's made us cohesive is the role of the dice synchro synch for you. Yeah, our RGM fudges He doesn't talk about it. We know he fudges So there's a meta role that says it's okay to fudge. It's not okay, but he does it We've been doing this for decades. We're sort of and is he doing it for the sake of the narrative I think he does the sake of us surviving he always under he always underestimates the power of his his monsters Even after 30 years So a lot of this sounds Staggeringly familiar and this is beginning to sound a little like and you're a former player not a current one I'm not I'm playing a very long time and your and I always feel like a current player and your character was Well, I had several characters One I remember, you know that the names are are from a different different time a little bit Featherstone, I think was the guy's name nice, which is vaguely embarrassing and what type of character He was a combination of a magic user and something else all my characters were combinations of things But that's extremely revealing in some way It turns out to be you know actually quite quite descriptive I think I was I was thinking about we were actually quite explicit when we were kids after a certain point and and vaguely Had different levels of discomfort with the extent to which this felt like an LSAT training course at times And I think if I were described sort of in retrospect what I felt like the kind of benefits were to this as an activity there was this idea of Competitive interpretation, you know, we all knew the rules and a good portion of the game Was invested in who could make a more persuasive case that their version of the rules the one that they wanted to be Was the one that should carry the day and and apply that that was that was always a thing that that came up And there was a lot of creativity around it was it was it persuading the dungeon master all by consensus nominally it was persuading the dungeon master, but but Practically speaking there had to be a general sense that there was consensus that that it was fair. We didn't have dictatorial Dungeon masters in it. In fact the the general vibe was that When we were playing we were all trying to help each other succeed and that included the dungeon master The dungeon master was not typically out to get the other guys, but to create circumstances where they could Succeed and we would rotate who the dungeon master was and we would have campaigns that would last a year at a time And that that would carry on and and with the same group of people roughly Yeah, very small group and was there ever an expulsion from the group There was never an expulsion from the group what happened in the form of expulsion was was related to what you talked about There in our school where it was a group of people who played but we very quickly separated into two separate groups Based on the people who were like serious about the rules and the people who Were not I mean we were serious about the rules, but but I guess the But but we used the rules to allow us to do anything and they used the rules to constrain themselves I can tell which side you were on in the battle. Yeah by that description but but it for us it was kind of a rules-based storytelling and And again that the rules were and I think this is part of why it's constructive We came to see a set of rules as a tool and not as as a trapper or constraint it was a tool that you could use to tell a story and do fabulous things and And this is what I think why it relates to people being good computer programmers or being good lawyers is it's the the rule systems are are just the raw materials for your imagination and and Not authority figures or or and open to interpretation I mean what little I know what the law and how it works is part of your job and if you're arguing the case as you are Making the case that your version of not just your version of the events in the story You're gonna tell about what happened that's going is going to be persuasive But also there is there's arguments about what I guess what you know That's not quite what particularly to think about the Constitution, you know What is what is is that really what they intended or can we can we bend the rule and understanding that? You know, it's more applicable if you think of it in this way or and I guess that's sort of the originalists They'd go back well Gary Geig asked intended. Yes, right or texturably exactly. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely and there would be all kinds of Offshoots and splinter groups both in rule sets as D&D developed and other role-playing games developed over the 70s and 80s and 90s Yes, 2000s about, you know I only play version 2.0 or I only play 3.5 or 4.0 was a you know was abomination or you know Whatever it is people are quite yeah quite Incompatible Constitution. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, people are quite people are quite one one last thing Yeah, that's good thing that connection that I thought was was was interesting was the the role of magic in the system so So when I became acquainted a little later when working on on computer-based games was He hated the system of Dungeons and Dragons because in his view all the things about magic were exceptions to the rule system and Whereas other games magic was more integrated into the rule system and and I thought that that was actually great and Because that's what magic is. It's you know an over overwriting of the rules And when I think back about the distinction between the two groups It really was about the extent to which one was comfortable or not comfortable with extent Exceptions to the rule and the place that they played in in one's experience I want Ethan to be able to do a little bit of a reading for us from the book Before he does just on the way back. There's also Character alignment that's right. Yeah, I'll announce or choose your characters general orientation to things along two Normal axes one is good and evil and the other is chaos and order Yeah, just what did you generally play? What were your Uh-huh same thing good Neutral good so in other words indecisive between chaos and order, but just good Bruce neutral playing out neutral Again, it has to do with when you what lose that you're playing yes Yes, yes, the original ones just had one chaos really came from And then good and evil we're headed afterwards In the game everyone has to be sort of on the okay, so I don't face chaotic don't play evil Yes Yes, for which I guess there are maybe we should just show it real quick before you do the reading sure there's the I forget what number it is. Oh, I can find it We have that's the blue cooler. I was telling you about there does they do have it That's the stuff that I found in it among you want to keep looking for it You want to scroll through to find it or yeah, I'm talking about the the meme at the end there the yeah The Perry Mason not the Perry Mason thing, but the 12 angry men. Where is it? Yes? Sorry, we'll come back to some of these if you want to we thought we keep there So this is something I found on the internet that was amusing. Yeah, so this is the alignment chart There's only nine in you know nine alignments or 12 angry men if you recall in the jury, but It's been a while since I've seen the movie, but it's an interesting idea. It's interesting idea that that You would never want to party that was to people's belief systems were too You know divergent or just it would just be no way to agree on anything Yes, the idea is that the game is cooperative and you all working towards some common good and it really comes out of this Some romantic idea that I think Tolkien came out came up with another fantasy writers Where we all work together for this common cause but but a lot of parties would introduce You know interparty conflict which was always that's when things started to break down Yes, you know, but I guess it turns out this framework I guess you can apply to almost any group or narrative like in Harry Potter Dumbledore is clearly chaotic good No, he's like subversive but good and then you can go on right on down the line With folks, so I my glasses here. Oh, yes, okay here the so I thought I'd just do a quick reading I one of the things I thought of just in relation to this group here How many people here are law students here? So fair number of you. Okay, good You know trying to skew this towards there skewer this towards maybe your audience, but One of the things that I thought about in particularly sponsored a couple of your comments was what was it for us when? I remember back to those times. What was it for us? That was the appeal of of this game and part of it was I think the agency you mentioned Bruce, right? But also the idea that we had mastery over a subject matter Which I think is so important to law and to a lot of people who want to specialize In their careers or any kind of area study this idea that you as particularly as teenagers We had secret knowledge right that our parents didn't know what we were doing and that was very powerful So this is just a short a short page or two from the book This is in the in the second or third chapter. I talk a lot about this is after I've I've actually found the blue cooler And but I haven't opened up the blue cooler yet, so I find it in my parents basement. I bring it home It's sitting in my office. I'm thinking a lot about what's happened to me into my life at this point and I'm having a sort of Retro, you know sort of reflective moment thinking it back to my high school years and really trying to think about what what was it about the game that was really Important the other thing I should just really quickly add is that I think I reference it in this section One of the things that coincidental a lot of know this is just fate looking out for me or something But the same year that I discovered this game Dungeons and Dragons was the same year that my mother had come home from the hospital She suffered a a traumatic brain aneurysm Curiously enough as a graduate student at Harvard She'd come down to Cambridge for the year to get a master's degree in teaching. She was 38 years old and she was renting an apartment over in here on village and Had been suffering from headaches all summer long and we were living with my dad on my stepmom at the time my parents were divorced and They found her at the brain aneurysm had ruptured. She was rushed to the hospital She spent four to five months in at Mass General actually and then that late winter early spring. She came home So the summer that I met this kid JP who taught me how to play D&D Was the same summer that me my brother and sister and I and a family friend were living with my mom and kind of getting to know The new mother so anyway, I think I mentioned that a little bit So I thought I would I thought I would would give you that backstory because otherwise it won't make much sense The joy in the game was not simply the anything can happen fantasy setting and the killing and pseudo heroism But also the rules Hundreds of rules existed for every situation geeks and nerds love rules Eight sorry D&D and its sequel a D&D or advanced Dungeons and Dragons Let us traffic in specialized knowledge found only in hard-bound books with names like Monster manual and Dungeon Masters guide as we played we consulted charts indices tables descriptions of attributes lists of spells Causes and effects like a school unto itself filled with answers to questions about the rarity of magic items Crossing terrain and how to survive poison. We loved to fight over the minutiae and I have a little footnote here That says sample argument player. What do you mean a gelatinous cube gets a plus on surprise dungeon master? It's invisible player, but it's a 10-foot cube of Jell-O. Let me see that player grabs monster manual from DM 20 minute argument ensues We could tell a maze from a morning star a cudgel from a club and we knew how to draw them We knew a creature called a white inflicted one to four hit points of damage when it attacked could we recharge wands? No, if I died I could be resurrected because according to page 50 of the player's handbook a ninth level cleric Could raise a person who had been dead for no longer than nine days note That the body of the person must be whole otherwise missing parts will still be missing when the person is brought back to life That's a quote from the player's handbook all good stuff to know Trolls and fireballs may be fanciful, but they have to behave according to a logical system like in life fantasy rules were affected by chance the role of the dice and As if they were jewels we collected bags of them plastic polyhedral dice Sorry polyhedral game dice four six eight ten and twelve and twenty-sided bobbles that like eaching sticks or coins foretold our fortunes when cast a Spinning dies such as the icosahedral D 20 could land in a 20 a hit You slice the lizard man's head off and green blood spurts everywhere as often as one miss your sword swings wide and you stab yourself loser The world my mother's illness left in its wake was unpredictable and emotionally unsafe My parents had divorced six years before the aneurysm and my father and stepmother six hours away in Canada Couldn't offer much by way of daily guidance or supervision my mother couldn't cook dinner or drive a car So how could she possibly raise three teenagers a good friend of my mother's named Alice agreed to move in with my family My mom returned from the hospital Over the years a steady stream of my mother's other relatives, sorry My mother's other friends and Alice's relatives coming and going would pitch in to help The role of parent was played by a cast of characters But above all Alice carried the weight She ended up staying and caring for us and my mother until my siblings and I left for college The lesson real life thus far had taught me that in the adult world fate was chaotic and uncertain Guidelines for success were arbitrary, but in the world of D&D at least there was a rule book We knew what we needed to roll to succeed or survive The finer points of its rules and the possibility of predicting outcomes offered comfort make believe as they were skirmishes in public sorry puzzle-solving endemic to D&D had immediate and palpable consequences By role-playing we were in control and our characters be they thieves magic users paladins or druids Wandered through places of danger their destinies ostensibly within our grasp At the same time we understood that our characters failures and triumphs were decided by unknown forces malevolent or kindly Such was the double-edged quality of our fantasy life where random cruelty or unexpected fortune ruled the day the game Was a risk-free milieu for doing adult things It was also a relief to live life in another skin and act out behind the safety of pumped-up attributes D&D characters had statistics in steep and six key areas strength intelligence Wisdom dexterity constitution and charisma these ranged from three to 18 Ethan the real boys stats would have been all under 10 the fighter character arrow my fighter character. Elarons were all 16s 17s and 18s Anyway, there's more on that vein which I will stop it right there, but For for the for the adult player I find the The the appeal is much less to do with the kind of vicarious Yeah, there's a lot of escapism escapism and although I think it still offers an important escape for me But it's a little less The last thing I want to suggest it is somehow D&D is you know Exists to compensate for one's lax in the real world. I mean I think that that's really unfair But in my particular case there were some specific circumstances in my life that were We're needing of distraction from and I think that the game provided that And gave me gave me a place to park park myself for a few years and gather strength I think as I think Bruce had another is this idea of practicing outcomes imagining futures Maybe it may be a little bit wary, you know, but but that's that's good training, you know The opening quote and part of what you talked about on the rules It's come up several times just the minutiae that can be very fun LSAT style to master That's that's complicating, but there's also a piece and maybe the escapism Such as it was as part of it It's simplifying that you take the complex world and it can be reduced right me your roles of the dice Yeah, yeah, right consensus So there's a neat kind of contrast between complicating and simplifying and in particular back to the alignment question I know you've asked the question before Is it okay to kill everything that's evil right that there is sort of these elements of you know What's a monster and what's not it's pretty rare that there's a Indifferent non-player character or other character and I'm curious how that either got worked out in the game Or if we translate it to the law Do we look for the cause that we can tell ourselves is Appropriate and then be able to lose ourselves as lawyers and advocates. Yeah in that cause to prove someone's innocence Yeah, I mean how often have you heard from the likes of Dershowitz Who I think has gone on record saying he would absolutely defend Hitler for example because Everybody deserves a lawyer and it's a job of the system adversarial or otherwise to sort out who's right and who's wrong But the only way it works is if you can lose yourself In your occupation and not have to worry about the complete right Yeah, I wonder if that's an example then of being able to say at least from my point of view The other side is the enemy. Yeah, I get to go after them Well, I think when there's a in my experience the better games are the ones where though I think the players did feel invested emotionally in what they were trying to accomplish And there was a there was a quest which is the classic idea, you know You must go to the obsidian hills and you know rescue those shard of That's gonna say Narsal, but that's been done before, you know The shard of hula ha because you know, whatever and so at all cost you do this and it must be done And so anything gets in your way is is is basically, you know Potentially gonna be run that sounds like it's like not the best life lesson And what's what's curious about it is I think the more sophisticated player or I think as over time You realize if the the dungeon master is a good one they he or she will create Scenarios where yes, the best solution is to kill like that is the only way through the problem But in many cases it was a puzzle you had to solve or it was it was you had to parley with your phone You had to sort of negotiate There wasn't always the answer was not always just to kill something wantonly I don't think as a teenager player I was too concerned about whether it was good or evil or the vicarious violence There's of course a lot of thinking about violent video games. It does does the act of killing something virtually make you Inheritling more violent or mess you up in some profound way and and of course D&D at the time for those You remember the game in the day and remember the news stories was the video violent video games of its era I mean the 1980s there were numerous scares about its either ability to seduce, you know unsuspecting, you know children to malevolent forces of Satan or else You know was going to cause people to do harmful things, you know commit suicide and so forth and a lot of these were One or two cases that were very well publicized and next thing, you know There's a 60 minutes, you know report on it and Gary Gygax is defending, you know the game on national television Which by the way sold a bunch of copies of the game I mean, you know, that was the most brilliant thing that could have ever happened to D&D band in Boston exactly So the the the that argument is I never really bought that one But but it's understandable that the moral universe that this exists in is something that people want to know about This is something that comes up in video games as well Are you just running through and playing Grand Theft Auto or whatever just killing wantonly or are there any moments where you do have to sort of make The game the game developers have created a scenario where the the right way to solve the problem is to do the good thing Yeah, as opposed to do the worst possible thing, you know and So much of it depends on well the DM the DM who is either the rule either the judge of the jury that are depending on how you want to Characterize him or her question comment Get the mic just so the webcasts can hear it Is that Paul Yeah, and If you had a character or have tell us who it is. Sorry, I was in the risk demographic not in the D&D So I think there's a lot of interest in sort of gamification of learning and gamification of work I saw a TED talk the other day that basically was if all the work were like World of Warcraft All work would be like World of Warcraft, which I thought was a little productionist but What do you see as the best examples of applying Gamification approaches to let's say more moderately traditional workplaces I get how you can do it if you're Google or Facebook, but ha, you know And I get how it's not going to particularly work at scat and but sort of pick a midpoint between those What do you see as best practices? What's been written? What's interesting? What what are we doing in the library about deemifying work and do you have an example in mind of a If not successful notable gamification within the workplace. No, I'm searching for I mean, it's yeah I mean work is just an extension to me It's just an extension of games people who like their jobs have more of those elements But it as a intellectual theme, it's over, you know We've been the bet battle of water who was one of the playing fields of eating these are not new ideas, right? But yeah, but as a theme. It's a relatively recent theme I think a very interesting and powerful one and certainly that you know the bumper sticker that says more people, you know Learn how to do World of Warcraft and you know Learn physics is so tells you there's something powerful there. I'm just curious what what do you see as the elements that seem to be working? Well, I'm not a huge sort of modern video gamer So my my although I I can sort of riff on that a little bit I feel like the certainly the reward system is really important. I think that what a lot of If you want to think about this very stereotypically a lot of what might motivate a worker Traditionally has motivated a worker is the promise of promotion the promise of cool stuff benefits raises But those are few and far between and of course now we know that there's you know wages have stagnated You know, there's not all kinds of reasons why that isn't happening But but those little bit of those little reward systems that could be built in I think I think is something that are a Game like World of Warcraft does quite Effectively and it encourages you to go higher because it is kind of crappy to start out at first level. You just literally are running around killing rats and you know to build up the experience the whole idea of experience points, which is a kind of a A D&D concept that later was used in a lot of these concepts of attributes for your character or sort of something to measure How far along you've gone? Yeah, how much experience you have it or how much buy-in you have into their experiences gets You know turnage we number is is a real idea from D&D So throwing that turning that a little bit on said the other way I would think about it is the idea of Collaboration, you know, I think collaboration is a huge Lesson from this game from Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games that everybody You can't do it alone and that you require the sort of diverse attributes of everybody at the table or in your team or whatever it is So not just humans can do it We need people of all races and genders and not just human fighters But there has to be magic users and thieves and so forth. So it encourages the kind of diverse You know making making you feel open to diversity and wanting to be more inclusive in the way you Solve a problem because you can't just go into the dungeon on your own. So how that gets translated into the Corporate world. I don't entirely know but I feel like that's it, you know But it may show just how lossy the bumper sticker is It's time to gamify the workplace Because there's a huge range of games and styles. I think the most obvious way One would do gamification would be to have at first be algorithmic So you just kind of level up according to rules and that's the system you learn I think a very different lesson than the collaboration anything you're talking about when it's just I mean When I think of the most one of the most salient popular culture references to gamification, it's Glen Gary Glen Ross right, there's all the real estate salespeople and first prize is a Cadillac second prize is steak knives third prize is your fired and All right, everybody start start following your leads. That's gamification. All right But it has a kind of algorithmic quality of just like How much real estate did you sell today? Where it sounds I'm reminded it just pulled this quote from Gary Guy Gax Oops, why did that? That's extremely puzzling to me. Let me see If I can get it going again, sorry And in that scenario that has to be a loser in order for it to work About the game he said the ultimate aim of the game is to gain sufficient esteem as a good player to retire your character He becomes a kind of mythical historical figure somewhat now in some ways, right? The purpose of work is to retire Rich, I guess that's a very means-based view of doing work But this certainly is different from the standard gamification tropes of To make sure that you I don't know that you're explicitly leveled up and but I think you're I don't want to not let's make room But I think your point about the algorithmic is is a profound one and something that we've been trying to do because if you have subjective assessment the subjectivity always defaults to some hierarchy whereas if if the points of whatever kind acquisition is Is formal as a then yeah from Ethan was both about Collaboration within the context of a campaign Teamwork when somebody's hanging off the edge of the cliff, but then met a collaboration about the game We've heard from almost everybody about how you're figuring out the rule sets What the style of the game house that it is a collective hallucination in which we are engaged now I think that's not a bad description of work But it doesn't always feel that way when you're like let's get everybody together and we'll just agree to change You know the steak knives That's a very dear so to import into the workplace just the idea of we're gonna keep score And there will be winners and losers seems quite different from this conception of the game There's another commenter thought so related when I think about this I like to flip it around and think about the way we organize work and how that would ruin D&D But you show up and I maybe let you pick your race, but I assigned you the rest of it Yeah, so they're like really specific set of rules and certainly those rules You aren't gonna be allowed to violate any way I mean think of all the ways in which we organize work and how it would completely ruin the whole exercise and then Slowly pair those back to try to see where we can adjust the way we organize work But that is to say I mean what it sounds like among Ethan's lessons are Wouldn't it be interesting if people within a workplace? Realized that they could actually If they got into a configuration where they could brainstorm Allah the way people have been discussing the campaign goes Maybe more productive work would happen. I guess it depends on what the workplace is about if it's about churning out widgets I don't know that I mean still might actually Yes, yes We should get the mic over Yeah, the Boston Dungeon Master, that's a good one who whom you're ostensibly fighting against but is also Well, they be setting the rules But as we played collaboratively subject to being persuaded that the rules are different than he thought or yeah They're really telling a collective story in which everybody is is a is a participant. Yeah on the general topic of Gamification, I feel like it's a sort of an elaborate word for incentive systems and that what's distinct about Dungeons and Dragons Isn't so much the incentive system, but it is the idea that that it's human mediated So there's a vital difference to me between a very elaborate Dungeons and Dry Dry, you know fantasy style computer game like World of Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons and the difference is that the heart of it Isn't an algorithm, but it's a person. Yeah, and and this completely changes the character of the activity But let's bring that around to law for a moment There are definitely different conceptions of the law for which one is it's not self executing So you do need people say judges and others to make it happen But that we hope they are constrained by the law in Massachusetts recently it made big headlines because of I think willful misrepresentation of what was happening But there was activity on a subway that by all lights Many think ought to be illegal for which the statute just was not particularly on point for which the Massachusetts Supreme Court was like The statute's not on point Legislature, you know, you want to amend the law which they then did go ahead So I'm just wondering is that an instance in the application of law Where one takes refuge in the rules and algorithms and expects the judge not to use license to deviate Or is what you're saying it's better to expect the judge You know and in my Limited experience in these things that there are very distinctly two categories of judges, right? Yeah, there are the ones who are the you know literalists and the rules are the rules and and and Then there are the people who are more into ideas of justice and making the rules serve some some of their purpose Yeah, and and you can tell who you're talking to most of the time if you're in in courtroom Yeah, and and these mapped almost directly to our little groups of Dungeons and Dragons players We had we had the the one group who who read the rules one way Yeah, and to me it would be phenomenally boring to play the game with these people Yeah, and and then there was our group again You've made your allegiance is clear and they would never want to play with us because they just like you know Like they were vaguely disdainful of the sort of degrees of success of our characters And we kind of we were playing like a superhero game and they they thought that was just yeah an abomination frankly Yes, but whatever that's how it goes. Let me. Oh, yeah one more comment, and then we'll put it over to Ethan to wrap us up Well, I think one interesting thing is that I think D&D really teaches you this and I'm a practicing lawyer And you definitely see it in the law is that when you get a certain level of mastery of rules They're not constraining. There's actually freedom there and that in a way You can you're not just telling a story Pushing against nothing there's friction and you're telling a story with rules And that makes it all that much of a better story and I find that when a brief is really working It's kind of has that type of flavor Where you're you have your facts and you have your story You want and you have the the kind of ideas that the judge wants to get to but at the same time You're weaving in all the rules that you have to deal with like I'm an IP attorney. So like the rules of obviousness for Patent lawsuits that weaves right into the story if you're doing it right and you can a lot of times tell if you're gonna win If the story sounds like it's good and the rules don't seem like they're you're fighting against them But they're rather helping you tell the story. So I think that that's I mean D&D It's straight pulled from there and from all these other types of very rule-intense games Right to the law would be interesting to see law schools trying to recruit out of the D&D tournament They try to get them younger and young sort of the role the role playing side of it the You know making your argument we talked about that earlier and the idea that the my brief one experience In a courtroom for a week. I had my first experience in a jury on a jury Earlier this winter and I was astounded by you know, again my showed up in the jury room with a 20-side Exactly how we're gonna do it offended feeling lucky today. I Know that would be nice Turns out under the US Constitution if it were revealed that this had been used to decide the outcome of the case no mistrial Great, we can go back in See the law words Well, there was a there was a Tanner v. Us someone did uncover a 20-sided something that was used in it. I think it goes back to actually ancient Egypt So someone has made it these do go back in history But I was just thinking about what you were saying in your comment the idea that you know when I was in the courtroom I was thinking about well, I've heard the facts of the case There's the law that we're supposed to abide by an applause to this case But that what you at least as a juror as a neophyte in that experience, you know Which I was astounded was not at all like law and order and I was waiting for that don't own sound I never heard that None of that was there was the case that the the narrative, you know the way in which the lawyer you know the Prosecuting attorney or the you know defense people were we're we're shaping the the the story in the end particularly I suspect particularly in a criminal case because it's so much about you are there putting you there in the room With them. This is what happened, you know did in our particular case. It was the very troubling one about a domestic abuse case and the the argument was had the defendant Actually tried to choke his wife or not and was she close to death or was it just that he assaulted her But she wasn't close to death that that way the the the charge of attempted murder either was or wasn't going to fly It based on whether we believed The the both attorneys arguments of that and it was fascinating again Maybe this is where my D&D brain came into this thinking about you know the tide turns, you know day one It's like oh looks like they're gonna win Oh, you know day two and it is a kind of a campaign and each day There's more to the story that gets added and then and then later There's sort of summations of the story and you get to kind of and then of course the lot, you know closing arguments Like okay, here's your last chance to kind of tie all the threads together And and some of those skills How well do you tell the story has a huge? Impact on the way we experience it because it is about empathy, right? It is about identification It is about you know making the the story feel real what verdict feel the jury return It was a complicated one because the they worked about 10 different Charges ranging from violation of a restraining order to assault to stalking to the attempted murder so The defendant ended up being found guilty on some and not on the others and did the jury room deliberations feel like 12-ing in the Being around the table to a certain extent. Yeah. Yeah, and interestingly enough I mean there's obviously a foreman, but there's there's oftentimes You know the person sort of takes control. There's people who had experience people don't have experience There's some who weigh in with the kind of more emotional Yes response to what happens and some who weigh in with a more kind of well, no Let's look at the law. Let's look at what the judge told us, right? Let's you know and that's just a reflective of I think yes people's brains, you know the way that what what appeals to them And I think in the same way, you know Whatever D&D is life life is D&D and there's a lot of things you can say are like a lot of experiences in life That we have that that teaches things later. Yes, whether you played sports whether you You know we're on the chess team whether you were in band camp whatever it was all these different things have formative a way of creating Skills and and personality traits and and aspects of your personality that they get expressed mostly in positive ways later And and for me it happened to be happened to be D&D So parting lesson for us parting lesson. Yeah, where's my 15 lessons and if I can get it back up there? You know, I don't know I One of the things that I've discovered in in in writing this book and in thinking about D&D and in particular About the 40th anniversary and talking to people is how much? a Weirdly, there's interest in D&D again, and it has zero nerd You know Negative baggage attached to it. It's like oh that sounds interesting. You know it used to be Something you did and you didn't talk about it very much Because you were afraid as I was that the jocks are gonna beat the crap out of me. Don't ask. Don't spell I like it and and now it's sort of safe for for D&D be out of the closet I think that's a good thing and I've experienced a lot of curiosity amongst just at you know what I would consider to be non geeky geeky game you're gamey people to participate in this experience because Like a lot of people my age in particular who look back on where are we now in relation to the 1970s 1980s What did we miss along the way? What should have we maybe thought to preserve as we move forward whether it's our attachment to our devices Whether it's the amount to which technology is you know brought us together, but separates us in other ways It's a rare moment where we have this opportunity to be around ourselves in person This kind of event where we're talking to you and well some of us were seeing through those through the screens but you know live event and And so much of what we how we define our leisure time today is really defined by I think Sort of top-down, you know, here's a movie. Here's a book. Here's a blockbuster Here's an internet thing that you need to see now That the the lesson of D&D is sort of no you you you make it yourself Like you have to make your own entertainment and there's some some pleasure and joy and meaning and making your own entertainment telling your own story and and and I guess You know, who are you gonna be? Are you gonna be a hero? Are you gonna be a bystander? Are you going to you know do the right thing at the right moment? There's something very I Charging or a charged base that I think D&D ignites that is important That we I hope you don't you know lose sight of yeah, you know that we can we can be Our own storytellers and our own our own entertainers Well speaking of entertaining I know Ethan brought some books So if people want to leave with a memento and something further to chew on that is sell you possible I can sell you one and I'll bet you would be willing to dispense advice for those wanting to Try out this sure. Absolutely. Yeah And and we can chat informally and obviously help yourself to yes some of the refreshments again for those of you who are watching at home Sorry, but there's some brownies and looks like and other things and Yeah, and for this freewheeling Conversation, I think it's fair to describe it as chaotic good Quite good, and we owe you huge. Thanks for coming out and for talking with us about it tonight. Thank you very much And thanks to Jonathan and and thanks to Harvard and thanks for making this space available and Come on down Cheers