Weird Studies

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life are suspended and new laws come into play. No game illustrates this better than Gary Gygax's tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, Phil and JF use D&D as the focus of a conversation about the weird interdependence of reality and fantasy. Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons) WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE Official homepage of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game Critical Role web series   Another RPG podcast JF failed to mention: The HowWeRoll Podcast Demetrious Johnson’s Twitch site Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (documentary)   Chessboxing!   Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America   Peter Fischli, The Way Things Go   Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom   Lawrence Schick, ed., Deities & Demi