Bioware Prequel - on Dungeons & Dragons (and Gamers and Satanists)

Published: Feb. 3, 2021, 5 p.m.

Frame Work branches out into gaming, with a look at the most sneakily influential piece of culture of the last half century, the OG table-top role playing game, Dungeons & Dragons.  The original idea was to examine its role in shaping  the video game industry, but before that the party finds a great deal to unpack about the creation of the game, its strange method of encouraging unfettered imagination while shackling it to complex math-based mechanics, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s,  the D20 system as a tool for teaching about both statistics and privilege, the relation between plagiarism and innovation, and the challenges of allowing an audience to dictate the direction of an ongoing story.