Tag: dragons

I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons, but plenty of my family members do, and they consider it to be one of the world’s most engaging table top games; a game that also promotes community. And, like any game that has been around for more than fifty years, there’s bound to be changes. And, with changes, comes angry voices in opposition. One of the angriest right now is Elon Musk. Writing for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer recently detailed Musk’s fury over changes to the game and the way Wizards of the Coast, the company behind D&D, has begun reckoning with its past Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to ‘burn in hell.’ Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. ‘Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash’ the ‘geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,’ Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included ‘a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language.’ After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to ‘progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense’ at those stereotypes, and not to ‘the ire of the grognards’-a reference to early fans such as Musk-Musk asked, ‘How much is Hasbro?,’ suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter. According to Mint’s Ravi Hari (with inputs from Deutsche Welle), “Musk has become increasingly vocal about the gaming industry, especially on his platform X (formerly Twitter).” He noted that “Too many game studios . are owned by massive corporations,” adding, “xAI is going to start an AI game studio to make games great again!” Dungeons & Dragons was the original role-playing game, born in the early 1970s after insurance underwriter and cobbler Gary Gygax met a student named Dave Arneson at a Midwestern tabletop gaming convention. In his piece, Serwer explains how their breakthrough came from shifting away from reenacting historical battles with miniatures toward a more character-driven, improvisational style involving a Dungeon Master, dice rolls, and narrative collaboration. It was, as he puts it, essentially “a game of pretend.” Serwer’s piece, “Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons To Be Racist: The fantastical roots of ‘scientific racism,’” goes beyond the game’s mechanics, tracing how fantasy itself carries the weight of 20th-century ideas about race. He delves into J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fantasy’s seminal 20th-century text, published in 1937, and the Lord of the Rings series that followed it. Both were “written, an era in which many Westerners believed that ‘races’ shared particular natures, characteristics, and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books. Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had rejected.” Serwer points out that in the early days, the game was “largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game-even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a ‘traditional African-analogue tribal society’ set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned ‘noble savages’ and ‘depraved cannibals.’ But for kids like me, [Jewish and Black] the meaning was always there.” Although business wise D&D had always been “in financial peril,” sales grew during the Great Recession, “while the retail hobby stores that doubled as hangout spots where many kids were introduced to the game started to close. No one expected the game to experience a sudden renaissance,” Serwer writes. “But it did. In 2011, the sitcom Community ran a D&D-themed episode. The nostalgic horror show Stranger Things, which debuted in 2016, showed kids playing D&D together. As other geeky pastimes became more mainstream-such as Disney’s Marvel juggernaut-the stigma once associated with those activities began to fade, a process I’ll call ‘de-geekification.’” Protests following the murder of George Floyd led the D&D development team to acknowledge “in a blog post that some earlier versions of the game offered portrayals of fantasy creatures that were ‘painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.’ In 2022, Wizards announced that it would be removing the word race from the game and substituting species, noting that “‘race’ is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds.” So where does that leave Elon Musk? Will he continue his personal crusade against the direction D&D is taking? Will he attempt to buy Hasbro? Or launch a gaming empire of his own? What’s clear is that his outrage is about much more than a hobby: it’s about who gets to define the stories we tell, the worlds we imagine, and the futures we fight over.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2025/11/elon-musk-vs-dungeons-and-dragons/