Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Stephen Colbert on Gaming

From an interview in the Onion's AV Club:

AVC: You were into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, were you not?

SC: Yeah, I really was. I started playing in seventh grade, 1977. And I played incessantly, 'til probably 1981—four years.

AVC: What's the appeal?

SC: It's a fantasy role-playing game. If you're familiar with the works of Tolkien or Stephen R. Donaldson or Poul Anderson or any of the guys who wrote really good fantasy stuff, those worlds stood up. It's an opportunity to assume a persona. Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers? And you get to be heroic and have adventures. And it's an incredibly fun game. They have arcane rules and complex societies and they're open-ended and limitless, kind of like life. For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing. You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It's good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in.

1 comment:

Cayzle said...

I just blogged about this and other recent media mentions of D&D here.

About the Colbert comment I said: "Well, that's pretty good press, but it begs the question, why stop at age 15? It gives support to the nasty comment [in other news articles] that says there's a time to stop playing games. The underlying message -- Grow Up! -- is just offensive."

"So, Mr. Colbert, I have some advice for you -- Try again! Come back to games, to RPGs, to D&D! They are just as fun and valuable as when you were a teen."