Historian Pieter van den Heede (Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication) and media researcher Lars de Wildt (University of Groningen) have written a chapter on how the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons has reshaped religion since the 1970s. The chapter ‘A Genealogy of Holy Weapons’ is part of ‘The Meaning of Weapons’, a new book by Lucien van Liere and Erik Meinema (Utrecht University).
In their chapter, Van den Heede and De Wildt explore the historical roots of ‘religious weapons’ in tabletop and digital role-playing games. They examine the case of (the original) Dungeons & Dragons (1974), its expansions and subsequent editions, to argue that D&D has contributed to what they call the ‘weaponisation’ of religion.
The researchers argue that RPGs transform religion into a series of quantified, fictionalised and encyclopaedic ‘weapons’ that can be used instrumentally within the rules of a game. We place our discussion further into context by examining the emergence of wargaming, including its development as a board-game pastime in the 1950s.
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