What I learned about Dungeons & Dragons and Schools
Unthinkable when I was a kid, now D&D is a part of the official curriculum for many teachers.
I recently invited to moderate an extremely interesting panel discussion at the Games for Change festival in NYC. The panel was titled “Dungeons & Dragons Gets Straight A's in Schools,” and featured educator Kade Wells, who told us how he used D&D —both pre-and post-Covid — to improve his students’ reading scores, general social skills, critical thinking and much more.
Here’s the complete livestream from the day’s events at the New York Times Center; jump to 3:24:33 for our panel.
While impact of Kade’s D&D program is impressive, I was most amazed that he had no problem convincing fellow teachers and school administrators to embrace D&D as part of the curriculum. When I was a grade schooler in the ‘80s that would have been unthinkable as the game was a key bogeyman in the era’s widespread Satanic Panic.
But Kade, his colleagues and bosses grew up playing games like D&D. That’s why you can have programs like this today as part of the official school curriculum — but it couldn’t happen until those ‘80s-era players grew up and took over schools.
Thinking about Baldur’s Gate 3 and other RPG games
I’m continuing to experiment with video formats, including using green screen and generative AI to create some unique subtly sci-fi backgrounds for my video.
So it’s a small leap to go from talking about RPGs in schools to making a couple of videos about Baldur’s Gate 3, the hotly anticipated upcoming video game that you’ve actually been able to play for the past three years.
That’s because BG3 has been available in “early access” since 2020, with players’ progress periodically wiped as new updates are released. And it’ll happen again just before the “official” release in early August. Having played through the game’s opening sequence a few times, then having those shards of my RPG multiverse erased, I’ve sworn off it until the actual, final, real release.
What better topic for a couple of brief YouTube rants?
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