Episode 139 - Dungeons & Dragons - The Fantasy Adventure Board Game (with Cat Mahoney)
Dungeons & Dragons - The Fantasy Adventure Board Game.
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Episode 139 marks something of a first as Chris and Alex play ‘The Fantasy Adventure Board Game’ Dungeons & Dragons originally created and designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, taking on its array of characters, weapons, and quests live during the podcast with special guest (and Dungeon Master) Dr Cat Mahoney, Derby Fellow in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Cat is the co-editor with Jilly Boyce Kay and Caitlin Shaw of The Past in Visual Culture Essays on Memory, Nostalgia and the Media (McFarland, 2016) and author of the monograph Women in Neoliberal Postfeminist Television Drama: Representing Gendered Experiences of the Second World War (Palgrave, 2019), as well as multiple book chapters and articles engaging with representations of gender through historical and historiographical frameworks. Discussions during this roll-by-roll episode of the Dungeons & Dragons game include the suitability of fantasy as a genre conducive to the table-top role-playing game format; the influence of Gygax and Arneson’s fame upon the 1980s resurgence of fantasy cinema; Dungeons and Dragons as an enduring transmedia property and the possibilities of world-building; and how ‘metagaming’ in Dungeons and Dragons offers a way to think about the player’s complex relationship to character and embodiment.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Belman, Jonathan, and Mary Flanagan. 2010. “Designing games to foster empathy.” International Journal of Cognitive Technology 15 no. 1: 5-15.
Chalk Alex. 2018. “A chronology of Dungeons & Dragons in popular media.” Anolog Game Studies 6, no. 1, available at: https://analoggamestudies.org/2018/06/telling-stories-of-dungeons-dragons-a-chronology-of-representations-of-dd-play/.
LaLone Nicolas. 2019. “A tale of Dungeons & Dragons and the origins of the game platform.” Analog Game Studies 6, no. 3, available at: https://analoggamestudies.org/2019/09/a-tale-of-dungeons-dragons-and-the-origins-of-the-game-platform/.
Peterson Jonathan. 2021. Game Wizards. The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons. Massachussetts: The MIT Press.
Sidhu, Premeet, and Marcus Carter. 2021. “Pivotal Play: Rethinking Meaningful Play in Games Through Death in Dungeons & Dragons.” Games and Culture 16, no. 8: 1044-1064.