Saïd Sayrafiezadeh on Debt, Cults, and Our Inner Algorithms
The narrator of your story “ Minimum Payment Due ” is mired in debt and, from the outset, trying to
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In the late 1980s, my friends and I knew something called Dungeons & Dragons existed—and we knew that it was for us. But no shop in our little upstate New York hometown carried the books, and the World Wide Web was still a few years off. We did have a set of the dice, so we worked with the scraps we’d gleaned from related books and video games, crafting rules and settings to help us tell the stories we wanted to tell. It was a messy process, but it worked. Over countless weekends and summer nights, we conducted our imaginary characters through marvelous journeys, high-stakes intrigues, and absurd escapades. Tabletop roleplaying games had been around for some fifteen years at this point, but we felt we were tapping into something both mythic and new. Which is exactly what we were doing. D&D owes its existence to a peculiar mix of ancient legend and folklore, fantasy literature, tactical wargames, and improvisational theater. Now fifty years old, the game is more popular than ever, but what keeps it new is the players who gather with friends to make it their own. Little wonder that so many writers have emerged from these crucibles of unrehearsed storytelling. Holly Black, John Darnielle, Lev Grossman, and others have talked about their early encounters with the game and how it informed their later work. Recently, celebrated writers including Renee Gladman and Brian Evenson have created original RPGs and adventure modules. I’m particularly interested in D&D as a folk practice for generating stories that are both visionary and ephemeral—and I believe that fiction writers can learn a great deal from that practice. I consider the rules of tabletop RPGs as a kind of vessel for carrying the inventiveness of childhood play into other parts of our lives. There are as many ways to play tabletop RPGs as there are tables at which such games have been played. But regardless of their chosen style, most players seem to have one thing in common: an appreciation for the unexpected. The referee of the game, whether working from a published […]
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