A World of Our Own Making: Using Dungeons and Dragons to Better the World
Katelyn Calfee
In a far away world, a reigning monarch has vanished without an heir, and the kingdom is in disarray. Merchants have fled the region, along with most nobles. Left behind is a group of people who now must fend for themselves in a dangerous world. You are a naïve fighter, not having spent much time outside your hometown. Called out into the world by the promise of adventure, you are devoted to serving those in need of help. You now stand, surrounded by a small group of similarly disheveled people, ready to make the world better. In a world riddled with problems, you have the innate power to fix them. While this individual story setting is unique to you, millions of Dungeons and Dragons players around the world have experienced unique stories in which they feature as the hero and grow, both in game and as a person.
Dungeons and Dragons was the brainchild of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, two men who shared a passion for role playing and fantasy games in the late 60s and early 70s in Wisconsin, USA. The first 1,000 copies of the rulebook were sold in early 1974, with over 5,000 more copies being sold by the end of 1975 (Fiori). The game has expanded significantly over the years, growing from three small handmade paperback books to three hardcover textbooks with over 300 pages each. Alongside the growing page count is a shockingly large player base, with an estimated 50 million players worldwide as of 2025, and the numbers are growing (Galov). When looking at the overwhelming state of the world today, it is easy to see why people enjoy fantastical escapism so much.
The game generally starts with a hook, something going wrong, and your character must band together with other players to fix it. Some players may be playing heroic characters when the story starts, but many will be ordinary people called to be something more. People simply in the right tavern at the right time. A traveling performer, a confused old wizard, a cunning rogue, a local ranger, and her pet owl. An opportunity opens for them to join an adventure, and they take it. I, myself, can attest to what a wonderful decision joining the adventure is.
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons four years ago, in my sophomore year of High School, a time where I was at my lowest to date. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, I didn’t have many social connections, and I had a negative outlook on the world. I won’t pretend Dungeons and Dragons fixed all my problems, but it did allow me a way to connect with other people who shared my love of fantasy, political intrigue, and storytelling. We were able to build connections and use our collective imaginations to imagine a world where we could fix the problems. As I think back on my past games, in worlds I made better, my mind wanders. How can my experiences in these fantastical scenarios be applied to real life in order to understand how I, alongside others, can become better at problem solving and rational thinking. Now, as a student studying the political world, I’m left considering what can be done to make the world better? What can I do as a single person?
Though I may be a single person, I am not single in my wonderings. Psychologists Jennifer Wright, Daniel E. Weissglass, and Vanessa Casey performed a study in 2017 to explore the connections between moral reasoning and Dungeons and Dragons in young adults. They challenged the idea that gaming, specifically games with focus on violence and combat, result in increased antisocial behavior. They used surveys from two separate experimental groups to track the cognitive impact on players and nonplayers, as well as involved participants in conversations about moral issues to monitor responses. Wright, Weissglass, and Casey’s argument speaks to the ideals of games as character development and about the larger negative public perception of some games. They noticed how “…the gaming group … shift away from concern for their own interests and individuality to an increased concern for their connection to others through shared group norms and values” (Wright et al.). Some of the participants had experience with Dungeons and Dragons, but it is notable that the most observable growth and change in moral reasoning levels were those who had never played before the study, demonstrating some initial benefit from exposure to the game. In addition, this study demonstrates a clear connection between gameplay in a fantasy world and transporting those values into real world scenarios. “gaming that involves the encounter of morally relevant situations appears to facilitate a shift away from concern for one’s own personal interests and toward the interests of others, both in one’s reasoning about moral scenarios and in the expression of one’s values” (Wright et al.).
Two years ago, I played a devilish fairy named Owmen Axton. She thirsted for power and made deals with blatantly evil patrons, granting her magical abilities. Although I created her with the full intention of exploring a more evil, selfish character, I was unable to sustain that character because of her negative interactions with the world, even despite the clearly fantasy setting. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to commit to being a character, or person, that makes the world worse. As a result, I chose to have her character be redeemed, and, in hindsight, my inability to engross myself in her told me a lot about myself. I can’t separate myself from characters, and having negative impacts on the world hurts me as a real person. Dungeons and Dragons forced me, for the better in this case, to make myself look in the mirror and think about my morals and values.
Heroism is not limited to fantasy worlds, however. A study concluding in 2015 investigated how children view and interact with real life heroes and their acts of heroism. Carola Conle and Michelle Boone observed a 7th and 8th grade class in Ontario, Canada, go through a unit considering real life heroes. After days of research about heroes from around the world, the students created four main categories of real world hero types: “‘Accidental heroes,’ ’Day-to-day heroes,’ ’Heroes on a quest for self,’ and ‘Heroes on a quest for others.’” (Conle, Boone). When looping back to hero types in Dungeons and Dragons, many of them follow this same formula: a ranger who fought a bear away from a child, a fighter who defends the village from bandits, a sorcerer who seeks an orb in a far off land, a monk in search of a new home for their people. As students continued to learn, they introduced four local heroes, each representing one of the four categories. Students discovered that not all heroes set out to become heroes, they were merely going through life and upheld their morals. As the final part of the observational study, students were asked about the impacts of their learning on their life. “[Participant] was beginning to ‘author’ her life differently. Existing dispositions were reinforced and visions of possible action came into view that might not have been considered before” (Conle, Boone). When we realize the power we hold in our own lives, we choose to live differently, more actively, and more heroically.
While there is beginning to be substantial research into the positive effects of Dungeons and Dragons as a therapeutic method, some, such as Professor James “Pidgeon” Fielder, a retired lieutenant colonel with a passion for Wargaming and Dungeons and Dragons, is already mapping the idea of Dungeons and Dragons onto politics. He views political power through the powerscaling system of the game, putting a numerical value to one’s influence in the world, “The more power you have, the more awesomeness you can do and the more destructiveness you can cause” (Fielder). This externalized view emphasizes the power of people, and also draws a distinction between positive and negative social impacts – something politicians may disagree on. He also notes how Dungeons and Dragons can be a useful tool for considering consequences of actions, and even experiencing them. “The [storyteller] might say, well, because you did X, Y happened. And Y is a lot worse than X was. So, now what are you going to do about that?” (Fielder). You made a mistake, and now you must reckon with it. Such practices that encourage considering the consequences help people think more before they act, and make less mistakes.
However, it is essential to understand that it is from mistakes where we as humans grow, and as a Dungeons and Dragons player, I have made my fair share of mistakes I had to reckon with and fix. Many of these mistakes, I only had the courage to make because I was in a fantasy world where I was not in any actual danger. Some of my largest learning moments also came from the courage endowed in me through fantasy. Regardless of the outcome, you learn from your experiences, good and bad, and grow to become better.
Right now, I’m playing a fae ranger on a quest for revenge. Her name is Mamushi. Her world is crueler than any I’ve played in before, but she strives for better. Her village was burned to the ground as a consequence of an ongoing war, and her mentor was an unintended casualty in a terrorist attack at a peace conference. At the moment in the story, she’s still reeling from the consequences, but I hope to tell the story of a woman who sees the worst of the world, and fights for better. In telling her story, I see who I want to be, and I see what I want to do.
The world feels to be in a constant stale of instability. There is widespread civil unrest. Everyone is recovering from a global pandemic that left millions dead, and billions stuck inside in isolation. Most of the global population lives in a state of struggle for one reason or another. People lack clean and safe water, or food, or air. Maybe all three. Leaders live at the top, some taking advantage of others, while some are content to turn a blind eye to the suffering below them. And you are just one person. Yet, nothing has changed. In a world riddled with problems, you still have the innate power to fix them.
Works Cited
Conle, Carola, and Michelle Boone. “Local Heroes, Narrative Worlds and the Imagination: The Making of a Moral Curriculum Through Experiential Narratives.” Curriculum Inquiry [Malden, USA], vol. 38, no. 1, 2008, pp. 7–37, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-873X.2007.00396.x.
Fiori, L. (2025, January 30). Dungeons & dragons: The history, impact and legacy of a cultural phenomenon | medium. Medium. https://medium.com/@louis-fiori/dungeons-dragons-the-history-impact-and-legacy-of-a-c ultural-phenomenon-b6a6b8c9e3af
Galov, N. (2025, November 11). How many people play D&D: The world’s most popular TRPG – Webtribunal. Web Tribunal. https://webtribunal.net/blog/how-many-people-play-dnd/
Nick, S. (2026, January 21). What can politicians learn from Dungeons & Dragons?. Colorado State University College of Liberal Arts. https://libarts.source.colostate.edu/as-dungeons-dragons-turns-50-should-more-political-l eaders-roll-the-dice/
Wright, Jennifer Cole, et al. “Imaginative Role-Playing as a Medium for Moral Development: Dungeons & Dragons Provides Moral Training.” The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 60, no. 1, 2020, pp. 99–129, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167816686263