That game in Stranger Things

Season 2 of Stranger Things is about to drop. And it's been a desperate year and a half of waiting. Steve and Eleven have been in TV commercials. Mike was in IT. This kind of nonsense goes to show how badly we are jonesing for another hit of our Netflix obsession.

Stranger Things represents a new kind of sub-genre of TV and movies, which I will dub "80s kids vs. spooky stuff Nostalgia." This genre purposefully imitates movies like E.T, Monster Squad, The Goonies, or the Lost Boys.
Another example of this would be the new IT movie, which for no accident was transplanted from its original setting the 50s to the 80s.

In the base-genre of "kids vs spooky stuff", children or adolescents are confronted with threats and challenges beyond the pale of everyday life. This plays on a couple different levels: It is an exciting catharsis for children, who are continually challenged by their limitations as such. For adults, it is a reminder that childhood was not a carefree, idyllic state, but that it was frightening! The playground was a jungle, and Lord of the Flies is more ethnography than allegory.
The 80s nostalgia element is appealing because it reminds us of how starkly life has changed since the advent of digital technology and the internet. 80s nostalgia shows us an era when "Free-Range" children were the rule and not the exception: Children swear gleefully whenever the parents are absent, which is often. Even the nerdy Indoor-Kids are feral by today's standards.
When Will is being chased by the Demogorgon, he can't text his mom. The setting precludes this. Instead, he runs for the shed and arms himself with a .22 rifle which he is clearly familiar with.

But how does a small, shy, sensitive boy like Will develop these monster-slaying impulses?

is how.

Stranger Things is not a subtle work. The Duffer Bros. are gleefully obvious about their influences and homages. The first two scenes of ST clearly parallel those of E.T. In the first scene, we are shown something creepy which we don't understand yet. Then we cut to a group of suburban boys around a table playing what looks like a board game. Except it isn't a board game and it seems to involve a lot of arguing over magic spells.
The title of the game is never explicitly mentioned - likely for reasons having to do with copyright and licensing - But to anyone in the know, it is clearly Dungeons & Dragons.

I love D&D, and I watched with glee as Stranger Things used it as a framing device to explain what was happening in the story. I was also pleased by how ST accurately portrayed D&D, which is something filmmakers have an odd difficulty with.

That the boys play D&D is as big a part of the 80s setting as the Cold War conspiracy or the landline phones. Dungeons and Dragons has been unspeakably influential in popular culture. But despite this, it is still thing which many people may have heard of, though they don't really know what it is.
The purpose of this article is to clear the mist around D&D, in case it come up in the new season.  

D&D is the original table top role-playing game. In this game, players cooperate to create a narrative in a shared imaginary space. But that is a lot to unpack. And explaining D&D is notoriously difficult to do well.

I hope/predict the science teacher will turn out to be a monster-slaying badass. Also, this is my face when I try to explain D&D.

In the 50s and 60s, there were no videogames. Instead, there was War-gaming. War games were played with miniature plastic or pewter figurines, and there were rules for how the units could move and how to resolve attacks. Wargames evolved from exercises meant to teach tactics to military officers.

Then, in the early 1970s, some guys developed rules for wargaming in a medieval setting. In the back of the book, as an "afterthought," were additional rules for fantastic, Tolkien-esque battles. All the guys playing wargames then (as now) were really into science-fiction and fantasy. So Fantasy Wargaming caught on embarrassingly quickly.

Almost immediately after, another guy in the same group of people had the Big Idea of changing the rules and the scale of the game so that instead of controlling a whole army of the field of battle, the players would control individual characters as they stormed a castle dungeon.

This change lead to an entirely different sort of game. The scope of the action become much finer and more detailed. Players suddenly became interested in deciding what their character did, what they said, what they wanted to accomplish. The game became about playing out the adventures and careers of a small group of heroes, who were in a sense stand-ins for the players.

These rules were published as the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. But this sort of game was so unlike anything else, that it would be several more years before the term "Role-Playing Game" was invented to describe it. In the years since, hosts of other RPGs have been developed, featuring all kinds of settings and rules-sets. But D&D is the most well known. Its medieval-fantasy setting is filled with ideas which new players can easily understand, and the rules are broad enough to be versatile.

When the ST kids are playing D&D, Mike is in charge of the game. He describes the scene, and the action, and the approach of the Demogorgon. Will, Lucas and Dustin have characters and discuss their plan of action. Mike has a cardboard screen hiding his side of the table where he keep his notes.

The action of a D&D game happens in the imaginations of the people playing. The figurines and maps on the table are not the point of the game, but merely a concrete reference so that the players can keep their shared imaginary space consistent.
While the players of an RPG are generally responsible for a single character, one player is responsible for "Running" the game. He or she is the one who invents the scenarios, describes the scenes to the other players, adjudicates the rules,  and describes the results of the players actions.
In D&D, this player is called the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master (DM) places monsters, traps, mysteries and challenges before the players. But the DM is not the adversary of the other players. The DM's job is to manage a game which will challenge the players and keep them interested.
A Dungeon Master wins when the other players are more interested in the game than in their phones. It's not an easy thing to do well, and this blog is basically a chronicle of my attempt to be good at DMing.

Traditional RPGs provided the foundations for electronic gaming. Most any game with fantasy themes, or in which characters have "classes" or "level up" has roots in D&D. Any videogame in which a character's capabilities are numerically quantified is said to have "RPG elements."
Yet computer-based games lack much of the freedom, flexibility and spontaneity of table-top RPGs in which you and your friends are the program  and system. Videogame titles are often praised for the variety of actions which  they permit a player to take. But traditional RPGs are by their nature, games in which anything can be attempted, and there is no divide between the players and the creators of the game.

So if D&D and traditional RPGs have been so widely influential, why are they such an esoteric, occult sort of thing? Simply, because they've been Occulted.
In the late 80s and early 90s, there was a bizarre moral panic in America, now referred to as the Satanic Panic. It was an odd resurgence in public fear of witchcraft and Satanism. If an unsolved crime was a little weird, local police would suspect that it was the work of Satanist.  People would go to hypnotherapists and suddenly recover memories of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" in the same way they might suddenly remember being abducted by aliens.
D&D was steamrolled by the Satanic Panic. The D&D rulebooks detail how to run magic and devilish creatures in the game. A certain demographic of people thought that these were literal instruction-manuals of sorcery and devil-worship, and decided that D&D players were The Enemy in the spiritual war for all of creation. A famous example of this ideology is the infamous tract by Jack Chick.
In 1985, 60 Minutes did a segment on the issue, thus legitimizing the panic for the average TV watcher.
This negative press and Satanic Panic spookified the hobby and drove it into obscurity. But this witchy vibe made it a fine accoutrement for a show like Stranger Things.

Another victim of the Satanic Roleplaying scourge?

There are plenty of fan theories and other articles which detail how the reference to the Demogorgon (a two-headed demon) is a metaphor for the link between Eleven and the monster. Or how the Upside-Down parallels the cosmology of certain D&D settings. So I won't go into that.

The first Season of ST had three parallel storylines going on; one with the adults,  another for the teenagers, and another for the kids. Of these three groups, the kids are the most mentally well-equipped to confront the dangers which confront them, and they generally have the best idea of what is going on. By making Will, Mike, Lucas and Dustin into such strong protagonists, the Duffer Brothers are tacitly endorsing Dungeons and Dragons and saying that the game benefits its players.

I love D&D and RPGs. They are a game which the players can truly own, and which can be about anything and everything. Stranger Things is a fun show which endorses my enthusiasm. I hope that ST can help to introduce intelligent, interesting people to the hobby.

And frankly I hope to see even more of D&D fan-service in Season 2.