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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 4420610" data-attributes="member: 59082">Forked from: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showpost.php?postid=4420456" target="_blank"> D&D needs to grow up </a>This is an intriguing idea. Care to go further with this? (I also noticed that Dragon Snack felt the same way, or if anyone else wants to chime in).I assume that you at least partially mean that D&D needs to reach out of its ghetto, become socially relevant or at least legitimate in the eyes of the non-gaming public. We all know that even now D&D has a negative connotation to many people as, at best, dorky and childish and thus ignored, or at worst, pathological and even satanic.But I think you are pointing to something more than just social acceptability, or at least my mind starts thinking in terms of artistic sensibility and, while still connected to D&D's publich persona, its place as a valid form of art, whether we're talking game design, role-playing, campaign creation, or any other aspect of table-top gaming. In other words, social legitimacy isn't only whether or not D&D and other others RPGs are anathema to non-gamers, but whether it can be part of the larger cultural sphere as a valid art-form that incorporates many different creative elements, from performance to fantastical world design to visual art, and so forth. Maybe as the bulk of gamers continues to age--the "Gamer Boomers" of the early 80s are now in their 30s or older--we may see a new wave of RPGs coming out, designed by adults for adults, and thus, perhaps, more consciously geared towards artistry. Now we've already seen a lot of that, especially in the post-White Wolf 1990s, but it seems to me that much of that was overly self-conscious, as if designers were trying too hard (to be artsy and) to forge out of the gamer ghetto. In other words, it seems that the White Wolf material and many of its "children" were created more with an "extended adolescence" in mind, rather than an actual adult art form, autonomous from poles of rebellion and conformity.  I'm just riffing on this, but my sense is that those early attempts of RPGs-as-art re-fortified the ghetto even more.So yeah, I am interested in the idea that D&D could "grow up" out of its (adolescent) ghetto, both in terms of social acceptance and artistic legitimacy.</blockquote>

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