There's something of a nerdy mystique around the role-playing Dungeons & Dragons game, but it's really just about friends having fun
Shaun Garea. Photo: Shaun Garea / Supplied
It's 1974 and the kings of the nerd world are hunched over tables and desks drawing maps and brainstorming ideas.
Fantasy monsters that will become staples of pop culture for decades to come, and rules for a game that will be played by millions, are drafted and written. Maps are drawn, open ended stories are created.
Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson have envisioned a game based on a shared imaginary space sustained by its players; one that only really requires some paper, pencils and dice to play. D&D has been born and it will go well beyond the Wisconsin basement where it started.
Chris Wetzel is living evidence of the reach D&D has. A full decade before the invention of the internet, he and his friends in New Plymouth were devouring everything wargaming related and that included some of the first ever iterations of what would become D&D.
"You talk about nerds now, we were not even geeks or nerds those days, we were just crazy people," he says.
A life of TTRPGs, or tabletop role playing games, had an impact. Wetzel says it did him a lot of good.
"I was a drug addict and a junkie for thirty-eight years; it's changed my life and my outlook. It's given me something to hold onto; it's given me an anchor."
Seventy years old and with no regrets, the research reveals that Chris is far from the only one to have taken value from D&D.
A lab dedicated to exploring the link between tabletop games and mental health was started last year by a small team of researchers from Massey University.
Role-playing exercises have long been a part of many therapy techniques in the form of cognitive behavioural therapy, but GRAIL aims to examine the effect of TTRPGs and board games specifically. It's the first of its kind in Aotearoa. As researcher, and co-founder of GRAIL Shaun Garea puts it -
"When people are engaging in these games, they are entering into a play space which allows them to take on a character and allows them to explore in the safety of the game space and do things verbally and act things out they wouldn't normally be able to do a lot of the time."
Those who might be questioning aspects of their identity, such as people unsure of their sexuality or gender identity, can find value in slipping into the skin of a character in a place free of judgement.
"The choices that you make have a safety net, there's a saying that nothing will stop creativity more than the fear of making a mistake, and the idea within a roleplaying game is the fear of making a mistake is often gone, because it's all part of the game."
Now in its fiftieth year, it's clear that TTRPGs have grown well beyond the scope set by those two men who drew maps in a basement in an unassuming American neighbourhood.
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