by Carl Knight

Created on: April 28, 2008   Last Updated: August 26, 2011

When I think of the days and nights I've spent in the throes of a tense game of D&D, what occurs to me most is not that it was demonic or evil in any sense; what I think of most is my high school locker.

I did not play D&D through my high school years. Bookworm that I was, I spent my time in study. I achieved top marks and graduated valedictorian. However, I was never neat about it, which is where my high school locker, my pungent, sloppy, cluttered to inaccessibility, possible candidate for quarantine high school locker, comes into the picture.

When you leave high school and enter a work force you soon discover that the friends for life you had in school aren't around much anymore and the spaces they leave fill up with new friends. It was the same for me and the new people I fell in with were gamers. They were people who swore off the norms of singles bars and rowdy inebriation; a crowd who saw themselves as different in that they would rather exercise their minds instead of medicating their bodies. They were, I found, much like me. They were the library crowd, the bookstore guys, comic book collectors, readers and writers and sketchers of the fantastic.
And they had a game some of them wanted me to try (a few of them were skeptical at first thinking me a nerd of the first water.)

I tried their game and found myself enthralled by the freedom of it. I also found myself hindered by my sloppy school habits. My inability to organize necessary paperwork, figures, dice, books, tallies and items. So poor were my managerial skills at the beginning of my gaming days that I was encouraged by one of my female friends to show up for the game a half-hour early so she could organize it all for me. A motherly gesture which left me feeling somewhat shamed.

After a few weeks of almost nightly gaming my habits had changed and I had become a prince of order. After a few out-of-town trips to game and specialty stores I was soon carrying notebooks with dragons pictured on the front. Folders, also with dragons, leather bags full of rattling dice. I almost didn't need the books anymore because I knew them so well, but being a prince of order, I kept them within page-turning range.

Certainly you will find the theme and symbols of evil within those books. Always you will find people as evil and powerful as you can "imagine."

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying "imagination is more important than intelligence."  I believe him. All of what we know was imagined first. From toaster ovens to the computer on which we write were all just an idea before they came into being and took up space.  I cannot "imagine" that a game which inspires a person to use their imagination the way D&D does can be called "Satanic." My locker was Satanic; it represented the worst in me and, quite possibly, led to Hell if you dug deep enough.

God is a creator. We, in his image, are creators too. In the hands of evil we would be allowed no imaginations because it is the foundation of creation.
You may call Dungeons and Dragons satanic if you want, the players won't mind; they'll merely shake their heads at your closed mind and roll another saving throw.

D&D helped me improve myself in a small way. I think of my locker today and I laugh at the unorganized boy I was and thank God I was shown a way to change.

Learn more about this author, Carl Knight.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.