Dungeons and Dragons: The Game National Security Experts Need to Play?

People have been playing Dungeons and Dragons for fifty years.  It’s unsurprising at this point that the game and its adherents have found their way into America’s immense national security enterprise. Indeed, the game’s impact is not limited to the US or even the English speaking world; the current edition is supported in six languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese) with bootleg translations available in several others. But beyond the raw fact of its existence, has D&D offered anything of use to the national security enterprise?  The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is a qualified “yes.”

Utility

Notwithstanding its origins as a simulation of individual combat prowess, Dungeons and Dragons is not a particularly useful engine for purposes such as evaluating small unit tactics. The resilience and armor systems are not well-suited to modern warfare, and while the turn-based combat system can capture a great deal of complexity, it is not necessarily a good simulation of how players make decisions in real-life. For example, a combat “round” in D&D lasts six seconds; it is not uncommon in a gaming situation for players to take six minutes to decide on a course of action, often digging through books and supplements in order to determine the most optimal spell or attack.

Rather than combat, D&D’s utility to the policy community largely revolves around process. The process of engaging in a D&D campaign (either as Dungeon Master or as a player) requires imagination, creativity, a willingness to accept and develop a narrative, and an ability to maintain long-term collaboration with a gaming group. These skills, in turn, have potential applications to the national security enterprise.

Ian Strebel and Matt McKenzie have argued that D&D can help train intelligence professionals to develop narratives, storytelling that makes information intelligible to the consumer and to the professionals themselves. Raw intelligence is incredibly difficult to interpret without having a narrative that links bits of information to other bits of information and helps the analyst generate a big picture. That the big picture can sometimes be deceiving doesn’t mean that narrative is bad, it just demands a better narrative; some story needs to link the data together or there’s simply nothing of any use to policymakers. Dungeons and Dragons, at its best, is about generating a coherent narrative from a seemingly random series of events. The open nature of the game system helps develop creativity and skills for managing the unexpected. Indeed, Strebel and McKenzie even develop a set of recommendations for convincing skeptical leaders to give the game a try.

Rex Brynen argues that the practice of developing scenarios within a D&D system helps professional wargamers to better develop scenarios in those professional contexts. Being a Dungeon Master helps to create skills of world-building, lateral thinking, and maintaining player engagement, all issues that often confound professional wargaming. D&D thus represents a subset of professional national security’s increasing interest in wargaming. To this we should add that participation in many of the wargames and simulations that increasingly populate the national security landscape requires a degree of role-playing and self-immersion that comes easier to tabletop gamers than to many others that populate the policy community. Pretending to be an elven priest in a long-term struggle against orcish vampires isn’t exactly the same thing as pretending to be one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the skill developed in the former help in facilitating the latter.

D&D has also proven useful in therapeutic contexts, giving veterans and opportunity to work through the complications of returning to civilian life in collaborative ways, ways more productive than spending time in a bar. Some campaigns established during military careers outlast the end of those careers, allowing veterans to hold onto connections with people who have shared experiences. As an immersive hobby (sometimes to the point of obsession), D&D can fill the time and exercise the mind to a degree that is sometimes difficult to match through other therapeutic techniques.

Dungeons and Dragons and NATSEC Community

During a moral panic in the 1980s, D&D came under attack from religious conservatives concerned about its Satanic overtones. Like most moral panics, this moment has passed, and by and large even the most sensitive elements of the national security enterprise now consider D&D to be harmless at worst. With an innovative and enthusiastic fanbase, it’s not difficult to envision players developing new ways of harnessing the most useful parts of the game for national security purposes.

About the Author: Dr. Robert Farley

Dr. Robert Farley has taught security and diplomacy courses at the Patterson School since 2005. He received his BS from the University of Oregon in 1997, and his Ph. D. from the University of Washington in 2004. Dr. Farley is the author of Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), the Battleship Book (Wildside, 2016), Patents for Power: Intellectual Property Law and the Diffusion of Military Technology (University of Chicago, 2020), and most recently Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages (Lynne Rienner, 2023). He has contributed extensively to a number of journals and magazines, including the National Interest, the Diplomat: APAC, World Politics Review, and the American Prospect. Dr. Farley is also a founder and senior editor of Lawyers, Guns, and Money.