'It is important that it be fully detailed': What the BBC makes of D&D down the ages

While idly looking at cricket scores on the BBC website earlier today I came across a link to this recent 5 minute 'BBC sounds' podcast on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of D&D. This took me down a rabbit hole, in which some quick Google searches dug up other brief BBC coverage of D&D down the ages; here are two fun examples (the first of which because it features Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, Joe Dever and other luminaries of the early British D&D/Warhammer scene, the latter of which because it features Gary Gygax):

I was intrigued by what these efforts all fail to achieve, more than what they actually show. The BBC Sounds' 2024 piece (I don't know if it is accessible outside of the UK) is chiefly revealing of contemporary anxieties, focusing almost entirely on the fact that the audience for D&D has increasingly become more diverse, but that there is still 'more to be done'. The first of the two videos (from 1983), on the other hand, is more like an exercise in anthropology; one could imagine an identical approach and tone being adopted in a National Geographic documentary shot on the Sentinel Islands. The second of the two videos, meanwhile, simply gives the opportunity for Gygax to expound, in between some short segments at a gaming convention in London, in the manner of an academic at a tutorial in an Oxbridge college. None of them comes close to explaining what D&D actually is, or takes any time to document what happens in a typical session. If one were a layperson, one would be absolutely none the wiser. The only continuity between them is a certain wryness on the part of the documentarian, and a sense that some terribly nerdy people are doing something kooky.

That's fine, of course; it's probably pretty accurate. But I do find it interesting that 'normies' find it so difficult to process the nuts and bolts of a D&D game. There are likely two reasons for this. On the one hand I think it is probably the case that D&D enthusiasts are not always very clear, or consistent, in what they think the hobby is all about. Some of the people being interviewed in the various clips seem to be describing communal storytelling; others (like Gygax himself) emphasise how it is all about worldbuilding; others suggest it is about exploring oneself; still others that it is 'like a board game' that goes on inside the participants' heads. On the other hand, when faced with something that is a bit difficult to initially conceptualise, it is human nature to default to the assumption that it is basically and irredeemably incomprehensible and weird - there is clearly a bit of that going on in the heads of the producers of all three clips.

All of this I suppose reinforces, obliquely, what it is that makes D&D so successful, 50 years on. It defies easy summary; it is protean. No two groups play even the same edition of the game the same way, let alone its different variants, and this malleability (what Ron Edwards would have labelled its 'incoherence') is clearly its strongest selling point as a role playing game. Some time ago, I heard the advertising executive Rory Sutherland comment that the reason why McDonald's was more successful than KFC was that not everybody always wants to eat fried chicken, but there's something on a McDonald's menu to provide a mediocre meal for any palate on almost any occasion. Its comparative lack of definition is in fact its great virtue. There is definitely something similar at work in the enduring appeal of D&D.