“Why don’t we just do it ourselves?”
his friend, Woody Minshew, then 25, suggested.
They found they enjoyed playing together for an audience, and people were eager to join their community.
They also wanted to make the game as accessible as possible.
Things took off in 2023 after aclipof their stream went viral.
They had tapped into the growing market of tabletop role-players.
For a select few streamers, the boom has been incredibly lucrative.
The nerds are taking over and they may have the solution to America’s loneliness crisis.
She’d never played D&D before but found herself captivated by the storytelling.
As she watched the group’s streams, she familiarized herself with the game’s lingo. "
Wright became an active participant in the group’s Discord andTwitchchats, which now have several thousand members.
“I didn’t realize how close to burnout I actually was,” she says.
People became regulars and we all learned each other’s names," Wright says.
I walked into my local game store just with the intention of asking about it," she says.
She was immediately hooked.
“I met some of my now best friends that day,” she says.
In the past decade, tabletop role-playing games have taken on a new life.
“It was such a phenomenon,” Knight says.
The show’s success made Hannah Minshew, one of the Bards, suddenly feel cool.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I know what a Mind Flayer is.
I have this exotic information that you all don’t.
Let me teach you.
I’m the cool guy,'” she laughs.
Based on traffic to its website, the gaming siteGoonhammerestimates the game has 2.4 million players each month.
Pascall’s son Ian was 10 years old at the time.
“It was nice to see role-playing games through the eyes of someone who hadn’t played before.”
His daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, drives two hours to make the sessions.
Pascall has noticed a big shift in the culture from when he was playing.
“In the ’80s, being called a nerd was a massive insult.
We’re all nerds now.
It’s all one big group.
It’s like, ‘I don’t care if you don’t have social skills.
Come play with us.'”
A lot of times we grow out of play and out of imagination," she tells me. "
It’s considered something that’s for children."
“I can’t think of many hobbies where you get to do this.”
No one else knew that it was happening but he gained so much from it," Walsh says.
“D&D gives you a really safe place to do that.”
Prosser says that the expectation of who a D&D player is has changed significantly over the years.
Prosser used to play in a group that was made up entirely of women players. "
People would think it was strange that a group of women performing artists wanted to play D&D.
That’s not the case anymore," she says.
“At least in most of the circles that I run in.”
As the internet fosters more avidfan communities, nothing feels as niche as it once did.
Today, fandom is just the air we breathe.
Aimee Pearcyis a freelance journalist who writes about technology and digital culture.
