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Robichaud, Christopher, ed. Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. 240pp. Paperback. ISBN: 978-1-118-39762-6. $19.95 (print)/ $9.99 (e-book).
Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy is a new volume in Blackwell's long running Philosophy and Pop Culture series, which seeks to provide insight into, and promote interest in, philosophy by engaging with popular cultural texts. (This work should not be confused with Open Court's similarly titled Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom [2012], edited by Cogburn and Mark Silcox.) Given series editor William Irwin's overview, it appears that Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy has two major goals. The first is the series' overarching goal of demonstrating that philosophy is not a dusty, dry subject, irrelevant to modern life, but instead that it has relevancy in current areas of study. The second is to use Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) to illustrate philosophical questions and to test philosophical theory, thus demonstrating the usefulness of philosophy as a critical approach to the game and its ancillary materials. It is worth noting from the outset that this book is intended to be a primer that whets the appetite for further study of philosophy, not to provide detailed analysis and in-depth criticism. In this respect, the book succeeds fairly well, with a couple of caveats.
The volume is made up of a short introduction by Robichaud followed by fifteen essays divided into six major parts. The book covers a lot of ground. The first part, "Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil," focuses on discussions of free will, good and evil, and the relevant philosophical and metaphysical approaches.1 How philosophy and role-playing games (RPGs) can help conceptualize death, otherness, and perceptions of self occurs in section two, "So Did You Win? Philosophy and D&D Gameplay." Parts three and four, "Crafting Worlds" and "Foray into the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance," move into the more general territory of world building and fantasy narratives, engaging in discussions useful to literary analysts and creative writers. The last two parts, "The Ethics of Spellcasting" and "Dungeons & Dragons out in the Real World," take the game's concepts and demonstrate their usefulness in engaging in thought about the real world, especially feminist and queer theory,...