Escape to Now

Since I stopped teaching full time a couple of years ago, I’ve become an unabashed fan of the work coming out of Dropout. These days I watch most of their game shows, as well as their brilliant productions of standup comedy that often verges on performance art. However, I found my way in through their series of live and recorded games of Dungeons & Dragons called Dimension 20, in particular the Fantasy High series.

Now, Andrea Long Chu has written a fun deep dive into the history and world of the game, where she reflects on her observations as a now practicing dungeon master, which is the person who facilitates these games:

But conventional wisdom holds that talking about one’s campaign is about as interesting as talking about one’s dreams. Most D&D campaigns are private affairs that leave few traces outside of scribbled notes and fond memories. No description can capture the rush of the game or the general anarchy wrought by the whims of the dice and the spontaneity of the players. For this reason, it is difficult to develop a proper aesthetic account of D&D. It is less like reviewing a book and more like reviewing a book club.

More of my work these days is focused on designing courses than on teaching, which means I’m not always as involved with students personally, and Andrea’s perspective holds something that’s true for me about courses too. In my experience teaching a great course is much more akin to running a book club than offering a book. It’s great to be able to offer a good book to folks, and I don’t kid myself: courses designed for learners to go through at their own pace are texts—even if they involve formats like video explainers or tutorial walk-throughs.

What I admire about Dimension 20’s approach to releasing well-produced live games, is that it feels like an in-between of a text and a club. They’ve prepared things with two audiences in mind: the players in the recording, who interact with the facilitator and drive the action and story forward through their characters; and the audience at home, watching all of this unfold. It’s less engaging than playing the game yourself, but comes closer to capturing the spirit and feeling of a liver interactive space for what is essentially passive consumption.

I’ll be curious to try a format like this for classes in the future as an experiment, to run a live course with a small group of students who can ask real questions and run into real problems in the moment, allowing them to act as student surrogates for others who can enjoy the course on their own time from home, in a different way.

The question on my mind is: how do you bottle up the urgency of the present moment? How can you make that moment re-livable in a future “now” with its own kind of urgency and potency?