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The fall of Constantinople wiped the last living Roman civilization from the Earth. The city’s refugees fled west, helping spark the Renaissance; its legacy shaped the religious traditions of millions and the modern map of Europe and the Middle East. The fall also inspired a book, which inspired a game, which inspired the world’s richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be.
Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to “burn in hell.” Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language.” After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to “the ire of the grognards”—a reference to early fans such as Musk—Musk asked, “How much is Hasbro?,” suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter.
D&D was the original role-playing game, a structure that has influenced every kind of genre fiction that followed. The game is more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds.
And for some fans, that’s a problem.
Fantasy and science fiction, with their imaginary cultures and creatures, their wars between evil monsters and honorable heroes, have always had a complex relationship with the concept of race, beginning with their foundational texts.
D&D wouldn’t exist without J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fantasy’s seminal 20th-century text, published in 1937. When Tolkien’s German publisher, to comply with Nazi racial laws, tried to determine whether the author was Jewish, Tolkien was outraged. A draft of his response reads: “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” He expressed his disgust to his British publisher: “I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”
[Read: The friends who have been playing the same game of Dungeons & Dragons for 30 years]
Unfortunately, a “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” permeated the era in which The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings series that followed it, were written, an era in which many Westerners believed that “races” shared particular natures, characteristics, and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books. Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had rejected.
Today, we can see their influence on right-wing populists in business and politics all over the world. The billionaire Peter Thiel named his software company, Palantir, after the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings, while his AI company, Anduril, is named for the sword of the human hero Aragorn. Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anduril and Palantir, founded a crypto-focused bank called Erebor, after the dwarfs’ mountain fortress. Vice President J. D. Vance named his venture-capital firm Narya, after Gandalf’s magic ring. Georgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy, and defender of “Italianity” against what she sees as the dilution of immigration, is a Tolkien obsessive who sees in hobbits, dwarfs, and elves the “value of specificity.” When Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in the 2000s, conservative writers embraced the films as a metaphor for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.
On the same day last month, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posted a meme analogizing immigrants to the armies of Mordor and the United States to the hobbits’ home, the Shire, while Musk wrote on X that the British need the far right to protect them from “illegal immigration,” just as the hobbits could “live their lives in peace and tranquility” only because they were protected by “the hard men of Gondor.”
The Lord of the Rings is the story of how two hobbits—from a “race” of short humanoids traditionally averse to conflict and adventure—journey to destroy the Ring of Power. The ring is an evil artifact created by the demigod Sauron, whose hordes of monstrous orcs, backed by men called Easterlings and Haradrim, are threatening to conquer the world. In their way stand the armies of Western men. (Many Tolkien fans pointed out that Musk’s post got those “hard men” wrong. They are proven time and again to be fallible and corruptible. It’s the hobbits who save the world. But maybe it’s not surprising that the planet’s richest man missed the point of a story about the corrupting nature of power.)
The most charitable interpretation is that, when he is discussing Middle-earth, Tolkien means species rather than race. Regardless, the late philosopher Charles Mills, a Tolkien fan, observed that Tolkien presents a picture of a “white civilization besieged by dark barbarity.” In it, elves are the “Fair Folk,” incarnations of “justice and beauty.” The scimitar-wielding Haradrim are “black men like half-trolls” and fight for Mordor alongside their allies, the “wild” and “savage” Easterlings. ” Orcs are described as “swart” and “slant-eyed,” the better for them to be seen as “black, utterly evil, lacking culture and history, the bottom link of Tolkien’s great chain of being.”
Mills points out that this interpretation is supported by Tolkien’s own writing about his inspirations. In private correspondence, Tolkien refers to the “White city” of Minas Tirith as “Byzantine” and the orcs as “repulsive versions” of Mongols. Rather than the orcs being a metaphor for Nazism or communism, the plot of The Lord of the Rings appears to be influenced by the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman empire—except in Tolkien’s telling, the Eastern Roman empire is victorious, and the slaughter of the orcs is considered no tragedy.
The point is not that Tolkien was a Nazi, or that people who enjoy or respect Tolkien (myself included) are Nazis. That would be a childish way to approach literature. But the ideas embedded in his influential stories have been reproduced in countless fictional works since. Few examples are more vivid than Dungeons & Dragons.
Dungeons & Dragons was born in the early 1970s, a few years after the insurance underwriter and cobbler Gary Gygax and a student named Dave Arneson met at a midwestern tabletop-gaming convention. At the time, war games using miniatures to enact fictional or famous battles were popular. Gygax and Arneson innovated by having each player inhabit just one character and interact with a storyteller, known as a Dungeon Master; together, the players and the DM improvise a storyline. The game involves dice rolls and numbers indicating character traits, rules, and a referee (the DM)—but the best way I can explain it is as a game of pretend.
I was a freak from the jump; I didn’t really have a chance. Black and Jewish with a father in the State Department, I spent my early life bouncing around Brazil and Italy before returning to Washington, D.C., in 1994, when I was 12. Abroad I was American, but when we returned to America I felt like a foreigner. So naturally, I fell in with the nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons—the “dorks, dweebs, freak machines, poindexters, and every stripe of pencil-necked geeks,” in the words of Ben Riggs, the author of the D&D history Slaying the Dragon.
It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl. Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned “noble savages” and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, the meaning was always there.
The second-edition rule book, the one I first played with, stated that the game’s references to “race” were not about “race in the true sense of the word: caucasian, black, asian, etc. It is actually a fantasy species for your character—human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfelf, or halfling. Each race is different. Each possesses special powers and has different lists of classes to choose from.” Some races, the rule book elaborates, “have fewer choices of character classes and usually are limited in the level they can attain. These restrictions reflect the natural tendencies of the races (dwarves like war and fighting and dislike magic, etc.).” For example, a halfling “can become the best thief in the land, but he cannot become a great fighter.”
An early D&D concept was the idea of “alignment”: Certain creatures are good, neutral, or evil, and, within those categories, are lawful, neutral, or chaotic. For example, an orc warrior is likely chaotic evil, while a human paladin is lawful good. In a 2005 forum post, Gygax wrote that it was fine for a lawful-good character to kill an evil character who had surrendered, because “the old adage of nits making lice applies”—intentionally or not quoting Colonel John Chivington, who led the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at the Sand Creek reservation. A congressional committee at the time referred to the slaughter as a “cowardly act” that gratified the “worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.” You might say 1860s lawmakers did not see it as lawful good.
Tolkien was hardly the only influence on D&D. But in the game, as in the books, certain characters’ fundamental traits were determined by their “race.” A dwarf couldn’t do magic; an orc was dumb and violent; an elf couldn’t be ugly. Although some “races,” such as humans, were capable of a range of classes and alignments, in a fundamental way characters were born into their proper place.
The prevalence of racial stereotypes in such games stems partly from the necessities of game design. Games, especially those meant for teenage boys, are likely to revolve around action and adventure, which means violence. A game designer needs disposable enemies—baddies who are immediately recognizable as such and whom you can slaughter without regret.
Austin Walker, a Black game designer who hosts the podcast Friends at the Table, described this to me as “a terrible alignment of design goal” and “cultural biases just being mashed together.” When you’re playing a game that involves “taking down the door and killing someone, you need to put someone behind the door who you’re willing to kill.”
[Read: The far right is becoming obsessed with race and IQ]
Another way to describe this imperative is that creators are often bound by the “hero’s journey,” Steven Dashiell, an American University professor and sociologist who studies games, told me. “The easy way to make sure that there is that moral struggle between good and evil is just to say that individuals of a particular group are inherently evil.”
One of the most enduringly legible symbols that a character is different and therefore more disposable is race. Of course, the fact that this is also true in the real world is the reason it became such an effective shorthand.
As a business, D&D always seemed to be in financial peril. But around the Great Recession, sales hit a nadir, while the retail hobby stores that doubled as hangout spots where many kids were introduced to the game started to close. No one expected the game to experience a sudden renaissance. But it did. In 2011, the sitcom Community ran a D&D-themed episode. The nostalgic horror show Stranger Things, which debuted in 2016, showed kids playing D&D together. As other geeky pastimes became more mainstream—such as Disney’s Marvel juggernaut—the stigma once associated with those activities began to fade, a process I’ll call “de-geekification.”
A technological innovation, however, may deserve the most credit for the game’s revival. After the streaming platform Twitch debuted in 2011, streamers began playing Dungeons & Dragons for audiences watching online. In 2015, a web series called Critical Role started broadcasting these “live play” games, featuring professional voice actors. Shows such as Critical Role, Dimension 20, and other series expanded the audience just in time for the pandemic, when people had a new need for activities they could do with friends remotely. Boom, Riggs told me: “D&D becomes bigger than ever.” Wizards told me that 85 million people have played D&D over the past year, and 21 million have registered on D&D Beyond, its online hub.
Many new fans are being introduced to the game not by playing it, but by watching other people play it first. In this format, D&D has become less about combat, and more about storytelling and improv acting. Live play has introduced D&D to a new, and more diverse, audience—more women, more queer people, and more players who happen to look a lot like the characters cast as disposable baddies.
Growing up in Orange County, California, in the 1990s, Aabria Iyengar was good at volleyball and improv. She was aware of D&D, but assumed it wasn’t for people like her. “The dynamics back in the day were very, like, male and young and predominantly white,” Iyengar told me. Then her boyfriend asked her if she wanted to play (“We need a cleric”), and something clicked. Dungeons & Dragons was, she realized, “a perfect tool to tell the stories we want to tell to ourselves and to others, about ourselves and about each other.”
Iyengar has a charismatic presence, and playing on Twitch with friends led to her trying out for Critical Role and eventually becoming the Dungeon Master for a spin-off, Exandria Unlimited.
Many longtime Dungeons & Dragons fans had recognized themselves in the game’s crude cannon fodder, yet still found a way to make the game their own. Black people, queer people, and women, Austin Walker told me, “were always there in the community, but always marginalized. That has shifted. We have found each other.”
Wizards saw that its audience was changing, and began to think about how it could make the game more inclusive. This was a major attitudinal shift: Back in 1975, when prodded about gender stereotypes in D&D, Gygax had written that he’d considered “adding women” to sections of the rule book, including “Raping and Pillaging,” “Whores and Tavern Wenches,” and “Hags and Crones,” as well as “adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking.’” The stereotype of the reactionary geek whose hatred for women manifests in imagining them as the victims of sexual violence is, let’s say, historically rooted.
But now the company was open to change. In June 2020, during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, the D&D development team acknowledged in a blog post that some earlier versions of the game offered portrayals of fantasy creatures that were “painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”
In 2022, Wizards announced that it would be removing the word race from the game and substituting species, noting that “‘race’ is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds.” It was also adjusting the “lore” of the “D&D multiverse to be more diligent in extracting past prejudices.” Since then, it has removed the kind of rules that made it difficult for hobbits to be fighters or for dwarfs to use magic, although different species retain distinct traits.
These changes weren’t just about women and people of color playing; Greg Tito, a former spokesperson and podcaster for Wizards, told me that white players “expected more and better from them too. And I think that was, you know, significant, because everyone was wanting D&D to do better.”
Well. Almost everyone.
If your identity was built around being a fan of a marginal pastime, de-geekification meant that suddenly, you weren’t as special anymore. Comic books, video games, fantasy and science fiction, role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons—they were all getting more popular, and trying to appeal to new audiences. Not everyone was happy with the changes that effort inspired.
Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who didn’t like the game getting “woke.” This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being quite as racist or sexist as they used to be.
Wizards had run versions of the game past audiences—“play testing”—and consistently found the same thing: “Fans definitely preferred it to be simpler,” Riggs told me. Many players, myself included, had always been turned off by all the rules, which could slow down the game tremendously and often led to session-killing arguments. But for D&D obsessives, the difficulties created by all the complexities were part of the fun. “Limitations breed their own kind of creativity,” Iyengar said. “So if you’re playing a character that cannot advance past a certain level because of their build, because of something innate to them, that becomes a problem to solve in a way that can be very pleasing.”
B. Dave Walters, an influencer who has served as the Dungeon Master for the Stranger Things cast, told me that earlier versions of the game were “very adversarial, and it was ‘hard-core,’ right?” Now “it is a collaborative story that you’re telling together.” He has “no problem” with people feeling nostalgic or preferring those older versions. The problem, he said, is when what “comes right after that is: therefore no girls allowed; therefore the plot of this adventure is the orcs have come and have enslaved all the women and the children.”
For Riggs, acknowledging racist or sexist material in earlier iterations of D&D is not a way to insult or denigrate its founding fathers, but a tribute to the power of what they made, despite their shortcomings. “The fact that D&D has spread all over the world into so many different cultures, subcultures, races, religions, etc., is proof of the power of the medium.” He added, “Clinging to the racist, sexist, troubling things that they put in the early editions of the game seems not only foolish, but disrespectful to the thing they created.”
Besides, players who didn’t like the new rules didn’t have to follow them: There is nothing stopping anyone from playing a version that still has the original restrictions, or ones that feature more traditionally heroic characters or storylines. The beauty of the game is that you can play it however you want at your table with your friends.
“It’s like, Buddy, it’s make-believe,” Walters said. “If you want evil orcs and chain-mail bikinis and slaves, you can do that at your house.”
“Go grab your boys,” Iyengar said. Go tell each other the story of “Lord of the Rings for the thousandth time. No one is threatening that, and frankly, no one cares.”
“Go play your game,” she said.
Maybe the most interesting thing about the reactionary backlash to D&D is that it’s not unusual. Virtually every geeky pastime has experienced something similar in the past decade or so, the downstream effect of de-geekification. In 2014, Gamergate began as a backlash to feminist criticism of video games. There was the follow-up “Comicsgate,” during which a bunch of female and nonwhite comic-book creators were harassed. Hard-core fans of Ghostbusters (this subculture was new to me) erupted over an all-woman reboot. Angry Star Wars fans review-bombed the Disney+ series The Acolyte, starring a Black woman, into oblivion—a process that began before the show even came out. Conservatives raged when the Amazon Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, did not feature a whites-only cast.
These backlashes all have the same basic catalyst, which is that companies trying to expand their profits have sought out more diverse audiences by creating content that features more than the usual, square-jawed white male hero. When the damsels who were supposed to be in distress and the members of the races that were supposed to be disposable began to be the protagonists, some fans experienced that as a kind of loss. And social media amplified those voices, even if they were a small contingent. Greg Tito suggested that the backlash was mostly an online chimera, and that “99 percent” of fans were cool with the changes. The 1 percent who weren’t just happened to include, well, the “one percent.”
We can all sympathize with someone who is disappointed by changes to something they have loved for a long time. But sometimes, this particular sadness is infused with something more sinister, a Trumpian nostalgia for a time when America was more segregated, and the hierarchies of race and gender that once defined American culture were more secure. That nostalgia can be manipulated into a belief that hounding and excluding newcomers will restore an idealized past that never existed.
In June, Musk invited X users to offer “divisive facts” on which to train Grok, the company’s AI chatbot. Lonsdale, the investor in Palantir, Anduril, and Erebor, responded: “Different races have different IQs, and that reality is a big determinant of their supposedly-cultural advantages and disadvantages.”
In an experiment run in July by my colleague Matteo Wong, Grok was the only one of five major chatbots willing to write a program that would “‘check if someone is a good scientist’ based on a ‘description of their race and gender.’” Musk has endorsed such biological determinism himself. He has repeatedly amplified racist pseudoscience from X users who post charts supposedly proving the criminality and intellectual inferiority of people of African descent. After one such user argued (based on highly dubious math) that some Black students at historically Black colleges and universities have IQs that indicate “borderline intellectual impairment,” Musk replied, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” referring to a United Airlines DEI program that recruited candidates from HBCUs. (There is, of course, no way to become a pilot without meeting the necessary requirements.)
[Matteo Wong: Elon Musk updated Grok. Guess what it said?]
The science backing up the idea that race can make someone a good or bad scientist or airline pilot is as solid as the logic behind “orcs can’t be wizards” or “a hobbit can never become a great fighter.” This vision of racial rigidity, in which people can be sorted into categories that quantify their potential, has nothing to do with genetics; it is a political creation, a descendant of the same racist pseudoscience that was prominent in Tolkien’s time. In this sense, what we call “scientific racism” could be called “fantasy racism” instead, a belief that people can be reduced to quantifiable numbers, like so many digits on a character sheet.
The races might be fantasy, but the effects of racism are real. After Musk’s DOGE gutted USAID, he insisted that “no one has died.” That wasn’t true. People had already died, and hundreds of thousands more will follow every year because America cut its food and medical aid to the world’s poorest. Anyone could have predicted this catastrophic human cost; Musk must not have cared. Perhaps he saw the dead of the global South as so many nameless orcs.
The changes to the D&D community, however, cannot be easily reversed—they are as much a product of the contemporary world as the original game was of the 1970s, and as Tolkien’s books were of his age. Iyengar told me she isn’t worried about Musk ruining D&D.
Musk is welcome to waste his money on “trying to make everyone play the version of D&D that he thinks should exist in the world,” Iyengar said. “That’s never been how that works. Everyone will play it how they want, or they’ll play something else.”
