The Boston Globe waxes poetic about Dungeons & Dragons and how it has influenced the popular culture for the past 30 years.

(can’t remember if the BG requires registration, excerpts below)

Peter Bebergal writes:

It started innocently enough. With a copy of “The Fellowship of the Ring” at my side and Styx on the record player, I was looking for something to help me rise above being bored, lonely, and unfulfilled. One day at school, a kid approached me. Having sensed in me an ally — the same urgent need to avoid getting beat up that day — he timidly asked if I wanted to play “D&D” after school.

(haha, Styx)

Our influence is now everywhere. My generation of gamers — whose youths were spent holed up in paneled wood basements crafting identities, mythologies, and geographies with a few lead figurines — are the filmmakers, computer programmers, writers, DJs, and musicians of today. I think, for the producers, the movie version of “The Lord of the Rings” was less about getting the trilogy off the page and onto the screen than it was a vicarious thrill, a gift to the millions of us who wished we could have dressed up as orcs and ventured into catacombs and castle keeps ourselves. Only a generation of imaginations roused by role playing could have made those movies possible.

I’d argue the influence went thusly, m’lord: LOTR (the book, ya creatins!) » D & D » MMOGs, et al, but D & D certainly did its part in carrying the torch. I, personally, never played D & D and none of my friends have ever admitted to doing so, (seems even more time-consuming than an orc-based MMOG), but the appeal of slaying dragons is universal.

That and ninjas.