When in Rome — or Cabo or Tokyo — put down your phone.
Many of us have been there: sitting in the middle of some beautiful destination on a much-anticipated getaway, on the beach or in the mountains or wherever strikes our fancy, and … staring at our phones. The little screen so often trumps the giant screen that is real life, even in moments when the intention is to take a break from the little screen and the day-to-day stress it brings with it.
There are plenty of ways our phones make travel easier. We have fast, immediate access to reviews, ratings, and recommendations to help guide our decisions. We snap pictures to capture memories and share them with others. And, of course, there’s GPS — truly, we ask ourselves, how did anyone ever find anything before the existence of Google Maps? The truth is, they did find things, and everything turned out fine.
For all the ways modern technology can improve our vacations, it can also make them worse. It’s an obvious point that checking your work emails when you’re supposed to be off sucks. What’s perhaps not so obvious is that posting to Instagram when you’re on a boat floating by a glacier in Patagonia kind of does, too. When you’re back at the hotel, Instagram and the picture you just took will still be there for the posting, but the glacier won’t (not only because you left, but also, eventually, because of climate change).
Living and dying by internet recommendations sometimes means that we all end up in the same places and have a miserable time for it, and we’re so focused on checking off the prototypical what-to-do boxes that we forgo more niche activities we might enjoy more. We stare at Google Maps for the majority of a 20-minute walk to get to the restaurant a handful of YouTube influencers say is a must-try, missing the 15 restaurants that might have been great in the interim. Getting the picture for Instagram may help us enjoy and remember the visuals of a place more, but that can come at the expense of the rest of the experience. We often pull out our phones to entertain ourselves during some downtime, not realizing that the exercise might actually make us more bored.
I’m not saying we all need to throw our phones into the ocean when we go on vacation, but it is worth pausing to ask whether we’re accidentally ruining our time away a little bit because we just can’t quit the portable internet device we carry around with us 24/7.
“People primarily use their phones for leisure, that’s how phones are marketed, that’s how they’re sold. They’re lifestyle enhancers, they’re leisure devices,” said Andrew Lepp, a professor at Kent State University who studies the impact of mobile phones and social media on behavior. “The question then is: Do they enhance our leisure or do they distract from it? It can do both, but if we’re not careful, it can diminish our experience of leisure.”
Your phone on vacation might be kind of fine … until you get sucked in
It is at the very least difficult — though not impossible — to abandon your phone entirely when traveling. The device often serves as your plane ticket, your credit card, and your tour guide. In the age of QR code menus, you often need a phone to figure out what a restaurant is serving. At some hotels, it turns into your room key, too. (That these scenarios are less than ideal for people without a smartphone is worth chewing on, but that’s a separate story.)
Some of this is generally positive. It’s nice not to have to memorize trip details because you can keep them on your phone; it’s great to be able to grab an Uber in a few taps. When your phone frees up space in your brain for other activities, that’s a plus. The problem is that once you look at your phone for one thing you do need it for, it’s easy to get sucked in. Who among us hasn’t gone to check the weather, only to get distracted by whatever notifications have appeared and never figure out whether it’s supposed to rain?
“There’s a functional purpose to the technology that facilitates our experience, but the convenience of having it in our hand lures us into the trap of relying on it too extensively to document when maybe we’re better off experiencing,” said Nathaniel Barr, a professor specializing in cognitive psychology at Sheridan College whose research has examined the ways we use smartphones as a sort of extended mind. It’s not bad to use your phone to externalize some tasks, like storing your hotel reservation or remembering your itinerary, but the problem arrives when you start using it to check social media and read work emails just as you always would.
Lauren, a finance manager for a large manufacturing company in New Jersey, checked her work email while waiting for a flight to Florida on a Sunday evening in March. She decided to text her boss about one message regarding an upcoming audit with her thoughts. That opened up a can of worms of communications that she wasn’t able to escape for much of her trip — instead, she wound up with a constant stream of texts and calls from colleagues.
When I asked why she responded to the initial Sunday evening email, she joked, “Because I hate myself, I have no idea.” Lauren, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as to not put her complaints about her job on blast, just can’t stay away from work — she’s been forwarding emails to colleagues intermittently throughout her trip. And it’s not just work that has her distracted. “I was lying by the pool and had a book in my hand, a drink on my other side, but still, I was scrolling on Instagram, I don’t even know why. There was nothing even that interesting,” she said. Leaving her phone in her room isn’t an option — it serves as her room key, too.
The distracting effects of phone use can cancel out some of the phone’s benefits, explained Alixandra Barasch, a marketing professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. She pointed to the specific example of taking photos. Her research has shown that taking photos increases the enjoyment of positive experiences and that it can lead people to better remember what they saw as they pay closer attention to the visual details of their surroundings to figure out the picture. But once the person goes to post the photo they just took on social media, the scenario shifts. “Whenever social media or other types of sharing becomes part of the experience, it actually distracts from our photo-taking benefits,” Barasch said.
People experience “self-presentation concerns,” she explained, meaning they get anxious when thinking about how others will view their lives and experiences. “The same trade-off applies if I’m taking notes, if I’m tweeting, having text-based conversations — that’s good if it immerses you, if it makes you attend to new details that you otherwise wouldn’t have noticed,” she said. “But the downside is when you’re thinking about how others are going to view it.”
Being so focused on any one thing, including photos, might mean missing out on other important parts of a vacation experience, too. Those taking photos are less likely to remember what they hear, say, from a tour guide, or they don’t pay attention to what their food tastes like or the music they’re hearing. My colleague Brian Resnick had a great story a few years back on how smartphones affect your memory. “We have limited attentional resources because we’re human,” Barasch said.
That little entertainment device might actually accomplish the opposite
Using your phone more can make you feel more anxious and, perhaps more surprisingly, more bored — the opposite of what one sets out to accomplish when vacationing. Lepp said that just 15 minutes of staring at social media on their smartphone can cause an increase in boredom and a decrease in positive emotions. In other words, when you pull out your phone to entertain yourself, you might be accomplishing the opposite.
“When you think about activities that really make you feel good, like a deep sense of enjoyment, that really absorb your attention, those are activities that are challenging, that require a little bit of skill,” Lepp offered up as an explanation.
There just aren’t a lot of activities that a phone presents us with that can sustain our concentration for a prolonged period of time. “A lot of what we do on the phone is relatively simple,” Lepp said. “Scrolling through social media is probably one of the most time-consuming things a person does on the phone, and it doesn’t take any effort at all, so we get bored quickly.”
Make a plan to stay off your phone for your next getaway — and try to stick to it
There’s no surefire way to make sure you don’t sabotage your next trip because you can’t get off your phone — and let’s be honest here, you’re definitely bringing it with you. It’s a good idea to try to set limits for yourself ahead of time. You might want to delete certain apps altogether, especially because phones are designed to suck you in, like a little vibrating siren song that never stops. Or you can just try to be extra intentional about staying away.
How well any of this might work is a bit of an open question. “That requires us to have self-control, and the research shows that if there’s one thing humans have a hard time with, it’s doing the things they say they want to do,” Barr said. “It’s the say-do gap. We all have the best of intentions — to eat healthier, to exercise more, to save money — and closing that gap between our intentions and our actions is incredibly difficult.”
Emily, from Texas, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, set out to be intentional about her phone use on a recent trip to New Orleans and was largely successful. She says her screen time dropped from eight hours a day, adding “don’t judge me,” to two or three. “In the mornings, whenever I first woke up, I would catch myself and say, ‘Okay, you’ve been on your phone too long, let’s get up, go take a shower, and get out,’” she said. “I just wanted to experience life, and you’re not really experiencing life if you’re on your phone.”
I, too, tend to think about being on my phone too much and missing out on life a lot, including and especially when I’m traveling. And still, whenever I’m on vacation, I catch myself staring at Instagram and sneaking into Slack and peeking at emails multiple times a day instead of taking in whatever is going on around me. My phone once again morphs into a device for wasting time, this time from an exotic location.
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
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The cannibal feast of the hit Showtime drama has finally begun.
The cannibal feast that Yellowjackets promised viewers in the first moments of its pilot episode has finally begun. Showtime’s critical smash began last year with a horrific vision of a girl’s soccer team, stranded in the wilderness for over a year after a freak plane crash, hunting, killing, and ritually devouring one of their teammates. Throughout the first season, though, it was never clear how the titular Yellowjackets got to the point of eating one another’s flesh — until now. In “Edible Complex,” the second episode of the second season, the surviving Yellowjackets devour the roasted body of one of their old teammates.
Our protagonists haven’t quite gotten to the point of the highly ritualized cannibalism that we saw in the pilot episode. Team captain Jackie is already dead of (mostly) natural causes when the Yellowjackets eat her, and they don’t cook her intentionally. They’re trying to cremate her, but a fluke snowdrift transforms the funeral pyre into a roasting oven when they aren’t looking.
Still, with “Edible Complex,” Yellowjackets shows us how they take their first steps into the world of cannibalism. Most impressively, it keeps their cannibalism motivated by deeply relatable teen girl emotions. The cannibalism is a survival strategy, but it’s also a metaphor.
When the Yellowjackets start to eat Jackie’s body, they do it because they’re starving to death. They also do it because Jackie was what they were told to aspire to be, so much so that they loved her almost as much as they hated her — until the only thing there was left for them to do was eat her all up.
Jackie (Ella Purnell) appears only briefly in the opening credits of Yellowjackets. We see her, ponytailed and perky on a soccer field, drawing a line across her throat in a vicious threat to someone we can’t see. Then she notices the camera, grins, and tosses us a sultry “just kidding” wink.
That’s who Jackie is: Casually bitchy to the extent that it helps her keep her underlings in line. Unwilling to commit to her threats. Always, always aware that she is being watched, and hence always protecting her image.
Jackie is aware that there’s a certain type of teen girl it pays to be, and she is able to embody that type apparently effortlessly. She is always pretty and put together, but not overly so. She’s dating the most popular boy in school. In the first episode, the Yellowjackets coach tells Jackie that he named her team captain not because she’s the best player on the field (she isn’t), but because the other girls defer to her. She’s a natural leader, he tells her.
In suburban New Jersey, that appears to be true. When the other Yellowjackets get into an argument that escalates into a shouting match at a party later that night, Jackie’s the one who’s able to defuse the situation. She tells each girl to take turns telling everyone else something they admire about the other, and sets the example of going first. The fight ebbs away without further incident.
When the Yellowjackets are stranded in the wilderness by a plane crash, however, Jackie’s leadership skills vanish without a trace. She has no practical abilities and is unwilling to learn any. She is unable to help the team find food or water or shelter. She slacks off on the communal chores of cooking and cleaning. Gradually, the rest of the team starts to defer to strong-willed Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) instead of Jackie because, unlike Jackie, Taissa has ideas that will keep them fed.
Over the first season, we see most of the Yellowjackets gradually abandon the more frivolous and ornamental requirements of suburban girlhood. They stop wearing makeup, and they let their clothes get gradually grubbier. Taissa crops her hair short. Jackie, however, keeps wearing makeup the whole way through the first season, and she remains fastidious about her wardrobe. She is preserving her image for an audience that no longer exists.
That audience is boys, who are the source and the sign of Jackie’s power: The rest of the girls defer to her because she is the kind of girl who popular, desirable boys like. That’s part of why Jackie holds on to her boyfriend Jeff, even though she finds him boring, isn’t particularly attracted to him, and plans to dump him as soon as they graduate. Jeff is what makes Jackie someone the other girls want to be like, a figure to whom they can aspire. Without Jeff, Jackie cannot be queen bee.
In the wilderness, though, there is no Jeff. The only boys are Coach Scott, who is gay, and their dead coach’s sons Travis and Javi. Javi is too young for any of the Yellowjackets, and while Travis (Kevin Alvis) is both age-appropriate and straight, he is the wrong kind of boy. He’s nerdy and uncool, someone who cannot grant a girl status by proxy. Jackie at first snubs him. She’s unbothered when Travis pairs off with Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), whom Jackie considers to be a burnout.
As the months wear on in the wilderness, though, and Jackie’s status tumbles ever more precipitously, she changes her mind about Travis. Toward the end of the first season, she decides to seduce him.
Jackie presents her decision to sleep with Travis even though he’s still with Natalie as practical: Winter is coming, they’re most likely going to die, and she doesn’t want to die a virgin. When the other girls learn of her decision, though, they see immediately that it’s also a display of power on Jackie’s part. Even here, in the wilderness on the edge of death, Jackie is still the kind of girl who can take ownership of any boy she pleases.
It’s Jackie’s betrayal that first drives the group into the state of semi-feral predatory glee we see them relishing in the opening moments of the pilot: They charge at Jackie and Travis with a knife, ready to kill them both. Their plans are foiled, but that impulse is still lingering in all of them when they are faced, starving and weak, with Jackie’s succulently roasted corpse: wouldn’t it be great to get her? Wouldn’t it be perfect if they could harm her, punish her for her sins, for being more popular and powerful than all the rest of them? And simultaneously, wouldn’t it be great to become her, to have Jackie’s perfect hair and perfect smile and perfect life?
To aspire and to punish all at once, they eat her. That’s true for no one more than Jackie’s best friend, Shauna.
Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is the one who actually takes out her knife and cuts into Jackie’s dead body at the end of “Edible Complex.” She’s been eating Jackie for longer, though. Before Jackie’s corpse is baked, one of her ears snaps off her frozen head. Shauna pockets it and eats it.
Shauna’s friendship with Jackie is at the center of the first season of Yellowjackets. Jackie’s power over Shauna is, in a way, a more intense version of the power she wields over the rest of the Yellowjackets. She remakes quiet, studious Shauna in her image, painting makeup onto her face, trying to set her up with Jeff’s dorkier friends, telling her where to go to college, pushing her to join the Yellowjackets even though, as Shauna yells during their final climactic fight, “I don’t even like soccer!”
Shauna allows Jackie to do all this because she is under Jackie’s sway, awed by her power, and wants to be her. She also allows Jackie to do all this because she loves her. But Shauna’s love for Jackie is laced with sadistic resentment. Before the group is stranded in the wilderness, Shauna secretly sleeps with Jeff.
“I’m not jealous of you, Jackie,” Shauna says during that final fight. “I feel sorry for you. Because you’re weak. And I think that deep down, you know it. I’m sure everyone back home is so fucking sad to be losing their perfect little princess, but they’ll never know how tragic and boring and insecure you really are. Or how high school was the best your life was ever gonna get.” Jackie is so furious at this rant that she storms outside on her own, and that’s how she ends up freezing to death.
Shauna’s lying in her big speech — she’s clearly jealous — but she’s also telling the truth. Jackie is insecure, and she is unlikely to take the world by storm after high school, while smart girl Shauna is ready to go to a good college and make something of herself. That’s one of the things Shauna has to remind herself of when she starts to feel too jealous.
In season two, Shauna hallucinates Jackie’s corpse laughing at her as she paints makeup over its frozen face. “You know Jeff only had sex with you because I made you into someone else,” Dead Jackie tells her. “And you only had sex with him so you could imagine being me.” Then she cuts into her arm and tells Shauna to eat her dead body.
Part of the poignancy and the creepiness of Shauna putting makeup on Jackie’s corpse comes from the fact that Shauna is reasserting Jackie’s old social power, the power of boys and makeup and high school popularity contests. Shauna used to envy that power, longed for it, imagined taking it for her own by sleeping with Jackie’s boyfriend, as if she could absorb it into her body through sympathetic magic. Then Jackie gives her another way of taking that power: eating her flesh.
In the present day of Yellowjackets, Shauna (now played by Melanie Lynskey) is a middle-aged housewife, married to Jeff, with a teenage daughter she resents who reminds her of Jackie. She is living out the future she used to comfort herself by imagining for Jackie, punishing herself with it.
“The thought of you with someone else always scared me,” she tells Jeff in “Edible Complex,” clearly referencing Jackie. “But it also turned me on. Someone else’s tongue in your mouth. Their smell on you. I used to think that made me some kind of pervert.” Now, she says, “I like being the way I am.”
Eating Jackie, Shauna gets Jackie’s tongue in her mouth and Jackie’s smell on her hands. Shauna eats Jackie because she hates her and she eats her because she loves her and she eats her because she wants to be her. It’s messy and it’s bloody and it’s grotesque, but it’s as emotionally true as TV about teenage girls ever gets.
The real treasure was the friends we made along the way (but actually).
If Dungeons & Dragons fans have suffered from bad dice rolls with past movies based on the venerable role-playing game, the new one, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, is more like a critical hit.
It’s fun, it’s funny, and most of all, to this regular player, it feels like D&D. Although the movie is packed with fan-service references and Easter eggs, you don’t have to know anything about the game before you take your seat. And that seems to have worked for a lot of people, judging by the movie’s top box office spot on its opening weekend.
Directed and co-written by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Game Night, Vacation) — longtime D&D players themselves — Honor Among Thieves is conscious of the pitfalls of its source material and, largely, avoids them. Complex gameplay concepts like spellcasting and character classes are smoothed over; they’re just portrayed in use without being too explicit about the details, making them fit for a mass audience. (The directors told Polygon that while this was intentional, they still stuck as closely to the rules that govern the game as they could on screen.) All the attention paid to creating that balance between honoring the game and making a good movie results in a film where the creators’ love for D&D really shines through, welcoming existing fans as warmly as it invites new ones in.
What the film captures is the chaos and ridiculousness you’d find in an actual D&D game. This means lots of moments that feel like someone got either a bad roll of the dice — resulting in unexpected misfortunes or failures — or a good one, where some highly unlikely scenario works out in the characters’ favor. Without the context of the system of chance that undergirds the game, it might seem like bad writing when the characters jump into a deadly gelatinous cube yet emerge unscathed — but sometimes all the constitution save rolls succeed! Goldstein and Daley deftly evoke the seat-of-your-pants storytelling traditional to D&D without actually letting the movie suffer from it.
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How D&D: Honor Among Thieves captures the heart of the game
Almost unanimously, the D&D players I talked to about the movie brought up one scene as a moment they really recognized from the game table: The adventuring party is being lectured at length by the paladin Xenk (Regé-Jean Page) on a set of strict rules for how to cross a trap-filled bridge … and then the guy standing closest to the bridge just puts a foot on it casually, making the whole thing collapse into a fiery pit below.
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Paramount Pictures/eOne
“Often these games go completely off the rails, and just incredibly ridiculous stuff happens, and there’s this feeling of, like, world-spanning troublemaking,” game designer and writer Chance Feldstein told me. As a fellow D&D player, they said what they most wanted the movie to deliver was that sense of unpredictability. “There has to be the epic fantasy element, but there also has to be that, ‘Oh, my God, how did that happen?’ part of it.”
That’s not to say every proverbial roll worked well on screen — the pacing was very fast and sometimes whiplash-inducingly uneven, with odd tangents and some moments where even a die-hard D&D fan might wonder about the plot choices. Weird digressions, cookie-cutter-evil villains, and context left unexplained can work out fine in a D&D game but don’t play so well on the big screen. And the sheer amount of story packed in was almost too much.
“There was so much plot in this movie, it felt like it should have been a season of a TV show,” Feldstein says. (Good news for fans: Paramount+ is working on that.)
Any movie based on Dungeons & Dragons necessarily has to contend with the game’s oft-cited, problematic history. While Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro-owned publisher of D&D, has been tackling some of the worst old stuff, there’s more work to do. Honor Among Thieves reflects that effort — one that’s often pushed forward or inspired by players themselves.
Kat Jones, game designer and game design professor at the University of Cincinnati, points out that many players today are fully aware of the game’s history and work to reimagine it more equitably, using tools like “homebrew” or player-created content. “You’ve got dungeon masters who do their own thing, player groups that take it in their own direction,” they say. “There is that agency to do things and tell stories that maybe weren’t originally intended.”
For me, though, the part that was most like a real D&D game was how much each character changes and grows. This choice in the movie — to give each of the titular band of thieves their own character arc — is a bit of an outlier for the usual Hollywood ensemble piece, which more often focuses on one or two main characters. There’s a complexity in these relationships and motivations that the average moviegoer might not be expecting in a big action-fantasy film. That feels like it comes more from a really good RPG. Jones says she thinks that’s what the movie succeeds on: “Each of them had their own thing that they needed to overcome in order to be their best self. When it’s done right, role-playing games can really home in on that.”
In an interview at SXSW, Daley said that was purposeful: “It was something we spent a lot of time on, making sure that each of the characters had something to say, that they were unique in their own right, and they also had an arc.”
The movie honors D&D’s more transformative properties
One of the most magical things that can happen in Dungeons & Dragons, the game, is that a group of players often starts with one set of objectives and then, as they learn more about their team and themselves, find they really want to achieve something different and better. The film has that, too.
For instance, Chris Pine’s character, the bard Edgin, started out with a plan to bring his wife back from the dead (tired fantasy trope alert), but his motives for doing so were selfish. By the end of the story, he has the ability to carry out his big plan, but he makes a totally different choice, to save his barbarian BFF and platonic co-parent Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) — and he’s driven by what’s good for his daughter instead.
That’s so D&D! When we play, that’s what role-playing aficionados are looking to do; explore our characters’ expectations and assumptions about what they want to do and who they want to be, and how those change over the course of the events that they influence and are influenced by — often through and with other characters and players, just as in the movie. What often results are intensely personal, deeply valuable experiences.
Like the young sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith), who struggles with the burden of a legendary surname and a crisis of self-confidence but manages eventually to tap into his fledgling powers to save the day. Or the tiefling druid Doric (Sophia Lillis), who joins the party with a vocal animosity against humans — as in, the whole species — and comes to value her human comrades as people.
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Paramount Pictures/eOne
This kind of internal change is something that interests Sarah Lynne Bowman so much, she’s made a career out of studying how RPGs allow people to transform themselves, both in playing games and in their real lives. Bowman, a professor of game design at Uppsala University, now works on the Transformative Play Initiative, and says the psychological basis for why this kind of game has such an impact on players is both ancient and modern.
“It’s a combination of community and co-creative storytelling; that’s a really profoundly important thing that we’ve been doing since the dawn of time, probably since the beginning of culture,” Bowman says. She explains that RPGs specifically allow us to “embody different characters that we create.” So we get to try different personalities and traits on for size.
“It’s something that allows us to not only explore aspects of ourselves that we don’t normally get to express, but also to share those with other people, and to create different kinds of social formations that maybe weren’t available to us in our daily social lives,” she says.
That’s what makes RPGs so special: You can take these emotional journeys as a different person, navigating what your own priorities are and how you relate to the world. Ideally, you take a journey that pushes you into being better somehow; a better person, a better teammate, a better parent, a better friend.
Game scholar and designer Jonaya Kemper has a term for that: navigational play, or using games to imagine yourself differently, in a way that might feel safer than in your real life.
“We have all these interesting studies that when people design their characters, sometimes they’re aspirational. … So it’s like, ‘I always wanted to be a performer. I’ll play a bard!’ Or, ‘I always felt like I could save people, I want to be a knight.’ That’s the navigation,” Kemper says. “We see people explore their identity, like, how do I feel about my sexuality? How do I feel about my gender identity? How do I relate to my culture? How do I relate to my parents? … And these are the things that really transform people’s lives, regardless of the game you’re playing.”
In its cultural resurgence, D&D is also trying to evolve itself
It’s frankly kind of a miracle that Dungeons & Dragons has such radical transformative properties — it was built by people who were happy to uphold a certain kind of status quo.
These games “came out of the basement of conservative white men in the Midwest,” notes James Mendez Hodes, a writer, game designer, and cultural consultant who has worked on, among other things, the tabletop RPG Avatar Legends, an adaptation from the show Avatar: The Last Airbender. “[D&D co-creator] Gary Gygax’s own politics, and then the influences on them, of Tolkien’s politics … and, worst of all, Lovecraft’s politics: These all shine through in the games they influenced. So historically, these games have spoken to a pretty specific group of people who align with the quote-unquote ‘mythical norm.’”
This concept, from writer Audre Lorde, is the existence of a societal standard that privileges a certain kind of person (Kemper cites this same idea in her essay “Wyrding the Self”). As Lorde put it in 1980:
Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society.
For D&D, and many tabletop role-playing games that followed it, that norm has historically been the white, straight, cisgender man.
But that’s starting to change, as evidenced by the fact that the movie only has two straight white guys in lead roles, and one of them (Hugh Grant’s Forge Fitzwilliam) is basically a non-playable character, or NPC.
Some of it is thanks to broader representations in the wider pop culture of the people who play D&D. Even people who don’t know much about the game might have seen it on shows like Community or Stranger Things — and each of those depicted a diverse set of players.
“It’s a good time for people to get involved in Dungeons & Dragons; it’s a time when it’s booming,” says Bowman. “There’s millions of people playing it online, which we didn’t use to think was really possible. And there’s just tons of streaming shows with all different kinds of representation.”
There’s Dimension 20, and also Disco Does D&D, a livestreamed game played by some of the cast of Star Trek: Discovery, a show that reaches a wide audience and is very conscious about trying to be inclusive and representative.
“It’s become much less fringe,” says Keith Ammann, a longtime player and the author of several books on game tactics in D&D, comparing social attitudes today to those of even 15 years ago. “I think you’re already seeing a significant change, simply in the fact that upon hearing about Dungeons & Dragons, somebody would say, ‘That sounds cool, I’d like to try it sometime.’”
Honor Among Thieves’ band of adventurers, far from the same-same cast of, say, the Lord of the Rings movies, largely look like the actual people who might play D&D in the year 2023. It’s no longer a cishet-white-teenage-boys-in-the-basement thing — if it ever really was — but the perception, and how D&D players were portrayed in popular culture, often reflected the stereotype rather than the reality.
There’s no doubt D&D has its problems, certainly historically (Gygax, one of its creators, believed women didn’t play RPGs because their brains were too different from men’s), but even as recently as 2022, when publisher Wizards of the Coast had to pull an entire people from a new book because the depiction of them was so horribly racist.
Not long after that, Mendez, who also works as a cultural consultant with Wizards of the Coast on their other massive property, the card game Magic: The Gathering, was brought on to review other forthcoming D&D content, like the recent heist-themed Keys from the Golden Vault. In an interview with Vox, he says his work is aimed at rethinking game material that might reinforce racist, sexist, anti-gay, and other oppressive behaviors.
“If games present topics related to systemic oppression in nuanced, realistic and productive ways, then those same experiences, if we opt into them and have forewarning, can be cathartic and evocative,” says Mendez. That means paying attention to both the large game concepts, like how characters are created, and the small things like how a language handles naming.
“The best outcomes for me are when someone from a community which has historically not felt comfortable in a hobby space where there aren’t a lot of people who look like you or identify like you, [from] a community of people who have to sort of push down their own identity and code-switch and mask really hard in order to fit in with the mainstream … can pick up a game and see that the game already thought of them,” he says.
To meet the future, D&D will need to welcome more people in
It’s clear from the combined marketing push around the movie that Hasbro is hoping to entice more people to play the game itself through the sheer fun and spectacle of Honor Among Thieves. But, great, because that’s also what we in the RPG community hope happens.
“I’m hopeful that it introduces the hobby to people who wouldn’t have considered it before,” says Mendez. “I’m also hopeful that it brings new directions to role-playing as a culture. I think that having that mainstream attention to a niche hobby creates an opportunity for new cultural perspectives.”
If you’re wondering how much the movie is like playing D&D, well, it is, but it’s an idealized version of a D&D campaign.
“Most of the creators I know in the scene just love the hell out of this movie because they finally see, okay, someone who really likes the material and isn’t just riffing on it for their own purposes but really doing something,” says Evan Torner, a professor of film studies at the University of Cincinnati and the director of the school’s Game Lab. “We understand that film has its own language, but this is a film that uses that language to remind us that we’re all kind of kids with stupid plans.”
Sure, at heart we might all be kids with stupid plans, but when you’re playing with your friends, it becomes something else, too. People who might have started out not knowing each other very well, or even disagreeing with each other, are transmuted through the alchemy of role-playing into something more like family. That found, or chosen, family theme resonates clearly in the movie, especially in Edgin and Holga’s relationship.
“They nailed the fact that there are a lot of players, particularly queer players, for whom D&D is really about found family on both an in-character and out-of-character level,” says Feldstein.
And when you have family on your side, and everyone works together, even the wildest plans can sometimes lead to victory.
There’s a scene near the end of Honor Among Thieves where the group finally gears up to face the biggest, baddest opponent, Sofina (Daisy Head), a scheming, ultra-powerful wizard who has nearly murdered them all before at some point or another and by all rights should succeed this time. Her eventual defeat — at the hands of Edgin’s young daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman), who, in an unlikely twist, uses an invisibility spell to sneakily slap a magic-suppressing bracelet on Sofina’s wrist — might have felt anticlimactic to some of the audience, as the main characters then take turns dispatching the incapacitated wizard in just a few rounds, and the fight’s over pretty quickly.
For a D&D player, though, this was absolutely chef’s-kiss perfect: There’s nothing quite like saving the world with some creative combination of a low-powered spell and a random trinket you forgot was in your character’s inventory until just now.
“It’s like looking down at your character sheet and being like, ‘What do I have to face this completely impossible situation?’ And you’ve got what you need,” Torner said.