another Dispatch article

Here is a funny article from Michael Arace of the Columbus Dispatch:

Here is a description of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons from wizards.com:

D&D is an imaginative, social experience that engages players in a rich fantasy world filled with larger-than-life heroes, deadly monsters, and diverse settings. As a hobby game, D&D is an ongoing activity to which players might devote hours of their time -- much like a weekly poker game -- getting together with friends on a regular basis for weeks, months, or even years.

Players create heroic fantasy characters -- mighty warriors, stealthy rogues, or powerful wizards -- which they guide through an ongoing series of adventures, working together to defeat monsters and other challenges and growing in power, glory, and achievement. The game offers endless possibilities and a multitude of choices more choices than even the most sophisticated computer game, because you can do whatever you can imagine!

My little brothers played D&D with one of their egg-head friends in the 1980s. I worried about their manhood -- needlessly, as it turned out. My brothers grew up to be police sergeants. Their old egg-head friend is a nuclear physicist or something like that.

There is a lesson here: Those of us who ridiculed players of Dungeons & Dragons as dorks might have been too quick to criticize. And it's not just because players from the 1970s and '80s became police sergeants, nuclear physicists and Wall Street moguls who used TARP money to cover their multimillion-dollar bonuses as they toppled our financial system.

No, we should not have criticized those dorks, because we all grew up and became dorks.

A show of hands now: Who out there plays fantasy football?

See?

Read the rest here.