Social media can be understood as a role-playing game like Dungeons & Dragons

It’s a cliché that any “geek” who knows how to program computers will also probably play Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D. If you need to find someone at work who can explain to you the latest episode of Stranger Things, then you could probably safely start in the IT department and the D&D fans working there.

This isn’t an accident, and it isn’t a new development. The history of D&D and the history of the personal computer are closely aligned, and today’s social media platforms are basically just free-to-play mobile role-playing games.

D&D is more popular than it’s ever been. In October 2024, D&D’s owners, Wizards of the Coast, estimated that 85 million people either played the game or engaged with the brand, either through its physical “table-top” games or through smash success video games like Baldur’s Gate 3.

A 2022 survey determined that the average age of a D&D player was 30 years old, and that more than 40 per cent of players identified as female, non-binary or gender-fluid.

Jon Peterson, a major D&D historian, traces the origins of D&D back to the war-game hobbyists of the late 1960s. He refers to them as a “conservative youth movement” of overwhelmingly white male gamers who kept in touch through a loose social network based in hobby magazines.

D&D’s growth over the last 50 years was driven by digital social networks in the same way that the evolution of digital social networks was driven by D&D.

Progression mechanics

Social media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn all make money from views, refreshes and eyeballs on advertisements. To motivate their users to stay on the apps, these platforms have developed algorithms to govern what posts are seen by which users.

These algorithms deploy what game designers call “progression mechanics,” which is to say systems of points where the more points you have, the more control you have over events in the game.

If you get a high score in Tetris, you still start over at zero the next time you play. But if you get a high number of likes and followers on Facebook, then it’s more likely that other people will see your posts, and in that sense your high scores are a form of “progress.”

The most important precedent for social media progression mechanics is the “experience points” of D&D’s collaborative story-telling game system. When D&D players choose actions to shape the story surrounding their characters, they roll dice, which determines if their actions succeed or fail.

Experience points — or “XP” — reward player successes by improving the odds in future rolls, thereby giving them more control over the shared narrative of their D&D adventure. Similarly, social media progression mechanics give users control over what public relations specialists call “the narrative” about whatever subject those users choose to discuss.

There’s a long history of D&D progression mechanics in the design of social media platforms, going back to the dial-up “BBS” or “Bulletin Board System.”

A BBS was a computer hooked up to a modem that let users log in one at a time to leave messages for other users to read, like a cork bulletin board in a community space. Like D&D, the community of computer hobbyists who built and ran the very first BBS systems were mostly white, male and midwestern — the first edition of D&D was published in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in 1974, and the first BBS was started in Chicago in 1978.

Also like D&D, BBS communities started out as subscribers to hobby magazines: the Avalon Hill General for D&D, Byte for BBS users.

The role of BBS

In 1986, a programmer named Guy T. Rice launched a BBS named TProBBS, which in Version 4.2f was both an early social media platform and an early digital role-playing game.

Like other BBS systems, TProBBS 4.2f required its users to create user profiles. But 4.2f took this a step further to ask users to create D&D characters for themselves: you weren’t just “User3788,” but “User3788 the Novice Bard.” The more you logged into the system, the more treasure and experience points you could gain, and so the more motive you had to log in to make use of the resources you’d accumulated.

In his book The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media, Internet historian Kevin Driscoll identifies another BBS designed around fantasy role-playing progression mechanics: Seth Able Robinson’s Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD), launched in 1989.

In LoRD, players were allowed a limited number of “actions” per day: exploring, trading, duelling, hunting, hanging out in the tavern. The more days you dialled in, the more actions you could complete, and so the more “progress” you could make in the fantasy world of the BBS.

In 2006, Facebook introduced the first social media algorithm, EdgeRank. It curated the posts on each users’ feed, assessing, among other factors, the evidence of each poster’s engagement to promote certain posts over other posts. The more you liked other users’ posts, the more “affinity” you built with those other users, and so the more likely your posts would be visible to a wider audience.

These progression mechanics aren’t just similar to the progression mechanics of D&D — they co-evolved alongside the progression mechanics of D&D towards the same ends.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Stephen M Yeager, Concordia University

Stephen M Yeager receives funding from SSHRC.