Parenting & Family Quote by Gary Gygax

Gygax takes a genteel swing at a familiar moral panic: the idea that role-playing is a special kind of deception, a gateway to unreality. His move is to widen the frame until the accusation collapses under its own banality. If learning is imitation plus feedback, then nearly everything we do is rehearsal - social scripts practiced until they feel like “us.” By that logic, “pretend” isn’t a deviant hobby; it’s the engine of socialization.

The intent is defensive, but not apologetic. Gygax doesn’t plead for tabletop gaming’s innocence so much as he puts the critics on the back foot, forcing them to admit they’re drawing an arbitrary boundary between “real” identity and performed behavior. The subtext is sly: if you’re scandalized by players acting as wizards and rogues, you should be equally scandalized by office etiquette, gender norms, patriotism, even the practiced friendliness of customer service. He’s not saying nothing is authentic; he’s saying authenticity is often the story we tell after the performance becomes habitual.

Context matters. As the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax spent decades watching his creation get framed as escapism at best and corruption at worst, especially during the 1980s Satanic Panic. This quote reads like an inventor’s pragmatic philosophy: imagination isn’t an escape hatch from culture, it’s how culture installs itself. By calling everyday life “pretend,” he quietly elevates play into a serious tool - a sandbox where people can see the rules they’re already following.