Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 120

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Popular Culture Review

world is created, which may include role-playing games (see Opie
and Opie 1969). For boys, this often tends to involve science fiction
worlds, and games such as Dungeons and Dragons or Battletech.
Boys formed a club of eleven members, the Dragonlords,
which met regularly for several years to play these games. A
difficult decision involved selecting the Dungeonmaster for Dungeons
and Dragons. Boys were chosen for their knowledge, creativity, and
fairness to others in the game. Each boy devised elaborate strategies
and recounted lengthy tales of wandering and adventure. Creative
problem solving was encouraged; a boy who was unimaginative,
illogical, or a poor strategist was helped by others, but encouraged to
think ideas through in advance. Social interactions were normally
peaceful, with voices raised very seldom. Although players
recognized the authority of rules published in the Handbooks, they
often found them silly or irrelevant and chose to ignore them.
Roberts and Sutton-Smith (1962) divided games into two
t)rpes: psychogenic and sociogenic. Role games seem to belong to both,
promoting psychological development of individuals and the
development and strengthening of social bonds. These gam esespecially Dungeons and Dragons-were played by males in Los
Angeles into their twenties, even as college students.
Aside from their cooperative game play, adolescent boys in
Los Angeles have enjoyed computer and electronic games for over a
decade. These games occupy much of the time of many adolescent
boys and are important for die development of computer skills.
As the boys grew into their late teens and twenties, team
sports and group outings increasingly became the focus of their world.
Defining oneself in contrast to the adult world became increasingly
important.
A Decade Later
A decade later in the early to mid 1990's, children watched
and enacted the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) games. These
allowed creativity, strategizing, and a feeling of individual power.
As these children aged, they developed an intense involvement with
the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (MMPR), a television series
with accompanying action figures. In December, 1994, The New York
Times q u o t^ Michael Goldstein, chief executive of the Toys "R" Us
chain, as stating: "This appears to be the biggest phenomenon we