Thanks! I was struck by Joyce Brothers saying D&D was "cooperative" rather than "competitive." I wonder if the experience of playing it was unusual for boys, in that it wasn't focusing them on beating or destroying another person physically, as in football, etc.

I read a fascinating scholarly paper on how Tolkien & D&D references are found throughout the early history of the Internet. The computer nerds working on the Internet were all Tolkien geeks. I began to wonder if D&D playing was a parallel to the Internet—a vision of networking & cooperation.

That Tolkien's own story seems to have involved his unusual friendship with his gay friend Geoffrey Bache Smith seems to me an interesting progression of themes—of boys learning to network & cooperate rather than strictly compete.