Dr. Jekyll and Prof. Hyde share an essay, concluding, "The job never ends until you end it."

It’s Not How You Play the Game

By Jonathan Malesic  

Published: Spring 2023

“We should play Dungeons & Dragons,” my friend Anne proposed one night more than a decade ago, apropos of nothing. She brought it up at a gathering of friends who either worked at the college where I taught or were married to someone who did. Anne had never played before, and her idea might have lasted only as long as the last drink of the night if I hadn’t volunteered to run the game as its dungeon master.

I needed a hobby, something to keep me from taking it personally when my students plagiarized or didn’t do the reading for the required and resented theology courses I taught. I had played D&D in middle school during the 1980s; it seemed appealingly absurd to dust off my trio of rulebooks — the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monster Manual — and play again as a fully fledged adult and tenure-track professor. I hoped D&D could offset my frustrated fixation on the live-action role-playing game we call work. . . .

Read the rest:

https://magazine.nd.edu/stories/its-not-how-you-play-the-game/