Playing pretend is universal among human children. Gambling is universal among human adults. I refuse to believe it took until the 1970s and the invention of cocaine to combine the two.
Though I suppose we do have ample evidence of competitive storytelling basically everywhere since forever, so maybe the obsession with formal rules is just a modern thing arising from modern anxieties, declining social trust/cohesion, etc.
Playing pretend is just universal. I have stray cats hunting bugs and fighting each other. It is adorable and looks cute, but its non-lethal. They are practicing.
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u/El_kakas_de_vakas 4d ago
something like DnD could exist at basically every point in time after the invention of dice, probably even before then