• Chairmen of the Bored: Nostalgia’s Tight Grip on Stranger Things

    The opening of Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Things finds four adolescent boys gathered round a table, intently focussed on some bits of paper, and some lead figures. The boys are playing Dungeons & Dragons, the perennially popular roleplaying game which caused a moral panic in the 1980s, with concerned moral crusaders convinced that the game was a recruiting ground for Satanists and murderers. The game serves as a framing device for the whole show, with our four young heroes sent on a quest more dangerous and compelling than any dungeon adventure they might concoct in the basement. And along the…