- by Sang Sech Hoang

(Echo Lockjaw (Blink Dog) - Image art by the author)

Biologically speaking, the egg is a marvellous piece of natural engineering. Capable of developing independently throughout its career as a carrier of life, the egg hides its most important components behind a composed, thick outer shell, to protect its valuable innards from a dangerous world that might seek to exploit the egg’s precious cargo. However, should the shell become too thick with age or in response to a harsh outside world that only seeks to hurt it, then the growing life within is destined to be trapped inside the now too thick shell of its egg, never emerging from its dark confines and forever refusing to reveal the beautiful life hidden within. 

In this way, children and eggs aren’t all too different. We rely on the heat and warmth of friends, family and role models to help us grow into our best selves, and we depend on a loving and accepting environment to develop in to keep our shells thin, allowing us to show the world what we hold precious within ourselves and live happy, long lives once we are strong enough to leave our shells behind. However, some eggs — some children, bear thicker shells than most, building large, imposing walls that trap rather than protect, threatening to suffocate the unique spark of life hidden inside. Whether born that way or made into it by circumstance, the path that each child takes to building their walls is unique and different for every child, as are the methods needed to help them open up their stony shells. For some, it’s a group of chance friends that care for one another, for others, it may be through the passionate pursuit of some long-desired goal. For me, I found love, acceptance and solace from both others and eventually myself through the medium of tabletop gaming and roleplay — through Dungeons and Dragons, to be precise.

When I, Sang Sech Hoang, was born on August 10, 2005, in Vietnam — an Asian country on the other side of the planet, I grew up with a busy mother and without a father in the picture for a significant part of my young life, only knowing the love of a paid nanny and the allure of books, my first friend and the only one that would truly keep me company in my developing years. Later, I would move to Québec equipped only with a foreign language and child-like innocence, as well as a natural shyness and my foreign heritage — gaining a busy, slightly more present than before father in the exchange. Suffice to say, being the only kid in the room with features as distinct as mine with an inability to understand the local language made me stick out like a sore thumb. This trend would continue when, after a few years spent finally grasping the lay of the land and on the verge of learning to fit in with my peers, my family decided to move to Ontario, sending my young, developing self back to before square one — equipped with only a foreign language, an unnatural shyness and my foreign heritage. It goes without saying that for a good period of my life, I had neither friends nor playmates, only a few motley bullies and those that either ignored or made fun of me, a fact that I only realized when I managed to stow away with a dictionary and finally learn the meaning behind the words that the particularly mean ones used to mock me with. Understandably, I built my walls thick — bastions of stone and steel meant to protect the light inside me from those seeking to steal it for themselves, never realizing for the longest time that to hide a brilliant light from the sky is to deny it of its ability to shimmer and shine, no different from extinguishing it with your own hands.

After a time I was suddenly 13 years old, as an avid bookworm who found comfort in wonderous make-believe worlds imagined by famous men where conflict is linear, the hero gets the praise they deserve and where those that mock them are foolish, evil people — a far cry from reality — and although I was no longer bullied for my differences, it was only due to the thick wall of indifference that I had constructed to protect myself from the world, a wall that, by keeping out any faint specks of negativity that might’ve been thrown my way, would come to repel any genuine connections I could have formed in equal measure.  It was at this age — still young and impressionable, but old enough to know my place in the world — when I stumbled upon Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in my life in an unlikely place with an unlikely group of unique people. It was, suffice to say, a life-changing experience.

I was attending a local convention at the time as one of my few guilty pleasures, as these places where strangers could come together every year and bond over their shared interests simply by attending had been one of the few places where I truly felt like I belonged, even as a stranger. It was by chance that one of these groups of strangers spotted me, and invited me to join them in a small game of sorts — they only needed one more player, after all, and I was free at the moment — so I accepted, and just like that, I had joined my very first Dungeons and Dragons group. At first I was skeptical, I had never met any of these individuals before and I didn’t know the rules or how to play, but they laughed me off when I asked, and I was taught that D&D at its core was not a game of strategy or competition, but was instead that of a story — a unique story that you build and shape through the characters you play as within a world conjured solely by your own imagination. These people so much older than I was treated me with kindness and patience, and taught me that, although the mind can be its own greatest enemy, it can also be a source of unique conflicts, vibrant worlds and magnificent visas to explore amongst friends, that through roleplay — the assuming of a role separate from your own in the real world — you can learn to explore the “what ifs” of who you could’ve been as a person, rather than who you are now in the present.

Through roleplay, I learned that I liked being outspoken and cheerful, I learned that I liked it when I made friends with the characters inhabiting our shared imaginary world rather than hurting or ignoring them, I learned that it felt good to help those in need regardless of their intangible nature, and I learned that I wanted to become all of those things — that I didn’t like being standoffish and awkward, that I hated how I was content to sit by and let the people in my life pass me by. In this way, immersive roleplay allows for a unique perspective unattainable for many — an opportunity to look at your own life through the lens of another version of yourself, and a way to see what qualities of this other version you want for yourself, an opportunity to construct your own role models and look up to the one person closest to you — yourself. This one chance encounter at a local convention with a group of strangers ended up changing my life for the better, giving me my first true glance into who I wanted to become alongside a short companionship that I will be grateful for until the end of my life. Eventually, when we all went our separate ways, I would learn that the group that set me down a path of positivity initially lied. They didn’t need and weren’t looking for another player to add to their already substantially-sized group, but these kind people had simply thought I looked lonely at an event that was supposed to be celebrating the uniqueness within every individual, and for the first time in my life, I slept that night wracked with sobs born out of happiness and gratitude for a group of strangers whom I had never met before and knew only for a day.

For the next three years, I would seek out those who were willing to explore these wonderful stories brought to life by the imagination, and in every fresh campaign, every new group of people and adventures, I would learn more about myself. Eventually, I would truly grow to fit in with the mould that I shaped for myself, and I legitimately found the confidence that I built and the skills I learned to have been indispensable in their usefulness. After all, why would I struggle with speaking publicly or presenting my ideas when I’ve been more boisterous with close friends and brought more outlandish ideas to the table in my fantasy worlds? Why would I find it hard to speak with new people, when I’ve experienced so many who I would once consider being strangers in my life becoming my closest companions? How could I find thinking outside the box to approach problems from new perspectives and solve them in any subject difficult to me, when I’ve brought entire worlds to life with the power of just my imagination? Thus, not only had Dungeons and Dragons allowed me to tear down my seemingly insurmountable walls and truly learn to accept, love, and want to change who I am as a person for the better, but my experiences had also provided me with tangible skills and a charismatic confidence that I wield in my daily life with great enthusiasm. It is no exaggeration when I say that my life would be much different without my discovery of D&D and the first real group of friends I made that came with it, and I greatly owe the precious introspective insight that roleplay provides to much of who I am today — from my aspirations in the medical field to the friends I have today — D&D has allowed me to express and appreciate myself as a confident and growing teenager, now 16 years old and in love with who I am as well as with what I want to be.

Thus, it is my absolute belief that Joel Mongeau’s proposal for the Project Roleplay program isn’t just a good idea capable of bolstering the health of the local community, but that it is one that provides exactly what the burgeoning young children of today require — a safe way to express and explore who they are and who they wish to become as individuals and a fun way to learn essential social skills that many may have failed to develop in over the course of their lives, either due to their differences like myself as a child, or due to other circumstances such as the onset of purely digital friendships, the current 3-year-long COVID-19 pandemic, a current lack of community programs that are capable of effectively helping children in their personal growth and discovery in enjoyable and truly memorable ways, or any other variety of factors in our community that may inhibit or interfere with the growth and development of the children expected to bear the weight of the future on their shoulders. 

If D&D with a focus on fun and play was capable of teaching me so much throughout my life, I can only imagine the benefits of a campaign based on the premise of learning through a medium that allows our children to explore and examine critical issues and ideas in the context of an outsider’s perspective, thus allowing for memorable insight into common or sensitive subjects that would be nigh unapproachable in the lens of traditional learning media, such as that of racism, involved confidence building, the morality of choice, or otherwise.  In the end, it is not a question of whether a program of this nature could serve the children of our community in an effective and easily observable way or if this program is capable of providing our children with a safe space to learn, grow, and interact with other children of their age. Rather, it is a question of whether one deems the happiness, self-esteem, high-level social skills and cognitive skills that this program will offer to the children of this community to be worthwhile and whether the worth placed on the growth and development of our youngest is ignorable.