Narcissus and the risk of the closed mirror

The theme of this edition of Popsophia is the mirror and the act of looking at oneself, beginning with the myth of Narcissus.

It is a powerful image, because a mirror is never merely a surface that reflects. A mirror is often a question. It asks us: who am I? What am I looking at? Am I seeing myself, or an image of myself? And above all: does what I see bring me closer to the world, or separate me from it?

Perhaps it is precisely to avoid answering these questions that we so often hurry past the mirrors in our homes. Narcissus, for example, looks at himself and in the end becomes lost. Not because the image is false, but because that image becomes everything and he can no longer escape his own reflection. He does not encounter the other — Echo — he does not enter into dialogue, he does not change his point of view. He remains trapped in a surface that gives him back only himself.

I was invited to speak about role-playing games in education, and I found this metaphor remarkably coherent. I believe that play, when it is genuine play, is the exact opposite of Narcissus’s mirror. Play is a mirror, yes, but a moving, collective and therefore imperfect mirror.

It is a mirror in which we do not see only ourselves: we see ourselves through other people, through rules, through the unexpected, through failure, through a story that we never completely control. It is no coincidence that we use the expression “hall of mirrors” when many surfaces reflect one another endlessly, carrying us into a dizzying multiplication of ourselves.

But that multiplication can have two opposite outcomes. It can become a prison, as it does for Narcissus: me, me, me, always me, reflected to infinity with no way out. Or it can become an educational possibility: many reflections, many points of view, many possible versions of ourselves. Not a fixed identity, but an identity in motion.

Play does not simply tell us, “Look at yourself.” It says: try becoming someone else; listen and choose; try making mistakes and beginning again. This is why play can be profoundly educational. Education is not only the transmission of content. It also means allowing a person to see themselves differently, discover that they are capable, imagine themselves in a new form, and understand that identity is not a final photograph but an unfinished story.

Why Dungeons & Dragons: from niche hobby to pop culture

At this point we might ask: why speak specifically about role-playing games, and why specifically about Dungeons & Dragons?

Because over the last fifty years Dungeons & Dragons has done something very rare: it has moved from being a niche pastime — often viewed with suspicion, irony or even contempt — to becoming a true language of popular culture. For a long time it was dismissed as “nerd stuff”: kids shut in a room, strange dice, rulebooks full of rules, maps, monsters, miniatures and incomprehensible words.

Today Dungeons & Dragons is everywhere: television series, films, podcasts, video channels with millions of subscribers, T-shirts, merchandise and references that even people who have never played can recognize.

This matters educationally because a popular language automatically becomes an entry point. When a young person hears about a warrior, a wizard, a rogue, a dragon or a die roll, they are not entering a completely foreign territory. They enter an imaginative world they already know in some form. That world can become a bridge toward school and storytelling, toward history, mathematics and language, but above all toward relationships.

Think, for example, of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. If you revisit the opening scenes, the children are playing Dungeons & Dragons. It is not a random scene; it is a poetic declaration. Those children are already trained to imagine the impossible. They are already prepared to believe that the other — even when alien, even when frightening — can be encountered.

Think of The Big Bang Theory, where role-playing becomes part of the characters’ everyday life: a social ritual, a way of being together and laughing, but also a way of revealing fragility and desire. Many series use D&D or similar games to say something about their characters: not simply that they are “nerds,” but that they possess an inner world, an ability to imagine, build rules and create community.

And then, of course, there is Stranger Things, perhaps the clearest and most powerful case. But before we go there, into the Upside Down, I want to underline something: Dungeons & Dragons is effective because it contains a structure that is both simple and ancient. A group of people sits around a table; someone describes a world and the others enter that world through characters. Decisions are made, consequences are faced, and a story is built together in a protected space — the theatre of the mind that has agreed to play.

In the end, it is a modern version of storytelling around the fire. Except that instead of passively listening to a story, the participants modify it by inhabiting it, and in doing so transform it. This is where Dungeons & Dragons becomes much more than a game: it becomes a training ground for shared imagination.

Role-playing as an “antidote” to Narcissus

In a role-playing game, and especially in Dungeons & Dragons, we do not simply move pieces on a board. We do not merely control a character as we might in a video game. We interpret a role inside a shared story. From this, a story emerges that no one possessed beforehand.

This is fundamental: in role-playing, the story does not belong to a single author. The Dungeon Master prepares, guides and imagines, but does not control everything. Players act, choose and surprise. The die introduces the unexpected. Rules give shape to freedom. It is a small narrative society.

And in this small narrative society something educationally important happens: everyone is forced to step outside their own center. The player asks: what would my character do? But also: what are the others experiencing? What does the group need? How can I contribute to the story without dominating it? How can I shine without dimming everyone else?

This is where role-playing becomes an antidote to Narcissus’s mirror. Narcissus sees only himself. The role-player learns instead that their image exists within a network of relationships.

In role-playing, identity is never still. It always exists in relation. I can be heroic only if there is a world that tests me. I can be brave only if there is a fear to cross. I can be generous only if there is someone toward whom my action is directed. I can be intelligent only if my thought meets a problem, a conflict or another point of view.

This is a powerful lesson for school and for life: nobody truly knows themselves alone. We know ourselves through relationships and through choices made with others. We discover ourselves when something does not go as planned, when we must listen to another person’s point of view and perhaps negotiate with them. Role-playing is therefore not an escape from the world, but a way of learning how to inhabit it.

Stranger Things: D&D as a grammar of imagination

And naturally we arrive at Stranger Things, perhaps the clearest example of how Dungeons & Dragons has become a popular language, a shared code, a grammar of imagination.

In the first scene of the series we see the boys playing D&D. It is a statement of intent, not merely a period detail. They are sitting around a table with a map; a group of friends is looking for a solution. It may look like a nostalgic homage to the 1980s — recalling the opening of E.T. — but it is much more. That scene tells us how those boys look at the world.

When horror truly enters their lives, when the unknown takes shape, they already possess a tool with which to name it. They call it the Demogorgon. They use the language of play to give fear a name, and this is a philosophically powerful act. Naming fear means beginning to understand it, transforming chaos into a story and making it something that can be faced.

Placing horror inside a shared narrative means no longer being completely crushed by it. The game does not remove fear; it makes fear speakable. And when something can be spoken — named, narrated and shared — we are no longer completely alone before it.

In Stranger Things, Dungeons & Dragons is therefore not just set dressing. It does not merely tell us that it is the 1980s and these kids are nerds who play with dice. D&D is their way of interpreting reality and naming what they do not yet understand. The game becomes an emotional vocabulary that helps them remain together when the world becomes incomprehensible.

This is exactly what play can do in education. It does not replace reality, deny it or make it simpler than it is. It gives reality a form. And often, before we can face something, we first need that form.

The Upside Down, Alice and the mirror as a threshold

The Upside Down makes the theme of the mirror almost inevitable. It is a mirrored world: inverted and dark. It is our world, but deformed; our home, but covered in shadow. Is this not, in the end, a psychological mirror?

A mirror does not show only what we are. Sometimes it shows what we try to remove, the parts of ourselves that remain unsaid.

In Stranger Things, the young protagonists do not win because they ignore the Upside Down; when they do win, they do so because they cross it together.

And when we speak of inverted worlds and mirrors we cannot avoid thinking of Alice. In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice does not remain motionless before her own image. She does not behave like Narcissus: she decides to cross the mirror, just as the children in the series cross into the Upside Down. That difference is decisive.

Narcissus’s mirror is a trap: it returns the same face, the same image, the same self. Alice’s mirror is a threshold: on the other side there is not simply a reflected Alice, but a different world — absurd, inverted, governed by distorted and non-linear rules.

Role-playing also means crossing a mirror. We enter a world that does not work exactly like ours, and precisely for that reason it helps us understand the world we inhabit every day. Fantasy does not take us away from reality; it makes reality visible from another perspective.

This is one of imagination’s great values: it does not simply show us “another world,” but allows us to return to our own with different eyes. The Upside Down of Stranger Things, Alice’s Looking-Glass world and the imaginary worlds of Dungeons & Dragons all tell us the same thing: to grow, sometimes it is not enough to look at ourselves. We have to cross.

The die, mistakes and the unexpected

Role-playing is a protected mirror. In a game I can be afraid without truly being in danger; I can fail and still learn. I can play a courageous character when I do not feel courageous myself. I can explore a difficult moral choice without paying irreparable consequences in real life. This is the pedagogical heart of play.

I say this as a teacher: school is often afraid of mistakes. It measures them, marks them, corrects them and punishes them. In play, however, error is part of the process. A failed roll does not end the experience: it opens a thousand possibilities and forces us to find another path.

Did you fail to persuade the soldier guarding the drawbridge? Then perhaps you need to negotiate. Did you lose the fight? Perhaps you need to flee. Did you open the wrong door? Excellent — because that is exactly where the story changes.

In role-playing there is not necessarily “success”; there is consequence. Learning to live with consequences is far more educational than learning to pursue only the correct result. And since the festival also invites us to think about smartphones and screens as new mirrors, it is easy to connect this to social media, where people work hard to reflect and display success while rarely showing failure.

The die is a small, great teacher: it reminds us that we do not control everything. We can prepare, study and imagine a strategy, but there is always a margin of uncertainty. This is exactly how life, art and education work.

As a musician, I often think of jazz, which is what I studied here in Pesaro. Jazz has a structure: harmony, form, rhythm, listening and memory. But within that structure, improvisation happens.

A musician is not free because they do anything whatsoever. They are free because they know a grammar and can use it to enter into dialogue with others. Role-playing works in the same way. Rules do not kill freedom; they make freedom shareable. Without rules, the game dissolves. Education also means finding a balance between structure and freedom.

Play as necessary knowledge

At school, all of this has enormous value. On the surface, Dungeons & Dragons may seem to be a game of dragons, spells, dungeons and battles, but it actually activates a surprising number of skills.

There is mathematics: probability, statistics, resource management and risk calculation. There is language: describing, arguing, listening, writing backstories, diaries and dialogue. There is history: building settings, understanding societies, powers, conflicts, economies, religions and myths. There is art: maps, characters, symbols, miniatures and scenery. There is theatre: voice, body, interpretation and presence — often a kind of theatre that does not even require performance for an audience.

And above all there are transferable skills: cooperation, empathy, problem-solving, negotiation and conflict management.

Role-playing is multidisciplinary not because we can paste school subjects onto it, as happens in many modern educational proposals, but because it is already born as a complex experience, a form of integrated learning.

The player does not study mathematics because someone says, “Now we are doing mathematics.” They use mathematics because they need it. They do not write because they have to hand in an essay, but because they want to bring their character to life and make the game richer. They do not read a rule because they will be tested on it, but because they want to understand what they can do.

This difference is enormous: when knowledge becomes necessary within a meaningful experience, it stops being an external burden and becomes a tool. This is where play can become an extraordinary ally of school — not because study should disappear or everything should become a game, but because play reminds us of something school sometimes forgets: we learn better when we are involved and are protagonists in the educational process.

The Game Master as educator

Of course, play is not automatically educational, just as no tool is automatically educational. Any game can be used badly; it can become exclusion, sterile competition, chaos or even domination. This is why guidance is needed — someone able to build a safe and protected space.

In Dungeons & Dragons that figure is the Dungeon Master, the narrative facilitator of the experience. The DM is not a tyrant of the story, but someone who creates the conditions that allow everyone to participate. The person guiding the game listens, improvises, regulates time, encourages those who are falling behind, gives space to quieter participants and contains those who want to occupy too much of the scene.

And the Game Master must do something extremely difficult: accept that the story may not go where they expected.

Is this not a metaphor for education? At least if, as educators, we accept that education does not mean controlling every outcome. To educate is to prepare the ground, offer tools, open possibilities and accompany the unexpected, because not everything that matters can be programmed.

Often what truly matters happens precisely when what we carefully planned begins to crack: when a student asks an unexpected question, when a mistake opens a discussion, when a choice changes the direction of the story. A good Game Master knows how to “read the table”: when to accelerate, when to stop, when to guide players along a particular path and when simply to let the story breathe.

Not everything is solved by fighting

There is one final point that seems important, especially when speaking about education. In role-playing games we face dragons, monsters, fantasy enemies and armies of knights, but we also need to learn not to turn everything into combat.

Combat is fun, of course, and young people enjoy simulating battles with dice. It is immediate, exciting, clear and safe. But if every problem is solved by fighting — a very contemporary question in today’s geopolitical landscape — then the game loses a huge part of its educational value.

A good adventure should teach that many solutions exist: dialogue, diplomacy, distraction, escape when necessary, waiting — a wonderful and increasingly neglected word — and even understanding the enemy.

Overcoming an obstacle does not necessarily mean destroying it, just as facing an enemy does not always mean eliminating them. Sometimes it means understanding, bypassing, defusing or transforming the problem.

The game then becomes a moral mirror that asks: what kind of hero do you want to be? The one who strikes first or the one who listens? The one who protects, or the one who finds a way out when everyone else sees only conflict?

One of the most beautiful things about role-playing is that, in a safe, protected and non-judgmental environment, we can experiment with all these different selves — something everyday reality rarely allows. In play, as in education, it is important to leave a way out, not only for the characters but also for the players.

An authentic educational space must never become a cage. It must allow participation and distance, involvement and respect for individual timing. The educator’s task is to protect the conditions that make this possible.

Turning the mirror into a door

To conclude, I want to return to Narcissus. Narcissus dies because he remains alone before his own image and cannot step outside himself. His mirror does not return the world to him; it returns only himself, endlessly.

Play, by contrast, is a mirror that can save us precisely because we cannot truly play it alone. In shared play, this becomes clear: I exist in relationship.

The Dungeons & Dragons table can therefore be an anti-Narcissus. Around that table, no one can remain the sole protagonist forever, because the story exists only if it is shared. And this sharing is not asynchronous, like the oral tradition in which a legend passed from mouth to mouth and generation to generation, changing through time and space. In a role-playing game, words circulate synchronically: they pass, change and are handed on in the same moment and place among people who are present together.

The story is born while it is being told, changes while it is being heard, and belongs to everyone precisely because no one can possess it alone.

The mirror is no longer a still pond into which we fall. It becomes a door open to the other, to possibility, to transformation, to the part of ourselves that can emerge only when someone truly listens and responds.

Perhaps education is exactly this: turning the mirror into a door. Telling young people: cross it, try, tell stories, make mistakes, imagine. A young person who plays seriously is not escaping reality; they are learning to look at it from more than one side, freeing themselves from the constraints of vertical education and from paths someone else has already built for them. They are learning that identity is not a fixed image but a story in motion.

And perhaps this is play’s greatest gift: freeing us from Narcissus’s closed mirror and returning us to the world, to other people, and to the wonderful responsibility of creating stories together.