It was lazy of me to say ‘we lost something’ and tail off into an easy finish. You’re right to ask what we lost. My first instinct is to say it was: the potential to be a roving band of adventurers, the intimidating and sexily toughened skin we might have developed if we’d been able to hack coming to understand what it was we ourselves actually wanted, the motivation that arises from being surrounded by a group who have been through ‘it’ together.

But I notice that your suggestion, that there’s a trade-off in modern life between the group’s ability to know itself and the group’s ability to act, is incompatible with this. I seem to be grasping at the idea that there should be some strengthened ability to act from that very self-knowledge, although it’s coupled with disruptions short term social harmony. Do we disagree here or is there something else going on?

By way of both the intensity and the intimacy of it, it felt like the games changed what we were likely to coordinate about. Giving up on them pushed us bac​k towards parties and nights at the pub, away from the fundamental recognition that I personally sat on for at least another 5 years, which is that many of us were bored. That we weren’t really helping one another.

When we’re feeling secure - knowing that our position is one of a loved and valued member of our social world - we can take risks and seek to do, confident in our ​abilty to return to a tolerable base position should things go tits up. So ‘rendering explicit’ territorial claims and conflicts and coordinations, stripping back our emotional cover, without any subsequent proof of trust, was perhaps the least conducive thing possible to us as agents. Risk was the wrong game, we were correct to stop playing. But we reached for it because we were seeking intensity in our lives, and had a sense that some lack of collectivism, or the less-than-forthright mechanisms of emotional protection were preventing us from achieving it. The other option would have been to fall in love, which, around the same time, many did.

I didn’t, at that time (and age), really understand that some of us would go on to make money, some to gather cultural capital, that the world would scatter us on its winds. But I did know that what we were taking as togetherness wasn’t the strong form, which has a power to transform even a pathetic individual into something to be afraid of - or to admire. Social co-ordination is the hidden reason for so much that is visible in politics - at the far end, as Gwern describes here, even the efficiency or otherwise of terrorist groups.

For all that it’s difficult to coordinate personal success or ambition within a group - for all that I’ve seen more than one person come up against consequences for that in their social lives - I think the objective should be to find ride-or-die, burn it all down and they’ll be standing in the ashes with you friends, people with fierce integrity, who will help you cultivate ambition within a group. It’s then that we have that chance of, as y​ou say, reconstructing robust group and individual agency. It​’s possible to be aware of others’ conflicting needs in a way that doesn’t threaten you. Precisely when the world isn’t taken for zero-sum.

Risk wasn’t going to get us there. Maybe, for you, it’s DnD. A decade later, and I’m ready to try again with some other game.