J. D. Wiker is a game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games.
JD Wiker originally comes from Indianapolis, where he began his love of games, starting with his family's collection of board games and the weekly game night. He designed his first game — a mash-up of Stratego and Tank Battle — in 1977, and discovered Dungeons & Dragons while buying miniatures to use as playing pieces. Wiker has done work on Wizards of the Coast's version of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, including The Dark Side Sourcebook, The Hero's Guide, and The Galactic Campaign Guide. After leaving Wizards in 2002, he founded The Game Mechanics, and is the company's president and lead roleplaying game designer, with credits including Artifacts of the Ages: Swords & Staves and the City Quarters series: Thieves' Quarter, Temple Quarter, and Arcane Quarter.
Wiker lives and works in the San Diego area.
His Dungeons & Dragons work has included design contributions to the third edition Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide (2000), Unearthed Arcana (2004), Planar Handbook (2004), Sandstorm (2005), and Monster Manual IV (2006).
Benjamin Wiker (born 1960) is a Roman Catholic ethicist.
Benjamin Wiker obtained his PhD in ethics from Vanderbilt University then went on to teach at a variety of institutions including Marquette University, Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, Thomas Aquinas College, and the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He came to attention in 2002 with the publication of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists. In this book, Wiker aims to show how Darwinism by its very nature completely undermines the ethical foundations of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam because its materialist cosmology is incompatible with any concept of natural law. Wiker became a member of the Discovery Institute, a think tank supporting this idea, soon after the publication of the book.
His next major book, Architects of the Culture of Death, co-written with veteran Catholic ethicist Donald DeMarco, looks at how the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Schopenhauer to Peter Singer have undermined the Christian value of "sanctity of life". 2008's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World looks at fifteen important books from The Prince to The Feminine Mystique and aims, following Paul Johnson and E. Michael Jones, to show how the actual lives of these thinkers led to fundamentally distorted views about human nature, morality, and sexuality.