Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008)

Saint Gygax of Dungeons & Dragons has passed from this world.

I was a D&D geek, back in my teens (late 70s, early 80s) ; and although I haven’t played in two decades, I’m still fond of the idea of D&D. I learned something about myself, and about other people, through Dungeons & Dragons. I learned that it’s okay to live a life rich in imagination.

Thank you, Gary Gygax: you did good. May your next adventures buckle as much swash; may your fireballs always do double damage; and may you always make your saving throws.

The New York Times reports:

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

- By Seth Schiesel @ New York Times: March 5, 2008: Link.

“Gygax’s accomplishment makes him … like the person who first conceived staged drama, or the guy who came up with the idea for books.”
- Darren Zenko

Eulogizing E. Gary Gygax, “the Father of Dungeons & Dragons,” is a lot different than coming up with postmortem praise for, say, a great playwright or a titan of literature – Gygax’s accomplishment makes him more like the person who first conceived staged drama, or the guy who came up with the idea for books. Before D&D there was nothing like D&D; its advent created nerddom as we know it, and changed culture forever.

The antecedents of D&D were heroic fantasy literature on the one hand and tabletop war-gaming on the other. Both were proto-nerdy pursuits, and had been around for centuries by the time Gygax and collaborator Dave Arneson published their first set of role-playing rules in 1974. The singular genius of D&D was in bringing the two together, creating a statistical framework for simulating the fantastic worlds of Tolkien, Malory, and Robert E. Howard.

Overnight, fantasies of knights, wizards and rogues went from products you consumed (or maybe even created) in the privacy of your own head, to something you played – unique experiences generated with other people according to ground rules everybody (usually) agreed on: role-playing games were born.

- Darren Zenko @ The Star: Link.

Geek Love

In “Geek Love”, a touching and insightful obituary, Adam Rogers nicely summarizes my own experience with D&D:

Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

- Adam Rogers @ New York Times: Link.

Sam Potts created the charming, sly, geeky flowchart: Link to full image.

Via Boing Boing.