(no subject)

One of the true gods of geekdom, Gary Gygax, died yesterday. His name will forever be associated in the minds of geeks with the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. The social acceptability of being a geek changed directly because of what Gygax and his co-author invented. I was a little too old to be involved with face-to-face D&D heavily. I never played D&D except on the computer. But suddenly there were groups of younger guys and girls getting together regularly, proudly thumbing their noses at the 'cool kids' who didn't get it. It would take another 5 or 10 years for the computer revolution to set in before geeks got a lot of good publicity in the media. But it was D&D that destroyed the stupid idea that geeks were necessarily kids with no friends.

I had always thought that Gygax was my age or a little younger. Turns out he was significantly older.

Frankly I think D&D only worked because the kids who played it were smart enough to make it work. The original game from which D&D sprang, Chain Mail, and the early versions of D&D itself are clumsy and cumbersome. It took intelligence, patience, cooperation and imagination to keep a game going for weeks on end. The cool kids never had the patience for that kind of thing. What was the appeal? I think it was the innovation in D&D that you could improve and make something greater of your character by playing the game and playing it well.