Gary Gygax died on Tuesday.

Images source: Wired.com

I was sad to just find out that Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons died on Tuesday.

I haven’t played D&D in about twenty years, and when I did I was never particularly very good at it. But it was 80s, and video games still had 8 bit graphics, and I was really into creating characters, lead figures, and dice with more than six sides. Eventually video games would get more advanced, and D&D seemed to be passed its peak. As his obit in the The Time Online noted, his influence can be seen in years to come. The early 3-D first-person shooter games that started appearing in the mid-90s, such as Doom (even if it was more sci-fi than fanasty, the player is still running around a subterranean maze of sorts), Myst, and World of Warcraft come to mind. Magic the Gathering seems to be an obvious extension of D&D as well, although not a video game.

I appreciate that fact that Gygax didn’t particularly like video games, and never designed one. As he was quoted in an interview in 2005, that Dungeons & Dragons “offers camaraderie, imagination, socialisation… Computer games can be so isolating. They’re not anything like sitting in a group and laughing, telling stories. You can’t share a bag of Cheetos online.” And even though I’m still not a huge gamer, there are still residues of my D&D days such as a love of graph paper and my DVD box-set of the Dungeon & Dragons animated series voiced by Willie Aames ( Tommy from “Eight is Enough” and Don Most (Ralph Malph from Happy Days.)

D&D seems to continually appear in random places over time. The last episode of Freaks and Geeks, Discos and Dragons, which is amazing and some of the best television ever produced. The opening lines to In the Garage by Weezer, “I’ve got a Dungeon Master’s guide, I’ve got a twelve-sided die,” is brilliant. However Gygax’s influence, as alluded to before, moves beyond that of kitschy, vaguely ironic pop culture references.

More recently, I went to a panel on gaming for the book, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. One of the speakers included in the anthology was Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist, now at Northwestern. In the 80s, he did an great ethnographic study of role playing gamers, including ones who played Dungeons & Dragons, which he documented in his still in print book, Shared Fanasty. The book contains knowing insight into the players of these games and their social structures, during that period, and still has relevance today as new (or perhaps not so new) social structures and conventions are being created in today’s MMRPGs.

Players of D&D in the 70s and 80s went on to advance the world in computer science and gaming, which clearly influenced the development of these technologies and environments for better or worse. We are only recently moving beyond these motifs and initial sources of inspiration in our increasing digital and interactive world. However, it is still important to mark the influential role that Gary Gygax played in the development gaming and virtual worlds, even if he lived in relative obscurity to the world at large.

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