Dungeons & Dragons – Memory Lane
I’ve been planning on writing this for over four years now. Memory Lane is basically me picking over my childhood for, hopefully meaty, scraps of memory but my memory was rudely jogged yesterday. E. Gary Gygax passed away. Back in the early 80’s I got hooked into the D&D thing.
When you were a D&D geek back then it basically meant that you played the game itself one night out of every 7 – if you were lucky – and you spent the other 6 days reading, thinking, planning, obsessing, and loving the wide open canvas you could create with some dice and imagination. At age 12-15 I worshiped Gary Gygax in much the same way people revere authors, sports stars, & celebrities. I read his words, mistakenly I believed he’d created D&D singlehandedly and – okay, one influence had to be the fact that the coolest D&D store – the one where the GASP grown-up D&D fans hung out – had a framed and signed picture of the man over the cash register.
My interest didn’t last long – puberty saw to that – but now that I think about it, Gygax, at one time was a hero of mine and could be a reason why I chose to make a career in the interactive entertainment industry. D&D was an internship.
Later in life I had the honor of meeting him at the last Gen Con to take place in Milwaukee (Lake Geneva, Gygax’s hometown, is where Gen Con gets its name btw – well, that and the actual Geneva Convention). I met his one time estranged co-creator, Dave Arnesen, as well. I could tell from a few minutes of conversation with both men that Arnesen contributed the rules, the numbers, the stats and Gygax contributed the imagination and vision. I could be very wrong about that, but that’s how it felt.
D&D, I believe, help make me who I am. I’m GamerDad, I play video games for a living, I strongly believe in the value of play. The urge and yearning to DO, rather than just watch. D&D led me to acting, and it’s why I prefer to write children’s fiction. Being a DM is a wonderful way to develop skills like narrative, story arc, filling in the details after the fact, and most importantly: character and motivation. D&D changed my world.
Thinking back, I can remember looking at the TSR ad on the back of some modules and supplements that showed where the magic came from. Gary Gygax is from Lake Geneva Wisconsin and he built his game, empire, company, and more there. As a teen, I wanted to visit Lake Geneva Wisconsin in the worst way. There, There Thar Be Dragons! I figured.
Now, Lake Geneva Wisconsin is where my mother-in-law lives.
There is no cause of death listed for Mr. Gygax but to be honest, it doesn’t matter what monster is responsible. I’ll just choose to believe that this time, this one time, E. Gary Gygax finally failed a saving throw.
Not even he could bend the rules on that one. Some rolls are permanent. . . .
The Onion AV Club has a nice obituary which states that Gygax was still hosting weekly D&D sessions as late as last January! Also, they posted this fantastic video. Perfect for anyone in your life who doesn’t understand D&D. Ladies and gentlemen, the late and definitely missed Freaks & Geeks!
March 5th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Hey, Bub! Did you intentionally put these two sentences together?
“Now, Lake Geneva Wisconsin is where my mother-in-law lives.”
and
“There is no cause of death listed for Mr. Gygax but to be honest, it doesn’t matter what monster is responsible.”
Sounds like you have a particular monster in mind…
March 5th, 2008 at 8:33 am
For the record, that is not what I meant at all. I meant that “Lake Geneva is still a part of my life despite the intervening years” because my mother-in-law lives there. I mean, isn’t that ironic? Don’t you think? I dreamed of visiting Lake Geneva because of D&D back when I was a teen and living in Irvine California. Now, 20+ years later, Lake Geneva is still close by.
And the monster line was a reference to D&D and…. ohhhhh you’re going to get me in trouble David. That’s it! Now I’m sending Carla my complete dossier on you and your work!
March 5th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
That clip pretty much described 1981 for me. Except everyone around that table would have been girls. And we were having a lot more fun than those guys seem to be having. 😉
I’ve been having a hard time coming up with a coherant thought on this. I can only hope he understood the magnitude of what his work did for so many people.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I don’t think the world will ever understand the magnitude. The man came up with Hit Points! He’s therefore a father of modern video games and a visionary. He’s early Sid Meier or Miyamoto.
March 5th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Absolutely … the indirect impact on our popular culture is immeasurable.
March 5th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
And as someone who thinks about stuff like this a lot … I’m shocked that I didn’t realize that until now. Of course all of this would have happened anyway – if there’s one history cliche I hate it’s the very idea of “If Joe hadn’t done this, then that would have never happened.”
There are very few happenings that wouldn’t have happened somewhere else eventually.
But Gygax was first and he set the direction.
March 6th, 2008 at 7:25 am
I got into D&D in the fall of 1980. I was at 6th grade camp with my class and we had high school students as counselors. Ours had played D&D and so had some of the other kids in my cabin. They played kind of stripped down version, with no dice and character sheets, just to show others what it was like. I was fascinated and got the basic set within a few weeks. The other kids I hung around with were equally hooked and we quickly moved up to the advanced rules. We played once a week for the next 3 or so years, but dating became a priority and interest fizzled out.
I was still into fantasy/scifi, but I just didn’t have the time to play. In collge, I got back into it and we played every couple of weeks. I also got into some different systems, like the games from White Wolf. Now that I have a family, I am back to not having enough time. My group of friends tried to start playing again, but we found that we needed something that we could finish in one sitting, so we eventually started playing Warmachine and Hordes.
Gary Gygax was a huge player in that industry and is probably the only name I can recall from that era. In the summer of 1989 I got a job at a camp in Elkhorn, WI. I was surprised to find that we were only 10 miles from Lake Geneva. Even though I really wasn’t playing D&D at that time, I still drove by TSR and felt like I was making some kind of pilgrimage.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Just to set things straight, Mr. Gygax had been in ill health for some time. I really had nothing to do with it. “Monster Mother in Law”
March 7th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Really people. If you parse the sentence above you’ll see that I clearly didn’t imply my mother-in-law is a monster who killed Gary Gygax. Gygax killed millions of fake monsters in his lifetime, so that joke was just a fond D&D joke. 🙂
Nice to see I have readers all over Wisconsin.