Gary Gygax, thanks for the memories

Unlike you, Rod, Gygax was the bane of my existence around 7th grade.

I'm still convinced to this day that the school bullies'/nerds' (at my school, you could be both) afternoon gatherings in the school library were as much to plot strategy against me as to plot strategy at D&D.

One of the daily D&D players later became a software multimillionaire. And he was still the same bully 25 years later as he was then.

He failed his last saving throw ...

Pour a 40 of +1 healing potion on the curb for Master-D.

Zagyg the Mad Archmage has departed for another plane of existence. God willing, he'll be back some day.

Rod, I never knew you were a gaming nerd. How nice to acknowledge you as a member of the tribe! My thoughts about Gary Gygax and the world he brought into existence are here; though my contact with the game today is, at best, a once-a-year Dungeon Master-gig with my brothers, I have to tip my hat to the man who made so much of my youthful imaginary life possible. Also, a nice nerdy discussion/reminisence of his importance here.

Can't write more than a couple lines on my PDA today, but a hearty Memory Eternal! for dear Gary. I was our high school dungeon master, and D&D was my primary solace during years of an abusive step-father and no experience of religion. I can't imagine ever becoming a Christian - or a crunchy con - without D&D. Great to hear of Rod's experience. Perhaps like me you'll rediscover the game by introducing it to your own children.

"The internet can do a lot of cool things, but one of the least cool things it can do is replace your imagination." - James Poulos, via Rod

Such thoughts echo the 1970 essay, "Ill Without Prescription," by the editors of MANAS [reprinted in the MANAS Reader]:

manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeXXIII_1970/XXIII-08.pdf

"...there is no question about the power of film to give factitious objectivity to inner imaginings and to lead the spectator into worlds
of extraordinary fantasy. Here, rational checks and balances have no function and absorption becomes total. When you go to the movies you
put your imagination aside and let the medium — which means the director, technicians, and actors — do all the work. It is an electronic seance. And since, as Mr. [Stephen, in a Saturday Review symposium] Koch says, the novel is no longer 'interesting,' why not?

Already the novel, Mr. Koch claims, has lost many of the young to the movies; and this is not, he holds, because movies are 'easy,' but because the psychological novel is dull. This is the statement which brings objection from R. P. Dickey, who teaches English in a Colorado State college in Pueblo. Mr. Dickey writes in the Saturday Review for
Jan. 24:

'. . . unfortunately for Mr. Koch's argument, it is fairly obvious that a story on film, good or bad, tends to be "easier" than a story in print, good or bad, because of two inherent limitations in the film
medium itself. A film viewer responds under two tyrannies from which the reader is free: (1) His rate of consumption of the images is controlled by someone else. The reader can stop, go back, mull over, muse upon, argue with, underline, and annotate whatever passage he so desires. (2) The images he perceives are dictated to him with radical exactitude. The reader is given certain words that describe, say, a room. He must use his memory and, more importantly, his imagination to get that room; he must, in short, work to get that room. The film viewer, on the other hand, is given the electronic-celluloid image of the room (exactly the same room as hundreds of thousands or millions of other viewers are given).

'The first limitation helps lead to a general diminution of the powers of the mind, the second to a flabbiness and deadening of the human imagination.'

This communication seemed too important to let pass without notice. These are matters which, for all his exciting rhetoric, Marshall McLuhan wholly neglects, or translates as merely confinement and limitation. Yet they are obviously considerations vital to the responsible use of all communication media. There are moments when McLuhan seems to regard the total saturation (domination) of the human being by flooding sense impressions as some kind of experiential highest good. It may be acknowledged that complete absorption in a
spectacle is on some occasions a natural part of human experience, but an absorption which prevents reflective thinking, conceived of as either a weapon or a tool, seems an instrument of more use to gods or demons than to men. By this we mean that total absorption in some bargain-basement spectacle put together by people with tickets to sell or an axe to grind might be very destructive for human psyches, and especially for young ones.

Questions of this order do not appear to matter to even the most serious of the film-makers. They seem out to dazzle, to wow, to
capture the minds of their audience. They seek a triumph of manipulative effects. At best, they are concerned as technicians with the endless subtleties in the modes of sensory perception, with the impact of what they throw on the screen, or with interpreting superficial fashions in æsthetic theory. The field does have unlimited relativities to exploit, so there will always be something "new" to do. Camera techniques not only permit an almost cubist analysis of the objective world; they easily lend psychological processes a fanciful
objective structure, and this latter attainment becomes a pseudo-philosophical justification of film."

Gary

a 1d20+1 gun salute

Rod, I can't *believe* you were into D&D. Open your eyes to the pure evil that is D&D:
http://tinyurl.com/8b6er

Y'all need to read the interview with Gygax in the "Believer" a few years ago. The journalist begged Gygax to throw some dice, and the old master groaned that role players were like bad actors at some community dinner theater. The piece also discussed how GG lost control over the TSR company that put out all the D&D material. Looks like a case worthy of the Harvard Business Review!

How ironic that a fair number of teenage gamers ended up as devout Christians. Or that Tom Hanks' career survived being the star of the 1982 anti-gamer movie "Mazes and Monsters," which offers a NYC-centric liberal critique of D&D.

Wow, Rod, you played D&D. Me too. It was huge for me. And goes to show that no matter how different people might seem, we all have commonality which must be honored.

Here, it's geek commonality, but who cares. Anyone's who's been to the Keep on the Borderlands, braved the Tomb of Horrors, or explored the Vault of the Drow has cred in my book.

"the new (actually decades-old) bully-nerd species of American teen-age boy ..." - Larry

It would be interesting to draw a shortlist of cultural examples, classic or pop, filling that archetype: depending also on whether the bullying is more attitudinal/verbal on the one hand, or overtly physical on the other...perhaps tightlipped Pharisees like Barney Fife, or the sales geeks taunting tall-blond "Chad" on the wireless ads, or Jimmy Fallon's "Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy" might embody the former, but for the latter, I can only think offhand of the proverbial "evil genius" a la Simon Bar Sinister (Underdog villain) or Bond villains, whose thuggeries took more remote-control techno form, with the fisticuffs outsourced to "Duh, yeah Boss" hulks like Cad, in the cartoon case...

No wonder they left their more exposed classmates more shaken than stirred. Had I been there, I'd have flipped 'em the (Gold)finger - no matter how many Moneypennies from Heaven, whether in coin of the realm or realm for the loin, they would carry off, after their fashion, to their fiendish and cavernous lairs...

I remember very little roleplay in our sessions beyond "are there any girls at the tavern?!". I do remember a lot of arguments over dice and charts. :-)

Ah,yes.

I'll probably be thrown into outter-darkness and be broken down to my native element for this...but Jimmy Martinski and I played dungeons and dragons together...in Sunday School...when by some fortunate turn of luck we were not only without a Sunday School teacher, we were without a substitute as well.