Loss of a genius goes unnoticed
In the midst of Brett Favre retiring, this easily became back-page news. Yet, Tuesday was a sad day. An important person in American pop culture died. His name was Ernest Gygax. Do you know who he is? Okay, that might have been a bit unfair. He was better known as E. Gary Gygax. Does that help? If not, then you just never played Dungeons & Dragons.
Gary Gygax was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. Even if you never played you heard of it. I played and loved it. If you play War Craft or some other game system now, D&D was the War Craft of its day. Sure it wasn’t played on a computer, but with paper and dice. Back then the only thing on the computer was pong. By the time I took up D&D Atari had swept the nation, but nothing video could replace D&D back then. I would even contend now that no game system can offer what D&D did.
Sure games like War Craft allow people to play simulated games with others all around the world, but most of the thinking is still done for you. You don’t need to know 400 pages worth of rules. You don’t consult manuals. Most of all, you don’t have to get together as a group to play.
For all the people that knocked D&D. It forced you to get together with friends. It forced you to use your imagination and be creative. It made you think outside of the box. The rules were extremely complex, yet your only limit of what you could do was within your own head.
Studies years later, about those that played D&D, showed that they have higher incomes, were more likely to graduate from college, more likely to graduate from graduate school, and had lower levels of suicide rates compared to their peers. On a whole, D&D players were intelligent people. They recognized a game that allowed their imaginations to roam free and they took advantage. No video game is ever going to do that.