Deep in the woods, a lonely boy with thick glasses grew up without siblings, without television and without the Internet. But he had books, and in the tomes of a new sort of game called Dungeons & Dragons he discovered a fantastic world of sorcerers, maidens and trolls. He discovered loyalty and betrayal, cowardice and courage. In those books he realized that his mind had the power to transport him beyond barriers of class and religion, race and income. In those books, he realized he could be anyone.
Over the 34 years since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created Dungeons & Dragons, there have been plenty of those boys. I was one of them.
So when Gygax, the intellectual and spiritual father of all modern role-playing games, died last Tuesday at 69 after multiple extended illnesses, it prompted a reconsideration of the power of the imagination he unleashed, a power that continues to resonate and swell around the globe.
There is a 20-something man in Shanghai (and Seoul, Taipei and Beijing) right now who has never heard of Gygax and who is chain-smoking and clicking furiously on an online role-playing game that would have never existed without Dungeons & Dragons.
As in other realms, the analog begat the digital. Without Gygax, there would have been no Ultima, no Wizardry, no Bard's Tale, no "Zelda, no Final Fantasy, no Baldur's Gate, no EverQuest, no Lineage and certainly no World of Warcraft.
But most important, without Gygax (pronounced GUY-gax) millions of people -- mostly young men, but also some women -- would never have discovered the liberating strength of their own imagination. They would never have discovered that everyone has the ability to create an identity. In role-playing games, players realize they have the astounding power to refuse to allow the external world to define them.
In adolescence this is not a vital lesson for the socially privileged -- the football quarterback or the prom queen. Back in the old days (not so long ago), before computer geeks became the richest people on earth, back when inherited wealth rather than entrepreneurial thinking was the definition of power, the unattractive smart guy was the object of scorn, rather than adulation or fear. And it hurt.
In lieu of drugs, role-playing games taught us that we could transcend the lunchroom, the school bus, the pizza parlor.
Chris Hare knows all about it. On Wednesday afternoon Hare, 34, an information technology administrator from Ossining, New York, stood in line at the Compleat Strategist in Midtown Manhattan, one of the world's oldest and most respected game shops. The day after Gygax's death, Hare waited to buy a miniature copy of the original pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.
"We're basically going to have a game of first-edition Dungeons & Dragons this weekend in Gary's memory," he said. "Seriously, in the early '80s, remember the movie Revenge of the Nerds? That was the popular opinion of intelligent people at the time. The jocks had it all."
"I grew up in Westchester, and it was cool to be rich. Obviously it was cool to be good-looking. But it was not cool to be too smart. Then Dungeons & Dragons came along, and it was a way to get out of there, to be yourself, to be someone else, to attempt the impossible and then gain the confidence in yourself to really do it," he said.
In front of Hare in line, Gary Lynch, a 29-year-old rehabilitation facilitator from Brooklyn, pointed to a newspaper obituary of Gygax and said: "Without him, I would never have gotten married. Without him, I would still be single."
Lynch said he had just been married last Friday at Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn.
He said he met his wife a decade ago in the science fiction club at Brooklyn College, which overlapped with the regular Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing group at the school.
"Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons keep people coming back because it's really a social activity," he said.
"The games really bring people together, unlike so many other things," he said.
A few blocks away, at Neutral Ground, a gaming parlor in the shadow of the Empire State Building, Erik Smykal, 42, one of the store's managers, came into work on Thursday, his day off, to help a player in his regular Dungeons & Dragons game devise a new character. Smykal said he first played Dungeons & Dragons in 1978, just as he also discovered the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Jack Vance.
"I was always reading, even at a young age," he said. "Mostly I just wanted to be left alone with my books. But then we heard about D&D, and I immediately got into the game in a big way."
"The ability to become a character, to project this collective story with friends, and of course being heroic is always fun; it really conveyed this tremendous feeling of freedom," he said.
"It allows you to get away from your day-to-day issues, not by ignoring them but by understanding what it's like to be someone else," he said.
Smykal looked up from the plastic tabletop on Neutral Ground's upper floor, just a few yards away from rows of young men playing Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft and Call of Duty.
"Really, this place wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Gary," he said.
"Learning to put yourself in another person's shoes emotionally is something that everyone has to learn eventually. It's part of learning to be a human being. Gamers do it for fun," he said.
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