Geek Love - New York Times : "The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By March 9, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor Geek Love By ADAM ROGERS San Francisco GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it. I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world. Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien. Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely
I’m a writer. I can do no other. God help me. Amen. B.A. English lit, M.A. Church History. (CC) Some rights reserved.