Gary Gygax's Legacy

I was never much for Dungeons & Dragons or any RPG's. I played D&D a few times with some friends who were more zealous than I and that was it. Didn't even have a character or own a single die (Okay, I liked the Saturday morning cartoon- that redhead with the invisibility cloak had some smokin' hot boots). So when D&D creator Gary Gygax died last week I really had nothing to say on the matter. But since D&D is such an integral part of nerd culture and has lead directly to the online gaming these crazy kids love so much today, I'm compelled to mark Mr. Gygax's passing somehow.

In that spirit, I present a Point/Counterpoint of sorts. First up is a Slate.com article that dares to launch the inevitable D&D backlash. A week of respectful mourning is actually pretty good in today's media culture. From Erik Sofge's article, Orc Holocaust-

Here's the narrative arithmetic that Gygax came up with: You come across a family of sleeping orcs, huddled around their overflowing chest of gold coins and magical weapons. Why do orcs and other monsters horde gold when they can't buy anything from the local "shoppes," or share a jug of mead in the tavern, or do anything but gnash their teeth in the darkness and wait for someone to show up and fight them? Who knows, but there they are, and you now have a choice. You can let sleeping orcs lie and get on with the task at hand—saving a damsel, recovering some ancient scepter, whatever. Or you can start slitting throats—after all, mercy doesn't have an experience point value in D&D. It's the kind of atrocity that commits itself.

For decades, gamers have argued that since D&D came first, its lame, morally repulsive experience system can be forgiven. But the damage is still being done: New generations of players are introduced to RPGs as little more than a collective fantasy of massacre and greed. If the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft is the direct descendant of D&D, then what, exactly, has Gygax bequeathed to us unwashed, nerdy masses? The notion that emotionally complex story lines are window dressing for an endless series of hack-and-slash encounters? There's a reason so many players are turned off after a brush with D&D. It promises something great—a lively (if dorky) bit of performance art—but delivers a small-minded and ignorant fantasy of rage, distilled to a bunch of arcane charts and die rolls. Dungeons & Dragons strips the "role-playing" out of RPGs; it's a videogame without the graphics, and a pretty boring one, at that.

All salient points, to be sure. But as the aforementioned counterpoint, I present this bit of video. The simple joy of D&D- the way it can bridge any social gap- as envisioned by Judd Apatow-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJAGxAeV7YU