Unqualified Offerings

James Maliszewski is largely right:

This past weekend marked my daughter’s tenth birthday. One of the gifts she received was a video game she’d wanted, a — if you can believe it — cheerleading simulation. Anyway, as I watched her play this game, I noticed that, to play, she first had to create a character and that, through play, her character acquired experience points to represent her virtual cheerleader’s increase in skill. At certain XP thresholds, her character acquired new moves and access to other goodies unavailable to less experienced characters.

Now, none of this is exactly clever or innovative. Literally thousands of video games over the last quarter century or more have include such game mechanical architecture. But I think, given how far removed conceptually my daughter’s game was from Dungeons & Dungeons, that this was the first time I well and truly understood the extent to which those three little brown books forever changed the world. The basic gameplay template Gary and Dave laid down in 1974 not only set the course for the vast majority of what followed in its wake but created the concepts and vocabulary that ordinary people, with no connection to D&D or the hobby understand intuitively.

With revolutionary creative partnerships – Lennon and McCartney; Lee and Kirby – you often get first a falling-out between the partners and then partisans wanting to give one of them the real credit, denigrating the other as, at best, second banana and at worst a charlatan. When this happens in gaming, Gygax gets consigned to the Paul McCartney/Stan Lee villain/fifth-wheel/mere-popularizer role. Arneson often gets credit for being the creative force, with Gygax’s contribution being to type it all up and get it printed, eventually screwing his partner out of as much of the money as possible. To me, Gygax was always the scold in his Dragon-magazine columns, haranguing people to play it his way, dammit.

But what makes Gygax one of the most influential people of the last fifty years is exactly that he saw the commercial potential of the odd offshoot of miniatures wargaming he and his friends started doing. It occurred to him that lots of people would like to do this thing if they only knew about it, which took some imagination. Then he had the guts to put all the money he could scrounge behind that conviction. (Imagine if Gygax had suffered from “geek shame.”) It’s a partial truth that Gygax was a “popularizer.” He found what he was doing fun, and saw no reason that other’s wouldn’t. Eventually, his and Arneson’s template found the technology that could reach what counts, in our kaleidoscopic culture, as a mass audience. (More pretty pictures! Fewer words on a page!) Regarding the “new geek mainstream,” he was a genuine prophet.