Triumph of the nerds

As time went on, Mr Gygax became more remote from his creation. His company, having thrown him out, was sold in 1997 to Wizards of the Coast, an upstart fantasy publisher that made sweeping changes to the rules. Mr Gygax disliked that, worrying that the focus was shifting to mathematical questions of maximising players' power. He wrote several new games, working six-day weeks even in his 60s, attending conventions, replying to fan mail and taking time off only for his beloved American football. But none of his new games matched D&D's success.

The game was spreading beyond basements, particularly influencing the nascent computer-games industry. Mr Gygax didn't like that either; he thought computer graphics cheapened the experience by substituting an artist's imagination for the player's. And while computers were ideal for streamlining tedious dice rolls and arithmetic, those, for him, were never the point. He considered role-playing a social thing, a form of group storytelling. Nevertheless, his impact was enormous. One gaming website voted him the joint 18th-most-influential person in computer games, quite an honour for someone who hardly played them.

His influence extends even to people who have never conjured a fireball in anger. Today's world is a nerd's world, and Mr Gygax did much to shape it. Blockbuster fantasy films like “The Lord of the Rings” are produced and directed by people who grew up with the game. Computer games are part of mainstream culture; “World of Warcraft”, an internet-based D&D clone, boasts 10m subscribers. Many of the people who built the internet (and their fortunes) spent their childhoods playing the game. The entry for D&D on Wikipedia is twice the length of the article on Proust.

But despite its influence on mainstream culture, D&D as a pastime is still a minority pursuit. Its fans perversely enjoy the opprobrium it still attracts, as well as its deeply cryptic side. “Gary Gygax Fails Fortitude Save” read one online epitaph, intelligible only to the initiated. And as for the qualities he gave his own D&D characters, Mr Gygax would never say.