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Gary Gygax Tributes |
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Posted on Sunday, March 9 at 1:32 PM GMT -6
The death of Gary Gygax has weighed heavily on thousands of people, so it comes as no surprise that three more articles focusing on his contributions to the gaming industry have surfaced. The first is at The New York Times:
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.
Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play — two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.
The second is at 1UP:
D&D offered "stock" characters, but dedicated players didn't go adventuring with boring pre-defined heroes; they rolled their own. Whether as Th'ugg the Kobold Slayer (he hates dog-men and has the two-handed sword proficiency to back it up) or as Malevola the Chaotic-Evil Seductress (she's ostensibly a mage but seems to invest more skill points in charisma), half the fun of D&D was defining a hero and developing him or her over the course of a few months of questing. You could even draw a portrait in that little box on your character sheet.
Massively multiplayer games are all about custom characters, but even action games are catching on; Drawn to Life basically lets you control a living character sheet doodle. And Mass Effect let players define not only the hero's appearance and gender, but also his (or her) backstory -- no surprise, seeing how its designers at BioWare cut their teeth making D&D games for PC.
And the third is at MMORPG.com:
While inventing a game like Dungeons and Dragons won’t get you household name recognition, Gygax was a legend (and I don’t use that term freely) in the RPG industry and with role players worldwide. So much so that to this day one of my favorite episodes of Futurama features an animated version of Gygax. :“It’s a… *rolls dice, sees result*… pleasure to meet you.”
Closer to home for MMORPG players, Gygax also lent his voice to Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online, appropriately filling the role of the Dungeon Master, describing elements of the setting to the adventurers. It seems fitting then that after his death, he was remembered by players in-game in a number of different events across the game’s servers.
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