Architect of the Now Monday, March 10, 2008

Wired editor Adam Rogers wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times eulogizing Gary Gygax, crediting him with grandfatherhood over all virtual vistas:

Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That “massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)

But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons & Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream: Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.

Maybe he's overstating, but he's not far from the point: Dungeons and Dragons changed the world that may not yet be fully appreciated by anyone but the hobby's truest disciples. It influenced an entire generation that is now coming into their own. In a very real way, Gygax was, in Rogers' words, "the architect of the now".