Gary Gygaxs world (and why I left it)
March 22nd, 2008, 10:09 pm Teen Hobbies
Last week’s obituaries for Gary Gygax described him as a game inventor. That description sells the man short. Monopoly and Scrabble are games — with winners and losers and rule-books. The experience offered by Dungeons and Dragons, Gygax’s signature creation, is very different. Don’t let the goofy 20-sided dice and nerdy culture fool you: D%26amp;D is an existential trip, one that teaches very basic lessons about the nature of human consciousness and identity.A D%26amp;D game unfolds as a dialogue. On one side is an omniscient %26quot;dungeon master,%26quot; who controls the world in which the action takes place. On the other side are the dungeon master’s (real-world) friends, whose fictional %26quot;characters%26quot; roam through the dungeon-master’s artificial milieu.Most of the game experience consists of simulated exploration — with the characters going down this or that passage, and the dungeon master telling them what they see and feel. During my years as a D%26amp;D player, I always found that fighting monsters — which is what all the dice and charts are about — was actually the least interesting part of the experience. What I enjoyed most was simply living, for a couple of hours at least, in a different world, one entirely separate from the tedium and social agonies of my own schoolboy life.Like most serious D%26amp;D players, I eventually grew bored with isolated forays into dungeons. I cared about my characters, and wanted them to have back stories. I wanted their adventures to have meaning within a coherent alternate universe like Tolkein’s Middle Earth. As a 12-year-old dungeon master, I started to create a master-sketch of my own imaginary world, complete with new types of creatures and magic. I even gave a thought to areas that Tolkein ignored completely — like agriculture and trade.And here is where my frustrations with D%26amp;D began. For all the work I put into Jon Kay’s own Middle Earth, it was a very boring place. I tried hard to invent the sort of sweeping back story that Tolkein produced, but everything I came up with seemed contrived — just a random series of events. The whole world was so dull that I didn’t even bother showing it to anyone else, and I eventually drifted out of D%26amp;D and into games such as Chess, which were governed by ironclad technical rules.In retrospect, the reason for my frustration seems obvious. Fictional worlds are useless to us unless they supply the drama and excitement lacking in our own — complete with the sort of conflict and resolution we get in our favourite stories. Like all D%26amp;D players, what I was essentially trying to do in the game was create a novel through other means. But as I learned, not all of us are good novelists. In fact, very few people are — which is why Scrabble, Monopoly and chess are so popular.In the wake of Gygax’s death, various commentators have argued that his influence lay behind the explosion of Medieval-themed video games that have largely replaced D%26amp;D in the lives of adolescent boys. That may be true in terms of the sword-and-sorcery atmospherics. But in a larger sense, there’s no connection at all. The world Gygax created was a free-for-all that participants were expected to colour in with their own imagination. But in computer games such as World of Warcraft, players compete in artificial worlds constructed entirely by professional programmers employed by video-game conglomerates. From a creative point of view, these games are really nothing more than high-tech monster-killing simulations.Does this mean Gygax’s revolution has failed completely? Not quite. In recent years, Internet-based virtual worlds such as Second Life have created somewhat Gygaxian fantasy universes — where 3-d %26quot;avatars%26quot; controlled by real-life players build homes and communities, create relationships, hold public events, and otherwise simulate the fullness of human existence in electronic form.But even here, Gygax’s vision remains unfulfilled. Spend some time on Second Life and you notice that the people there aren’t exploring dungeons, or slaying dragons, or even exerting themselves much. Instead of trying to live out the story-line of a novel, they’re just kind of Â… hanging out, aimlessly mimicking the activities they enjoy in real life. Writing the next Lord of the Rings is hard. Lounging around a virtual cafe and flirting with other disembodied folks, it turns out, is a lot easier.Gygax was a visionary who persuaded millions of people to engage in an extended out-of-body experience. The lesson for most of us, though profound, was not what Gygax himself likely intended: Indulging imagination has its pleasures. But it also has its limits.jkay@nationalpost.com
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