sawyl | Prophet of the hyperreal

It's an interesting sign of how things have changed that Gary Gygax' death has prompted an obit in the Guardian and an op-ed in the Times, which makes the point that we're all D&D players now:

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There's no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax's 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

We don't have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we should see "Iron Man" instead of "The Dark Knight"), I'm counting my experience points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr. Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.

Had Gygax died a few years ago, it's hard to imagine he'd had got quite so much coverage. But now that the geek is king, he stands totemic, a great prophet leading the way to a promised land of hyperreality, albeit one governed more by one's and zero's and random number generators than polygonal dice.