Gary Gygax: Rolling in His Grave

Snatched from Penny Arcade:

No one can accurately gauge Mr Gygax’s influence on culture.  It would be like trying to trace just how much the Beatles have influenced us.  I don’t think that’s an unfair parallel, either.  In the same way that the influence of the Beatles cannot be simply limited to music, Mr Gygax was far more than a strategy game designer.

Wired has a great article on Gary Gygax and the history of his creation here.  A quick Google search will reveal a lot more, including the understated Wikipedia entry.

How do you estimate the impact of someone who, for so many, paved the road forward for rich imagination and open-mindedness?  Mr Gygax built an architecture of limitless possibility- a challenge to explore the universe in all its multicultural diversity.

If you were to staple a political message to his work, it might be that we have to be prepared at all times to consider new ideas.  Tunnel vision begs a cave-in.  We might scorn our neighbours’ religion, but what if we, literally, played the game from their perspective?

In enabling us to explore different identities, hasn’t he given us the tools to appreciate a more wordly perspective?

Mr Gygax is not soley responsible for giving us the ability to put our hands on our imaginations, any more than all music descends from the Beatles.  But surely, like the Beatles, it’s no exaggeration to say that Gary Gygax blazed the trail into an entirely new way of thinking, making everything that had gone before into Chapter One, and everything after into What Came Next.