My escape to the Dungeon
THE CREATOR, the master, the ruler of the realm where I dwelled for many a year, is dead. Gary Gygax, co-inventor of the geek-gathering game Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday. One of the most influential pop phenomena of the past 50 years, Dungeons & Dragons helped spawn the present multibillion dollar fantasy industry - a cultural force we must now face, lest we lose our grip on reality.
In the pre-computer 1970s, Gygax and Dave Arneson added fantasy elements like wizards and fireballs, plus a dose of improv theater, to their medieval war games. The low-tech, mind game Dungeons & Dragons was born, quickly catching on as a fantasy game that let players role-play single characters.
In 1979, Dungeons & Dragons hooked me. My gaming buddies and I were labeled geeks, doomed to the lower echelons on our high school caste system, but largely left alone to our own devices: complex rulebooks, Tolkien-esque maps, and cheap soda. We played every Friday night for five years, rolling polyhedral dice and consulting charts to decide our characters' fates, because the rulebook of the real world was impossible to fathom.
But since the 1980s, so-called fantasy escapist pursuits have gone mainstream. Dungeons & Dragons inspired blockbuster fantasy movies and J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, and boosted interest in Renaissance fairs and Tolkien. Adults now play Xbox and PlayStation as much as kids. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft and Second Life, have entranced tens of millions worldwide. Even Dungeons & Dragons has become an online game.
Yet few have paused to consider the nature of the fascination, or its effects. Exhausted by our troubles, America seems nostalgic for a lost age. Wouldn't the world be better if we were ruled by benevolent kings and had real encounters with magic? If alchemy and mystery, not politics or media, ruled the lands? If a boy wizard or hobbit thief could wield real power?
In the story of my life, I say Dungeons & Dragons taught me imagination, verbal skills, and team-building. But the game consumed my teen years. Was this obsession with fantasy heroics a kind of cowardice - a perpetual infantalizing, an inability to take real-life risks that actually mattered?
I now know the reasons why I needed to escape into Dungeons & Dragons. I haven't played for decades, but my lingering attraction to these fantasy realms leaves me dissatisfied with reality. Simple pursuits - folding laundry, mowing the lawn, "Sopranos" reruns - seem dull by comparison to the exploits of that parallel me in a faraway land.
Paradoxically, we now embrace digital technology to bring us these imaginary places where we can easily vanquish evil. Gygax's influence has mutated into something more thorny. Might a new menace be looming, not Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," but "fantasy escapist entertainment"? I fear a massive cultural failure to fight real battles in actual, not virtual, life. The phrase "World of Warcraft widow" exists for a reason.
Perhaps I am seeking to feel good about the countless hours I spent as a Dungeons & Dragons geek. But I believe distinctions can be made. Qualitatively, the imaginative experience of folks reading "Harry Potter," or measuring the arrow-range of a squadron of miniature Elvish archers with an actual piece of string, beats playing passive Warcraft shackled to a PC. In literature and D&D, images flicker in the mind, not on the screen. In MMORPGs, it's the game designers who mostly flex their imaginations, not the players.
As Gygax said in a 2006 interview, "The analogy I make is that pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television." Warcraft surges in popularity. But I'm heartened that old-school Dungeons & Dragons is still around. The game won't let you hide behind avatars and computer screens, in lonely bedrooms behind closed doors.
Humans want to tell stories - magical ones, where we can be heroes - like the improvisational play of kids, cast in archetypal "good guy," "bad guy" settings. It's just we've forgotten how. Gygax showed us how to be bards again. For that, we should be grateful.
As a culture, we have a choice: tell each other riddles in the dark or be overwhelmed by special effects. Perhaps, like in Dungeons & Dragons it will be a die roll that will decide the fate of us all.
Ethan Gilsdorf is a writer from Somerville. His book "Escape Artists: Travels through the Worlds of Role Playing Freaks, Online Gaming Geeks, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms," will be published next year. 