The New York Times recently published a fun diagram to illustrate the supposed impact of playing Dungeons and Dragons early in your life. It suggests that if you did that you’ll either have an intense relationships with computers and/or science fiction and that the roll/role-playing concept may have contributed to the algorithm behind Google’s search ranking. In the accompanying article, Adam Rogers says:
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.
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hmm now you mention it – its pretty obvious roleplayers have made the entire modern world/the internet. D&D is basically non-linear interactive storytelling usually done in groups -that kind of sounds like the basis of the internet to me. And of course you get the opportunity to pretend to be someone else rather than a wimpy teenager with zits – which was the founding thought behind D&D I assume. Maybe I should be putting that I raised my half elf fighter/cleric to level 12 on my cv after all.
March 19th, 2008 at 1:50 am
ummm…. is there suppose to be a diagram or something here?
I see a big purple block ….. ????? PS Gary Gygax was co-creator with Dave Arneson. Both are great contributors.
February 5th, 2009 at 11:21 pm