The Dungeon Loses Its Dragon
Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away, hopefully at the age of 400, atop a hoard of gold. John Moser gives a 20-point-charisma salute. D&D will probably go down in history as the perfect example of the tradeoffs involved in moving from analog world-immersive games to digital ones. The internet can do a lot of cool things, but one of the least cool things it can do is replace your imagination. Then again, the power of the imagination was always (at least since the ’80s) supposed to be about overturning established cool structures, and if anything’s proof of that, it’s the internet. Gygax may be gone, but radical life extension and noncorporeal currency, at any rate, live on.
