A Non-Trivial Pursuit

If you have ever played a game that involved creating a character, setting that characters "stats", outfitting him/her/it with equipment, and then increasing and developing that character over the life of the game, then you have this man to thank:



Gygax was one of the co-inventors of Dungeons & Dragons. A game and concept that inspired not only many table top geeks but also a huge (I mean huge) amount of computer and video games that would follow, as the technology allowed. Despised by some as satanic, ridiculed by many as pointless and pathetic, it was a game that used your (gasp) imagination and forced you to play your character based solely on some scribbled notes, a lot of written rules (as someone noted arguable the first "open source" code), and of course lots of funny shaped polyhedryl dice.

I played it for a number of years - although perhaps not as fervently as some since there weren't many others I knew to play with. My greatest enjoyment actually came from creating the worlds that players adventured in. I loved making maps and coming up with stories and devious tricks and traps people had to think their way through.

On my Apple IIc (with green monochrome monitor and all 128kb of RAM) I wrote a long program for generating characters for Dungeons & Dragons (actually the Advanced version) including typing in every single magic item listed in the books I had and having some sort of database operation pick some out at random for characters starting above level 1. All in BASIC as I hadn't even learned Pascal at that time nor had I ended my programming career forever after the FORTRAN77 fiasco my freshman year of college.

Considering the time it took me to do that, it was a little disheartening when a friend of mine loaned me several of the Wizardry series of games for the Apple that had that already built in as a minor component of what I thought was a fantastic computer game. And it was for the time - tiny little "3D" slideshow window and all. Over the years I spent time playing games like A Bard's Tale (my first color computer game on my 286-12) and then Diablo (we're talking VGA graphics here!). Then computers got better, the games looked better but they began to get more formulaic and derivative of earlier games. Granted games today have traded some of the freeform aspect of original D&D for the need to deliver a "finished" product, but the underlying basics are still there.

Even today games like Mass Effect and World of Warcraft owe their heritage to the original D&D concept. I know a lot of people (my Dad for one) thinks games are a waste of time. I suppose by definition they are, but I really enjoy ones that make you think, and even better that tell a story.

Sometimes even a good story.

We're entertainment junkies. We listen to music, watch endless TV (or record it all to watch it at some later, non-existent date when we have "time"), we go to movies or watch them on our big screens at home, we go to concerts and plays and operas, and we play and watch sports. And we play games. Everyone has their preference - mine is to get involved with the story rather than to sit idly by and let someone else all the work.

Oh and the title of this post is in reference to something I always thought was strange. When Trivial Pursuit first came out, it was only sold in specialty shops - like The Wizard's Chest in my local shopping mall - along side all the tabletop boardgames and all the D&D stuff. I thought it was odd because answering a series of specific preset questions is pretty much the antithesis of what D&D was all about.

posted by Tom at 12:05 PM | 0 comments |