It’s a truism about Slate that they’ll publish anything if it’s contrarian enough. Yesterday they ran a contrarian take on the recently deceased Gary Gygax, now being celebrated in the press as forefather of a purportedly dominant modern geek culture. Gygax was the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. The argument of the Slate piece is that Gygax’s D&D is responsible for the bad trends in role-playing games — meaningless slaughter, lust for treasure and XP — in contrast to the good things, the actual playing of roles. Many of his criticisms of D&D ring true. But his contrarian historical point falls flat:
Dungeons & Dragons strips the “role-playing” out of RPGs; it’s a videogame without the graphics, and a pretty boring one, at that.
As a historical matter, the opposite is true — D&D put the role-playing into role-playing games. It would be impossible for D&D to have stripped anything out of role-playing games, since they didn’t exist at the time; D&D created a genre that was far from inevitable. D&D took the elements of table-top wargaming and pushed them in the direction that lead towards modern RPGs, including the ones the author praises as true to the form. D&D’s immediate predecessor was the straight-up table-top game Chainmail (also by Gygax), which pit groups of soldiers against each other. Relative to Chainmail and its ilk, the contributions of D&D are tremendous — identification of a player with a single character is pretty much a prerequisite for true role-playing, for example. Seen this way, even the innovations the author calls “genocidal” were real progress. Experience points were a way of giving players personal investment in a single character, whereas in previous games there were no characters, only interchangeable soldiers.
In general, the true observations Sofge makes are swallowed up by his ahistorical, knee-jerk contrarian perspective. It’s a shame that the editors of Slate don’t try to tell the difference between arguments that are unheard because of unfair neglect, and arguments that are unheard because they’re essentially wrong.
Update: The Slate Fray for the article is filled with comments that share my general sentiment, though the arguments are usually a little different. I like this one.
Related: Mefi comment presents a heart-warming Gygax story.
Very oedifying!