{"id":2850,"date":"2008-03-04T15:34:33","date_gmt":"2008-03-04T23:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2008\/03\/04\/15\/34\/a-great-disturbance-in-the-nerd-force\/"},"modified":"2008-03-04T15:41:02","modified_gmt":"2008-03-04T23:41:02","slug":"a-great-disturbance-in-the-nerd-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2008\/03\/04\/15\/34\/a-great-disturbance-in-the-nerd-force\/","title":{"rendered":"A Great Disturbance in the Nerd Force"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20080304\/ap_en_ot\/obit_gygax&amp;printer=1\" title=\"Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons &#038; Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.\t\tHe had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.\t\tGygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons &#038; Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.\t\tGygax always enjoyed hearing from the game's legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family's home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons &#038; Dragons as recently as January, she said.\t\t'It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them,' Gail Gygax said. 'He really enjoyed that.'\t\tDungeons &#038; Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that's still growing in popularity.\t\tBorn Ernest Gary Gygax, he grew up in Chicago and moved to Lake Geneva at the age of 8. Gygax's father, a Swiss immigrant who played violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, read fantasy books to his only son and hooked him on the genre, Gail Gygax said.\t\tGygax dropped out of high school but took anthropology classes at the University of Chicago for a while, she said. He was working as an insurance underwriter in the 1960s, when he began playing war-themed board games.\t\tBut Gygax wanted to create a game that involved more fantasy. To free up time to work on that, he left the insurance business and became a shoe repairman, she said.\t\tGygax also was a prolific writer and wrote dozens of fantasy books, including the Greyhawk series of adventure novels.\t\tGary Sandelin, 32, a Manhattan attorney, said his weekly Dungeons &#038; Dragons game will be a bit sadder on Wednesday night because of Gygax's passing. The beauty of the game is that it's never quite the same, he said.\t\tFuneral arrangements are pending. Besides his wife, Gygax is survived by six children.\">Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons &amp; Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The thing I liked most about Gygax&#8217;s fantasy stuff was that it was so obviously not based on wishy-washy English pastoralism in the Tolkien vein, but was always darker and edgier and unabashedly pulpy, in the spirit of Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Robert Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. *Especially* Leiber and Vance. Of course, since Gygax&#8217;s heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, a couple of generations of fans reared on Tolkienism have infected D&amp;D with Tolkienistic tropes, but Gygax&#8217;s original D&amp;D world, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/World_of_Greyhawk\" target=\"_blank\">Greyhawk<\/a>, is a crucially interesting reflection of both timeless fantasy archetypes and 1970s\/1980s anti-establishmentarianism&#8230; and a kick-arse adventure playground of endless orc-infested dungeons and elf-infested forests in a classic vein. Gygax&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Expedition_to_the_Barrier_Peaks\" target=\"_blank\">Expedition to the Barrier Peaks<\/a><\/em> is one of the best mindfuck roleplaying scenarios I&#8217;ve ever been killed within.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s still <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Glorantha\" target=\"_blank\">Glorantha<\/a>, which has also remained relatively Tolkien-Free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons &amp; Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69. The thing I liked most about&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[585,584,583,586,582],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dd","category-dungeons-and-dragons","category-gary-gygax","category-glorantha","category-roleplaying"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}