If you are a true geek, then you already know what this post is about from the title.
For the rest of you, Gary Gygax died a little over a week ago. He co-created the infamous role playing game 'Dungeons and Dragons'. There are a number of interesting pieces on him in Wired, the New York Times, Slate and others. These articles do him more justice than I will and honestly I can't claim to know anything about him. But this is the point where the routine confession emerges: yes I was a a D&D junkie for a while.
Here's my attempt at a profound observation about Gygax and D&D. He realized you were a nerd before you did. That is, D&D and its ilk became this road map for giving some young kid the chance to indulge their inner nerd while also learning to accept and understand this intriguing social and mental predisposition, and finally to create a game that would seamlessly have you network with others who had the same geeky tendencies.
Yes, some unsuspecting kid (actually not me, believe it or not, but I saw it - and you saw it too), who like everybody else was already dealing with the early onset of puberty but who had something even more sinister going on that they had not begun to deal with. We are talking of course about a kid who had still not recognized much less sought counseling for his inner nerd, but who would invariably discover D&D and, upon realizing its sheer awesomeness, would careen into school proclaiming its wonders to all schoolmates. This would be the first experience of coming to understand that one was slightly different from the other kids. It would also immediately help to thin out and narrow down the pool of potential friends to those with compatible interests. Notice the gender neutrality - this is important - girls and guys were sucked into this in healthy numbers because both girls and guys can be sheer geeks and that's the only real criterion here. Before you know it, this kid is trolling the halls with a pack of likeminded prorgramming, tolkien-obsessed types trying to find a DM (look it up).
It truly took a genius to give us 4-, 9-,12-, and 20-sided die with which to determine outcomes of situations with ogres, dragons, wizards and much, much more. I remember some nights looking at those dies totally transfixed by their symmetry and wondering how the hell they did that. Later in life I'm pretty good at 3D visualization and decent at recognizing symmetry - I've often wondered if those stupors in which I tried to figure out those cursed die had anything to do with that.
When Atari was exploding pervasively on the scene, when cable TV was the most amazing thing ever imagined on TV (after your Atari game player - will you ever get your revenge YAR?!?!?!?), Gary Gygax had the guts to make using your imagination cool and to create a way for people to get together with friends and challenge each other in mind games. It was brilliant.