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Looking Back At Dungeons & Dragons
An anonymous reader sends in a nostalgic piece about Dungeons & Dragons and the influence it's had on games and gamers for the past 36 years. Quoting:
"Maybe there was something in the air during the early '70s. Maybe it was historically inevitable. But it seems way more than convenient coincidence that Gygax and Arneson got their first packet of rules for D&D out the door in 1974, the same year Nolan Bushnell managed to cobble together a little arcade machine called Pong. We've never had fun quite the same way since. Looking back, these two events set today's world of gaming into motion — the Romulus and Remus of modern game civilization. For the rest of forever, we would sit around and argue whether games should let us do more or tell us better stories."
Few people born after 1990 will likely want to touch D&D, or any other pen-and-paper RPG. I kind of feel sorry for their imaginations. At some point the saturation of visual media will reach a point where practically everything is a close derivative of some other work the artist has seen, and you'll have very little artwork that's created simply by the mind of the designer. This has implications, IMHO, that reach further than just how people draw elves and orcs. D&D made us look up at the *ceiling* and try to imagine a creature, a place, a situation, and the interaction of things that we've never encountered. Kids seeing Avatar today will be, in some way, imagination-impaired.
(damn, I sound old)
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
A troll appears on the discussion thread. He has not noticed you yet, but he's causing some damage to the surrounding environment. Remember that you'll need fire or acid to cause him permanent damage -- just modding him down won't work.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.