(Tim: I first met Paul Cote walking down the hall of our dorm at Northern Illinois University. Wearing a tall leather Lincoln hat, Paul mentioned he liked Dylan. We became friends. Since then, we've roomed together, gotten our M.Divs. together, and we continue to visit and correspond. Through the years, I've occasionally asked Paul to retell the story of his friend, Gary Gygax, and the beginnings of Dungeons and Dragons. What did he think about all the Christians who were convinced that D&D was something close to necromancy or child-murder?
Here on the occasion of the death of Gary Gygax is Paul's personal account of the origins of D&D in the Gygax's merry home, a home large and generous enough to take Paul and many other teenage boys in and to give them fun. As you read this eulogy, stop and think: What if our Christian homes were as stable, joyful, and generous to the waifs all around us?)
When I was a 13 year old boy living in Chicago, a friend's father
introduced his son, my friend, and me to military board games published
by the Avalon Hill Company of Baltimore: Gettysburg and The Battle of the Bulge.
As boys we had enjoyed listening to our fathers telling stories about
World War II, and watching old war movies with John Wayne, and
especially Errol Flynn. And on rainy days when you couldn’t play
outside, these games were more fun than abstract games like cards and
chess. Historian John Keegan states in the introduction to The Face of Battle,
“for a young man training to be a professional soldier, the central
question is: what is it like to be in a battle?” Knowing that our
fathers had gone to war, and that it was a formative moment in their
lives, in becoming men, our imaginations were fired by the same
question, and war games, like reading military history, were a way of
thinking about these things.
Here's a picture of Gary Gygax at the podium, addressing the opening of the first
wargaming convention, the Geneva Convention (Gen Con.) held in Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin. Standing next to Gygax is Bill Hoyer, president of the
International Federation of Wargaming (IFW). This and the other photo below may be the only pictures taken at this first wargaming convention in 1968.
Avalon Hill published a magazine for its customers called The General, and through an ad in the back I began corresponding with a “war gaming club” in the Chicago land area, with the grandiose name, "The International Federation of War Gaming" (IFW). The IFW consisted of a couple of dozen gamers, most of whom had never met one another, but who played games by mail, wrote articles about games etc. That’s when I began corresponding with Gary Gygax, who worked in downtown Chicago but commuted by rail to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Gary lived in a small, comfortably run down house on a main street in the Town. He had 5 children, all close in age, and all having bright red hair just like his wife, Mary...
Gary and his wife, Mary, were an inspiration to me, as a young man.
Unlike my parents, who I saw struggling between each paycheck just to
pay the mortgage and provide for me and my sister, (for which I am
profoundly grateful), Gary and Mary did not own their home, had even
less money than my folks, and yet they did not worry about money: they
spent their time doing what they enjoyed doing. They valued their
freedom more than their security. Clearly, they were both ‘not
uptight’, part of that great experiment in the late 50’s and early 60’s
of pursuing happiness, and yet they were not utopians, did not believe
that politics would save the world, were not into drugs, or any of the
excesses associated with the 60’s. They were warm, friendly, and
hospitable, surrounded by friends, and had a lot of fun. Why did
countless teens who saw A Hard Day’s Night decide they wanted
to be like the Beatles? Because in the movie, they seemed to be having
so much fun. Hanging around with Gary was a little like that.
Freedom and playfulness are not unmixed blessings in a sinful world,
but neither are they to be feared as always destructive. With judgment
and self-control, they can be beneficial.
Gary was a charming man, who had extraordinary charisma. He had a
gift for connecting with people, and I found that even people who met
Gary only a few times felt that he was a friend. He was a good
listener, and was open with everyone. I remember one afternoon when I
went to visit, expecting to play games, but I ended up going with Gary
and his family to some land he owned outside of town to pick
strawberries, and we ended up talking about everything that mattered to
both of us, even though I was 15 and he was 30.
In 1968 Gary arranged for the IFW to rent a delightful old exhibition
building called Horticulture Hall about two blocks away from his home,
and the club sponsored a weekend get-together called the “Geneva
Convention” where many war gamers from across the country met one
another for the first time. About a hundred people came. Gary’s wife
and kids sold sandwiches or hot dogs in the hall, which was a good
thing since most of the young teenage boys at the convention, like
myself, had no intention of wasting an hour of gaming time to leave and
get lunch. People crashed in cheap motel rooms (I stayed at the
Hi-De-Ho Motel, which sounded like a lover’s hideaway to my folks) and
stayed up most of the night playing games.
Gary had a sand table in his basement and every weekend guys would
come over to play miniatures, especially medieval miniatures, which was
Gary’s favorite time period. Gary had read hundreds, if not thousands
of science fiction and fantasy books, and so had a wealth of knowledge
of not only stuff in the books, but plot twists, things that happen to
people in the course of adventures and stories and so on.
One time, Gary put a castle in the corner of the sand table, and the
knights went inside to explore. The castle was not big or detailed
enough inside to get all the figures inside so action inside the castle
became a paper and pencil game. They found a dungeon, and got all
wrapped up in exploring the dungeon, finding treasures, avoiding traps
and so on and sort of ignored what was going on with the battle on the
sand table. They had so much fun doing that, from then on players just
went for the castle and the dungeons, and the sand table became passé.
I used to visit Gary when I could, (being 15 with no car) and that
included during family vacations to the church camp at Lake Geneva. I
recall watching the riots in Chicago during the Democratic Convention
on the TV in Gary’s living room. Then one time in the early 70’s I
stopped in to play the new Dylan record for Gary and Mary, and to hang
out, and when I suggested playing a board game, Gary simply said, “we
don’t play them much anymore, we’ve been having a lot more fun playing
paper and pencil games”. So I sat down on his porch with his oldest son
Ernie and we played “going into a dungeon”.
Some rules for miniature war games were fairly simple, and some
gamers were especially interested in the models and figures themselves,
painting them and collecting them. Other rules were very detailed and
complex, and required a Judge to oversee the game, taking pieces on and
off the table as each side took it’s turn so that each side only knew
what they could “see” and surprise could be incorporated into the game.
The most elaborate set of rules was published in 1966 by Michael F.
Korns ("Korns rules") in a book titled Modern War in Miniature.
It contained tables of information about WWII weapons, and formulas for
everything a soldier could do, for example, “In daylight on an average
day, ¼ square meter of man or machine exposed at a distance of 200
meters from an enemy soldier will be observed once every 24 seconds by
the enemy soldier. In any given two-second period (the length of a turn
in the game) the soldier’s chance of sighting the ¼ square meter area
is s=1/12 or 8.3%. Games using “Korns rules” required a game judge to
execute the complex rules, while limiting players knowledge to ‘what
they can know’ and to narrate the action. An example of play is given
by Korns in the introduction to his book:
People often wonder how did Gary Gygax come up with Dungeons and Dragons? Was he a genius? Lucky?
Or did he, like blues man Robert Johnson, go down to the cross-roads and sell his soul to the devil for fame and fortune? No.
In fact, Gary was an extraordinary man who was also in the right place at the right time, and the result was a eucatastrophy.
He brought together people, and then ideas, to create something
extraordinary at just the right time, in the evolution of game
technology.
As someone who was there at the time, I can say that what Gary
really did was to combine the way of playing, and the relationship
between the players and the judge, from Korn’s rules with medieval
miniatures rules and his extensive knowledge of Fantasy and Science
fiction novels to create a shared storytelling experience. The
mechanics were a paper and pencil game, but the key was Gary himself as
the ‘dungeon master’ and it became wildly popular simply because it was
a lot of fun. Later, with the publication of D & D the
experience was mass produced, but as with enlightenment in the rock
opera Tommy, there were a number of drawbacks to bringing the special
experience to the masses.
Typical concerns about D & D are that players spend too
much time doing it, and get obsessed with alternate personalities and
that it encourages belief in magic or the occult. I have always told
concerned Christians that there is nothing inherent in the game itself
that is evil or unhealthy. But the people playing, the ‘sub-culture’
surrounding a group of players does effect what playing the game means
and whether playing is a bad influence on the players. And yes, it has
attracted some unsavory or unstable people.
I use this analogy. Participating in High School wrestling is of
“some value”. It teaches hard work, discipline, and character in the
face of adversity, among other things. On the other hand, Professional
wrestling is quite another matter. It is not a sport, it is a
ridiculous spectacle glorifying violence, sex, “the cravings of sinful
man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does”. No
one should gloss over the sin of professional wrestling, or be too
quick to condemn High School wrestling.
I have not spoken to Gary for many years, or played D & D,
or been part of the gaming community, but I did know the man. Although
Christians disagree about the effect his invention has had on our
culture, anyone who knew Gary Gygax personally would disagree that he
was evil, or that he was used unwittingly by evil forces, or that the
predominant influence of his life was to corrupt others. To say that a
person devoted their life to playing games and making up stories may
seem like a waste. But of course, Gary’s life was also about the
friends he played with.
I can’t speak to Gary’s faith in Christ. I suspect that like a lot
of very gifted people, faith in Christ did not have the place in his
life that it should have. But having known him, I do feel impoverished
by his passing. May God have mercy on his soul.
(This article may be reproduced in its entirety
with the following attribution: "This article is reproduced by kind
permission of its author, Paul Cote. It was originally published on the
blog, "Out of our minds, too.")
