In a sweet article in Sunday's New York Times, Wired editor Adam Rogers notes the passing of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax and argues for a sort of teleological relationship between the culture of D&D in the 1970s and our current digital culture. This is interesting for the explicit link Rogers makes between gameplay and non-game digital objects and business models. Of course, it's also clearly a geek fantasy of redemption ("The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone else has to know now, too"). Not to mention, it repeats the digital culture origin myth (that functions very powerfully and literally) of American boy geniuses creating through play.
1 comment:
Such a great find. Not only is this diagram pleasingly nerdy (says someone who does not usually admit to having played D&D when she was 12), but it also signals so perfectly the networked quality of the contemporary digital media landscape and, by extension, our lives as they are embroiled in and by that landscape.
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