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04 March 2008
Greater Influence on US Culture: Gary Gygax, or William F. Buckley, Jr.? Let the debate begin.
I like to think of them as two very different players sitting down to a game of Illuminati: New World Order, personally. In fact, if Greg Bear or Neal Stephenson were to write a novel posing those two as ultrapowerful, undying shadow overlords pitched in a long-haul battle of cultural wills still raging 100 years from now, I think that'd be just about the best book ever.
Whew, that piece of ignorance is now documented for posterity, and will be a point of pride to which I can refer from now on. I may be an anime geek, but D&D is one level to which I've never sunk. Also, writing erotic furry mary-sue fanfic.
Buckley. Nerdism is relevant, but nerd culture is only recently relevant (due to the increased social power of nerds).
On a tangential note: Theodore Kaczynski had a letter from prison published in the New York Review of Books It's on an obscure matter completely unrelated to his terrorism or beliefs.
I almost, but not quite, can't belive the geek meter on metafilter about this. (Sorry for the metafilter reference, I know it's Not Done.) And what a perfect name the guy had. Sounds Not Real.
*suddenly feels like the fat kid in a locker room full of jocks*
I dunno. Games and story-telling are pretty ancient and fundamental human behaviors. Gygax codified a system that merges the two in an accessible way, and that creation became the framework for a whole new kind of game, the MMO. That seems more important to me than being the water-carrier for the Whig party.
*cringes, pushes glasses up nose, and awaits towel-snap*
GG made people who would not normally get together get together.
And he created a whole new subset of retail.
Hell, he made me money in bad dragon drawings alone.
I'd love to argue for GG, but Buckley was more influential among people with actual power who in turn made laws and investments that pretty much determined the parameters of American lives.
That's not to say I was immune to the siren call of the graph paper and the many-sided die.
Seriously, the best part about playing D&D as a girl, in the 80s, was hanging out with the quirky boys.
Ah, that MeFi thread got me thinking about the guys that I hung out with when I was a freshman and sophomore at college. The campus was in the middle of a state forest in rural PA and there was nothing to do there. Sitting in that horrible fire trap of an apartment drinking cheap beer and smoking stuff even cheaper than the beer, we'd play D&D until we passed out. Great times.
I will concede that Buckley had more influence with the powers-that-be, but did he actually make policy happen, or was he merely a highly articulate parrot with bright and pleasing plumage? I don't know.
Gygax, on the other hand, created the first crude formulaic syntax for describing an ongoing virtual world.
Let me take a different stab at this. BitterOldPunk nicely left his proposal untensed ("Greater influence?" rather than "who had the greater influence?"), so I'm going to include the future state of the world and post my argument accordingly:
Buckley has had a more profound influence up until now. Or until recently? Point is, he's been an influential figure, however fuzzy the question of agency vs. commentary may be. The people in power now know and care, one way or the other, about Buckley.
Gygax's influence is more subtle and subversive and, I think, long-lasting. He's shaped the worldview of a whole hell of a lot of people who will be running the country (both commercially and politically) and the world in the next ten, twenty, thirty years. He's defined some of the cultural underpinnings of a lot of very smart, very imaginative people who are now making their way firmly into adult life.
The only reason I've even heard of Buckley is from reading old, moldy, and dusty issues of MAD Magazine when I was a kid. And no, I didn't get it then, either.
Whew, that piece of ignorance is now documented for posterity, and will be a point of pride to which I can refer from now on.
Wow, you're pridefully ignorant on some stupid-ass stuff. Hey, it's your free time, you can spend it being smug about whatever you like.
I don't really have an opinion on which one was more influential; apples/oranges to me. All I'm gonna say is that I am sincerely surprised that the news of Gygax's death has drawn the attention of the mainstream media in a way I wouldn't have believed possible yesterday. Google News has put him under his own heading on the front page Entertainment section. I wouldn't have thought that most people in the MSM would have cared, or thought that the audience cared.
I guess it really comes down to how you quantify "influence". How small a ripple is relevant? Buckley may have had Big Ideas that Made Stuff Happen, but how many of those ideas are as instantly recognizable to as broad a range of people as the concept of "hit points"?
US culture? I'm in Canada, and I can safely say Gygax had a greater impact on my mind than Buckley. It's why I stuck with Everquest 1 and 2, and why I like Neverwinter Nights and all the other D&D-based RPG's, and has affected all the stories I write, both in my head and on paper. Hell, *I* even got to wield Mournblade! (ok, it killed me doing so, but I still did!)
*polishes +4 geek medal with Cloak of Elvenkind.*
Excellent point, gaspode.
Someone asked me one what I found attractive in the opposite sex, and I said, "A Comeliness of 14 or better and a high Dex."
"Why Dex?" they said.
"I appreciate grace, and you don't get that with a score under 8, really. And it always helps with the saving throw too."
Also mentioning that someone's botched their save when they do something dumb, and that person *gets* it.
After a long (well, for me) post to MeFi, basically it boils down to this is why I like RPG's, and why I'm thankful for Gygax's contribution to the general psyche.
Wow - there's 359 comments on MeFi in the Gygax obituary thread. Not one single snarky comment, just a lot of really great and heartfelt remembrances, which is pretty amazing for the blue, and very telling on the impact the man had had. This has left me pretty awed, in a really good way.
Just wanted to mention that. Geeks rule, ok!
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