Friday, March 07, 2008

Gygax death outs Tim Carney as dice dork

Gygax painting

The trouble with having a bunch of brothers in the journalism industry is that you can never be sure when your past will be used for material. Case in point, Brian Carney's Wall Street Journal column on the passing of D&D creator Gary Gygax, which includes this heartwarming gem:

"But at the risk of sounding like a geek and a curmudgeon at once, in my day we did it the old-fashioned way. In all likelihood we were in somebody's basement, sitting around a table with our dice at the ready and our character sheets in front of us. My brother John was the dungeon master, and he was a good one, too. My brothers -- Mike and Tim -- and I, along with our friends Chris and John (I'll withhold their last names to protect their reputations), spent hours at a time exploring a world that existed only in our imaginations."

UPDATE: Todd contemplates the lasting political impact of D&D by analyzing the Brothers Carney, "or at least a Platonic ideal of each of three of the Carneys," through the lens of Gygax's order/chaos dichotomy.