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Vocabulary > Games, Outdoor activities, Board games
 
Chess Champion Bobby Fischer
Date taken: 1962
Photographer: Carl Mydans
Life Images
Anglonautes: Wrong Life caption - the man in the picture
is NOT
Chess Champion Bobby Fischer (1943-2008).
Chess Tournament
Chess
Location: US
Date taken: 1939
Photographer: Hansel Mieth
Life Images
Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach
Game Spy PC
http://uk.media.pc.gamespy.com/media/619/619908/img_5195285.html
http://uk.media.pc.gamespy.com/media/619/619908/imgs_1.html
added 9.3.2008
Image légèrement recadrée à droite par les Anglonautes.
Dungeons & Dragons
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27dungeons.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/arts/05gygax.html
Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach
http://uk.media.pc.gamespy.com/media/619/619908/imgs_1.html
checkers
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/us/30fortman.html
board games
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/17/board-games-christmas
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2009/nov/27/10-best-board-games
dice
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/16monopoly.html
new version of Monopoly
2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/16monopoly.html
The Wire Monopoly
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2010/oct/07/the-wire-monopoly
Hasbro's new edition of Monopoly,
complete with batteries and inflated house prices
2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/27/monopoly-christmas-toy-bestseller
chess
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/chess/index.html
chess > Robert James "Bobby" Fischer
1943-2008
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/bobby_fischer/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/19/crosswords/chess/19fischer.html
Scrabble
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-sublime-joy-of-scrabble-1067061.html
Trivial Pursuit
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/business/03haney.html
crossword
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/crosswords/
For Better and For Worse
by Lynn Johnston
Gocomics
May 6, 2012
outdoor activity
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/21/children-weaker-computers-replace-activity
hopscotch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch
snakes and ladders
http://www.snakes-and-ladders.co.uk/
merry-go-round
http://www.merrygoroundmuseum.org/
hide and seek
sliding
http://www.swing-n-slide.com/
swinging
http://www.swing-n-slide.com/
climbing
http://www.swing-n-slide.com/
No Dice, No Money, No Cheating.
Are You Sure This Is Monopoly?
February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
You can still collect $200 when you pass “Go,” but not in piles of play
money.
In the new version of Monopoly, the game’s classic pastel-colored bills and the
designated Banker have been banished, along with other old-fashioned elements,
in favor of a computer that runs the game.
Hasbro showed a preview of the new version, called Monopoly Live, at this week’s
Toy Fair in New York. It is the classic Monopoly board on the outside, with the
familiar railroads like the B.& O. and the development of property. But in the
center, instead of dice and Chance and Community Chest cards, an infrared tower
with a speaker issues instructions, keeps track of money and makes sure players
adhere to the rules. The all-knowing tower even watches over advancing the
proper number of spaces.
Hasbro hopes the computerized Monopoly will appeal to a generation raised on
video games amid a tough market for traditional board games, a category where
sales declined 9 percent in 2010, according to the market-research firm NPD
Group. “How do we give them the video game and the board game with the social
experience? That’s where Monopoly Live came in,” said Jane Ritson-Parsons,
global brand leader for Monopoly.
With free digital games everywhere, Hasbro is hoping to revive interest among
young children and preteenagers in several of its games that cost money. (The
new Monopoly, available in the fall, will be about $50). Battleship will undergo
a similar digital upgrade this year, and other Hasbro games will be redesigned
for 2012 and 2013, Ms. Ritson-Parsons said.
But for families used to arguing over Monopoly’s rules, players who slip a $100
bill under the board for later use and friends who gleefully demand rent from
one another, it may not be so easy to adapt to a computer’s presence on the
board.
“It seems that there’s a computer that makes most of the decisions for you — it
changes a lot of the rules, it removes a lot of the skill,” said Ken Koury, a
competitive Monopoly player and coach who informally settles rule disputes for
others. “With this computer, I’m wondering what’s left for the player to decide
— is it they just keep pushing buttons and wait for someone to win?”
Hasbro is aiming at luring 8- to 12-year-olds back to these board games. Its
executives say this age group, accustomed to video games, wants a fast-paced
game that requires using their hands. To move forward on the new Monopoly board,
players cover their game piece with their hands, and the tower announces how
many spaces the player can move. Players also hold their hands over decals to
buy or sell properties, insert “bank cards” into slots to check their accounts,
and send a plastic car moving around a track to win money or other advantages
(only when the tower instructs them to, of course).
Hasbro executives also say that young players do not want to bother with reading
instructions and toss rules aside.
“For games, but really for anything you buy today, you need to be able to take
it out of the box and play it,” said John Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing
officer. “You’re not ensconced in the rulebook.”
To that end, Hasbro is shortening and simplifying many of its popular games,
changing the formats of Scrabble and Cranium so they can be played in
five-minute spurts. Rivals like Mattel are doing the same with games like Apples
to Apples. Even video games often come in bite-size pieces, like the popular
Angry Birds.
"There is a recognition that people’s attention spans maybe aren’t as big as
they used to be, or they don’t have the time to dedicate to this activity," said
Sean McGowan, a toy analyst with Needham & Company.
Ms. Ritson-Parsons said that while some aspects of the game had changed,
Monopoly Live still emphasized social interaction.
“Getting rid of the instruction book encourages a lot more face-to-face
interaction,” she said. “If you’re not having to read as much, you are all
chatting more.”
Hasbro has kept key social elements, like allowing negotiation for property.
The adherence to rules also speeds up the game and makes it more interesting,
she said. For example, if a player lands on Marvin Gardens but decides not to
buy it, the rules mandate that it be auctioned off right away — but a lot of
players do not know or do not follow that rule.
“People were saying, ‘It takes me a while to get to own properties,’ ” Ms.
Ritson-Parsons said. “Well, it’s going to if you don’t auction it.”
The new version tries to combat board boredom in other ways. It sprinkles in
random events, like a horse race where players must bet on winners.
The computer also tracks how fast or slow play is going, and may intervene to
make it lively. If, say, very little property is getting bought, it will
announce an auction in the middle of turns.
Hasbro executives said that the company would continue to sell classic Monopoly
once the new edition came out.
“It’s really just an extension of the brand, not a destruction of what was,” Mr.
Frascotti said.
Mary Flanagan, a game designer and distinguished professor of digital humanities
at Dartmouth, said that games tended to reflect the societies that they were
played in. For instance, the original Monopoly, issued in 1935 by Parker
Brothers, now a subsidiary of Hasbro, reflected “American ingenuity, the sense
of needing to have hope, and reinforcing capitalism in the face of real economic
despair,” she said.
This version, she said, seemed to be “less and less about financial awareness” —
children do not need math skills in it— and more about social interaction.
Yet “when you say you can’t cheat, it means that there’s no sense of being able
to socially negotiate the rules,” she said.
Joey Lee, who studies games as an assistant professor of technology and
education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said cheating could
actually be instructional.
“I wouldn’t necessarily even call it cheating,” he said. “In many cases a
gamer’s mind-set is coming up with new and novel approaches to winning, and to a
certain problem at hand. That’s exactly the kind of mind-set we need as far as
21st-century skills.”
“Being able to negotiate with others, make up your own rules, argue with other
players, that, to me, is part of what makes it a successful social game,” he
said. The tower is “more of that blind adherence to following orders, versus
being able to figure out and learn the game for yourself.”
Though Hasbro is emphasizing social interaction with the game, some Monopoly
players and academics said the new version sounded much less social — no arguing
over whether a player could buy his neighbor’s “Get Out of Jail Free” card?
“It takes away from the aspect of interpersonal negotiations if you have an
electronic voice in the middle of the board telling you everything to do,” said
Dale Crabtree, a finalist in the national Monopoly championships in 2009. “The
first thing I said was, ‘The next thing they’ll do away with is the players.’ ”
No Dice, No Money, No
Cheating. Are You Sure This Is Monopoly?, NYT, 15.2.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/business/16monopoly.html
Larry Evans, Chess Champ, Dies at 78
November 17, 2010
The New York Times
By DYLAN LOEB McCLAIN
Larry Evans, a five-time United States chess champion and prolific writer who
helped Bobby Fischer win the world championship in 1972, died Monday in Reno,
Nev. He was 78.
Mr. Evans, who lived in Reno, died of complications of gall bladder surgery,
according to the Web site of the United States Chess Federation, the governing
body for the game.
Though Mr. Evans was a grandmaster, he was best known for his writing; he had a
syndicated chess column for decades and wrote more than 20 books, among them
“New Ideas in Chess,” “Modern Chess Brilliancies” and “The 10 Most Common Chess
Mistakes.”
Mr. Evans was an editor of the 10th edition of “Modern Chess Openings,” long a
mainstay for tournament players. He also founded American Chess Quarterly and
edited it from 1961 to 1965. The book that Mr. Evans was probably most famous
for was one on which he assisted: Mr. Fischer’s “My 60 Memorable Games.” He
cajoled and exhorted Mr. Fischer to finish the book, edited and helped him with
the prose and wrote introductions to all the games.
Typical of Mr. Evans’s style was the introduction to Game 9 against Edgar
Walther, in which Mr. Fischer escaped with a draw: “What makes this game
memorable is the demonstration it affords of the way in which a grandmaster
redeems himself after having started like a duffer; and how a weaker opponent,
after masterfully building a winning position, often lacks the technique
required to administer the coup de grace.”
During Mr. Fischer’s prelude to the world championship, Mr. Evans was what is
known in chess as his second. He helped him train and prepare for his matches
against Mark Taimanov, Bent Larsen and Tigran Petrosian. Before the championship
match in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972 against Boris Spassky, Mr. Evans and Mr.
Fischer had a falling out. Frank Brady, Mr. Fischer’s biographer, speculated
that the rift was over Mr. Evans’s desire to have his wife, Ingrid, accompany
them on the trip, which lasted more than two months.
Larry Melvyn Evans was born March 22, 1932, in Manhattan. Growing up, he hustled
games for dimes on 42nd Street. He won the championship of the prestigious
Marshall Chess Club on West 10th Street at 15 and was New York State champion by
18. In 1950, he played for the United States team in the biennial Chess Olympiad
in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, and took an individual gold medal. He went on to play
on seven more Olympiad teams, including the one that won the gold medal in
Haifa, Israel, in 1976.
In 1951, at 19, he won his first United States championship. He defended the
title a year later in a match against Herman Steiner. He won the title again in
1961, 1968 and 1980, when he tied for first with Walter Browne and Larry
Christiansen. He also won four United States Open championships. The World Chess
Federation awarded him the title of grandmaster in 1957.
In the 1960s, Mr. Evans moved to Reno when he discovered he had another talent:
counting cards. “He had a memory that he built up from chess,” Dr. Brady said.
“He could memorize cards, and he wasn’t making any money from chess in those
days. Nobody was.” His other profession did not last. “He made a lot of money
and he kept getting banned from casino to casino,” Dr. Brady said.
Mr. Evans is survived by his wife, an artist and photographer, and two stepsons.
Mr. Evans had a few successes in international tournaments, among them a first
at Portimo, Portugal, in 1975. But he rarely played internationally, and in his
one attempt to qualify for the world championship, at the Amsterdam Interzonal
in 1964, he finished 14th.
Dr. Anthony Saidy, an international master who knew Mr. Evans for many years,
said the risk-taking that made Mr. Evans successful in tournaments in the United
States did not work as well against the very best players, but he was still a
formidable player. Dr. Saidy said, “He was one of the very few American
grandmasters that I couldn’t beat, ever.”
Larry Evans, Chess
Champ, Dies at 78, NYT, 17.11.2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/us/18evans.html
Richard L. Fortman, a Champion at Checkers, Dies at 93
November 30, 2008
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX
Richard L. Fortman, an internationally known authority on checkers, the sport
of men and kings, died on Nov. 8 in Springfield, Ill. He was 93 and a lifelong
resident of Springfield.
His daughter, Cindy Ponder, confirmed the death.
For seven decades Mr. Fortman was considered one of the game’s foremost players,
analysts and authors. He was almost certainly the last living link to the heyday
of checkers in the era before television, when men passed the time playing in
barbershops and firehouses and city parks, and when high-pressure tournaments
took place in smoke-filled rooms where the prevailing hush was broken only by a
rhythmic click-click-clicking.
A specialist in the slow, ruminative art of checkers by mail, Mr. Fortman was a
former world postal checkers champion. His series of handbooks, “Basic
Checkers,” published privately in seven volumes in the 1970s and ’80’s, is
widely considered the Hoyle of checkers, required reading for students of the
game.
In the hands of a master checkers is no child’s play, and Mr. Fortman was quite
literally a master. (Like chess players, checkers players are ranked
internationally, the most extraordinary becoming masters and grandmasters.) In
his prime Mr. Fortman was one of the top players in the world. He could play
blindfolded. He could play 100 games at once. He won most of them.
Like chess, checkers is played on a board of 64 squares. Unlike chess, it is
played only on the black, the F sharp major of the gaming world. Pieces, or
“men,” as they are known, move on the diagonal. It is a game of relentless,
incremental forward motion: only when a piece reaches the farthest row and
becomes a king may it move in reverse. These tight restrictions on allowable
moves, players say, make checkers in many respects more difficult than chess.
There are about 500 billion billion possible positions on a checkerboard —
visualize a 5 with 20 zeros after it — and players study historical openings and
endgames with the fervor of initiates to priestly ritual. The hold checkers
exerts on the faithful can border on obsession; at its most tenacious, adherents
say, it has been the ruin of more than one man. Happily, Mr. Fortman, by all
accounts a solid citizen who earned his living as a warehouseman, was not among
them.
Richard Lee Fortman was born in Springfield on Feb. 8, 1915. His father, Richard
Clarence, was a railroad telegrapher, and late at night, when few trains came,
he and his co-workers along the line played checkers by telegraph. They could
not betray themselves by keeping checkerboards in the stations, so the games
played out entirely in their heads.
At home, father and son passed long winter evenings at the board. With years of
telegraphy under his belt, the father routinely trounced the son. When the son
was about 15, his father, an intuitive player, suggested he consult books on
checkers in the local library. Young Mr. Fortman did so, and after about a year
began thrashing his father. The father revised his position on checkers books.
In 1933, at 18, Mr. Fortman entered his first state tournament and placed third.
(Between 1950 and 1978, he was Illinois state champion six times.) After Army
service in Italy and North Africa in World War II, he joined the Panhandle
Eastern Pipe Line Company, becoming a warehouse foreman there.
Mr. Fortman married Faye Nichols in 1950. Their home was awash in checkers, with
games in various states of play scattered throughout the house. When his
children were young and dangerous, Mr. Fortman set up his boards in the basement
of his parents’ home, located conveniently next door.
In correspondence checkers, Mr. Fortman’s particular passion, a player has
perhaps 72 hours to plot and ponder before writing his next move on a postcard
and sending it to his opponent. A game unfolds over many months, sometimes
almost a year. Mr. Fortman won the world postal championship in 1986 and again
in 1990.
Besides his wife and daughter, both of Springfield, Mr. Fortman is survived by a
son, Mark, of Westmont, Ill.; a sister, June Russell of Springfield; and four
grandchildren.
In recent years the computer has made checkers by mail a bygone art. Mr. Fortman
adapted, and to the end of his life, his daughter said, he spent hours each day
playing, and winning, games online. Last month members of the checkers world
suspected that Mr. Fortman’s health was declining after he failed, highly
uncharacteristically, to submit his return moves in time.
Richard L. Fortman, a
Champion at Checkers, Dies at 93, NYT, 30.11.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/us/30fortman.html
Op-Ed Contributor
Geek Love
March 9, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM ROGERS
San Francisco
GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a
little bit, because he built it.
I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs
knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created
the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and
polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our
world.
Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war
games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from
the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the
Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.
Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside
their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say,
the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was
quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence.
You also got to pick your moral alignment, like whether you were “lawful good”
or “chaotic evil.” And you could buy swords and fight dragons. It was cool.
Yes, I played a little. In junior high and even later. Lawful good paladin. Had
a flaming sword. It did not make me popular with the ladies, or indeed with
anyone. Neither did my affinity for geometry, nor my ability to recite all of
“Star Wars” from memory.
Yet on the strength of those skills and others like them, I now find myself on
top of the world. Not wealthy or in charge or even particularly popular, but in
instead of out. The stuff I know, the geeky stuff, is the stuff you and everyone
else has to know now, too.
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy
novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about
characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like
elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction
stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in
the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently
mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a
snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic
sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.
Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions
of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship,
Mr. Gygax’s creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements
instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play —
two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game — so Dungeons & Dragons
was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the
right lessons to the right people.
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But
people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and
unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character
sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into
numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real
self.
For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world
became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind
of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.
Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in
the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing
all the time gave my universe rules and order.
We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a
casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become
a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around
us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can
even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of
how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator”
TV show. I mean, so I hear.
Mr. Gygax’s game allowed geeks to venture out of our dungeons, blinking against
the light, just in time to create the present age of electronic miracles.
Dungeons & Dragons begat one of the first computer games, a swords-and-sorcery
dungeon crawl called Adventure. In the late 1970s, the two games provided the
narrative framework for the first fantasy-based computer worlds played by
multiple, remotely connected users. They were called multi-user dungeons back
then, and they were mostly the province of students at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. But they required the same careful construction of
virtual identities that Mr. Gygax had introduced to gaming.
Today millions of people are slaves to Gary Gygax. They play EverQuest and World
of Warcraft, and someone must still be hanging out in Second Life. (That
“massively multiplayer” computer traffic, by the way, also helped drive the
development of the sort of huge server clouds that power Google.)
But that’s just gaming culture, more pervasive than it was in 1974 when Dungeons
& Dragons was created and certainly more profitable — today it’s estimated to be
a $40 billion-a-year business — but still a little bit nerdy. Delete the
dragon-slaying, though, and you’re left with something much more mainstream:
Facebook, a vast, interconnected universe populated by avatars.
Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based
on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds
relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this
is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.
This diverse evolution from Mr. Gygax’s 1970s dungeon goes much further. Every
Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection
on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a
character playing the real world.
We don’t have to say goodbye to Gary Gygax, the architect of the now. Every time
I make a tactical move (like when I suggest to my wife this summer that we
should see “Iron Man” instead of “The Dark Knight”), I’m counting my experience
points, hoping I have enough dexterity and rolling the dice. And every time, Mr.
Gygax is there — quasi-mystical, glowing in blue and bearing a simple game that
was an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.
That was a reference to “Star Wars.” Cool, right?
Adam Rogers is a senior editor at Wired.
Geek Love, NYT,
9.3.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html
Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69
March 5,
2008
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL
Gary Gygax,
a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins
and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he
helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis.
He was 69.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Gail Gygax, who said he had been ailing and
had recently suffered an abdominal aneurysm, The Associated Press reported.
As co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the seminal role-playing game introduced in
1974, Mr. Gygax wielded a cultural influence far broader than his relatively
narrow fame among hard-core game enthusiasts.
Before Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy world was something to be merely read about
in the works of authors like J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Howard. But with
Dungeons & Dragons, Mr. Gygax and his collaborator, Dave Arneson, created the
first fantasy universe that could actually be inhabited. In that sense, Dungeons
& Dragons formed a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films
and the exploding interactive video game industry. It also became a commercial
phenomenon, selling an estimated $1 billion in books and equipment. More than 20
million people are estimated to have played the game.
While Dungeons & Dragons became famous for its voluminous rules, Mr. Gygax was
always adamant that the game’s most important rule was to have fun and to enjoy
the social experience of creating collaborative entertainment. In Dungeons &
Dragons, players create an alternate persona, like a dwarven thief or a noble
paladin, and go off on imagined adventures under the adjudication of another
player called the Dungeon Master.
“The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative
experience,” Mr. Gygax said in a telephone interview in 2006. “There is no
winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining
yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a
fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of
vicariously experience those things.”
When Mr. Gygax (pronounced GUY-gax) first published Dungeons & Dragons under the
banner of his company, Tactical Studies Rules, the game appealed mostly to
college-age players. But many of those early adopters continued to play into
middle age, even as the game also trickled down to a younger audience.
“It initially went to the college-age group, and then it worked its way backward
into the high schools and junior high schools as the college-age siblings
brought the game home and the younger ones picked it up,” Mr. Gygax said.
Mr. Gygax’s company, renamed TSR, was acquired in 1997 by Wizards of the Coast,
which was later acquired by Hasbro, which now publishes the game.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Gygax is survived by six children: three sons,
Ernest G. Jr., Lucion Paul and Alexander; and three daughters, Mary Elise, Heidi
Jo and Cindy Lee.
These days, pen-and-paper role-playing games have largely been supplanted by
online computer games. Dungeons & Dragons itself has been translated into
electronic games, including Dungeons & Dragons Online. Mr. Gygax recognized the
shift, but he never fully approved. To him, all of the graphics of a computer
dulled what he considered one of the major human faculties: the imagination.
“There is no intimacy; it’s not live,” he said of online games. “It’s being
translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it
is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one
time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or
television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said,
‘Because the pictures are so much better.’ ”
Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69, NYT, 5.3.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/arts/05gygax.html?ref=opinion
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