Prologue: The Beginnings

On a cool fall afternoon in 1972, a trio of Minnesotans pulled into Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, apicturesque lakeside town about an hour north of Chicago. They puttered through the four-blockdowntown, pulling into a driveway just a few streets outside the tiny main street drag. Two ofthem, Dave Arneson and Dave Megarry, anxiously rechecked their bags as they emerged from

their car. They‟d driven 350 miles just to show off the board games they‟d made themselves. If they‟d forgotten anything, it was too late t

o go back, but they wanted to make sure all theirmaterials were in order.Lake Geneva then, as now, was an unlikely gaming mecca. A resort town with a population of5000 people

—that figure quadrupled in the summer, when people came to swim in the lake‟s

uncharacteristically clear, rock-bottomed waters

—

it had been better known as the summerhome for wealthy families such as the chewing-gum Wrigleys and the home-appliance Maytags.Now it was home to 34-year-old Gary Gygax, a game player and game writer whose peripateticenergy and immense curiosity had already earned him a prominent place in a community ofMidwesterners fascinated by military and history-themed games.Arneson and Gygax had met before, at the GenCon gaming convention that Gygax had started

in Lake Geneva a few years earlier. The two had collaborated on a sailing game called Don‟t

Give Up The Ship. Now Arneson was working on a new adventure game with a style of play thatwas as close to theater asit was to the typical miniature soldier battles. Megarry, too, had beentrying out a new board game, played more conventionally with dice and cards, but setunderground in a monster-infested dungeon. Gygax had heard about them and wanted to seeboth.

“Come on in,” Gygax told the visitors. “I‟ll show you around.”

He let them inside, showed them where they would be sleeping, and then led them down to thebasement. Gygax had built a sand table there, 12 feet long by 6 feet wide, where a group thathe played with almost every weekend held their games. Gygax was the author of a game called

Chainmail, which used little figurines to simulate medieval battles. He‟d recently modified the

game, adding elements of fantasy such as trolls and dragons and magicians that shot fireballs,which not so coincidentally had the same blast radius as the cannons used for other gamesplayed on this table. The new version had proved wildly popular. Sometimes as many as 20 or30 gamers sat around the table playing.As the sun set, the little group gathered to play at Gygax

‟s dining room table upstairs. A fewother people from the Lake Geneva scene had joined them, including Gygax‟s own 12

-year-old

son, Ernie. They tried Megarry‟s game first. The players traversed a board made of graph

paper, running into monsters and fighti

ng them with magic spells. “I said, „Wow, this is a greatadaptation.‟ It was Chainmail in a dungeon,” Gygax remembered later.

Arneson went next. A heavyset, spectacled young man a few years younger than Gygax, with abig, mischievous smile, he launched them into something very different. The players had tomake characters and give them attributes that would determine how strong or smart they were.Those attributes would help them when they attacked monsters or tried to figure out puzzles inthe game. The

n the players would act out the characters‟ roles as they wandered through the

swamps of the haunted Castle Blackmoor, doing their best to stay alive. Arneson himself wouldplay the godlike role of Game Master, telling the story of what was happening to the charactersat any given moment and letting them decide as a group what to do next. Would they fight the

monster? Would they run away? Would one member of the group steal everyone else‟s treasure

and hightail it for a safe house? It was alittle haphazard

—

Arneson kept rules scrawled in anotebook full of loose-

leaf sheets of paper, and anything that he didn‟t know, he simply made upon the spot. He‟d been doing this with his own group of gamers for almost a year now in

Minneapolis, and he had the style down.

“Deep in the primeval swamps of Lake Gloomey, shrouded in perpetual mist, lies the city of theBrothers of the Swamp…” he started, and the party of adventurers was off.

By the end of the weekend, Gygax and the rest of the Lake Geneva crowd were enthusiastic.Collectively, they saw that something new was in reach, merging the underground dungeonexploration scenario and this improvisational role-playing mode of gaming. Maybe others in thecommunity would be drawn to its fantastic mix. Arneson gave Gygax copies of his notes to workfrom, and Gygax set to work creating a full set of rules, drawing from these and from Chainmail,and making up new elements to fill in the blanks. By the time he finished a draft of the 150-pagerule book early the next year and began showing it around to his friends, he had a name for thenew game: Dungeons & Dragons.

“We were having a tremendous amount of fun, but we figured we were crazy,” Arneson said,years later. “We had no inkling that this would turn out to be something so big.”

***

This book is about the phenomenon of gamers, and most specifically, the communities ofcomputer game players that have sprung up and matured over the past 25 years. The storystarts in this small town, with a group of people who had no desire to play games electronically.Elsewhere in1972, the arcade video game craze was just starting to build under the fingertips of game

designers and players at Atari and elsewhere. The gamers in Lake Geneva, however, weren‟t

interested in moving pixels around a screen. They were concerned instead with storytelling, andwith the ability to play parts in their stories together. That desire would ultimately have aprofound impact on the development of computer games and the communities of computergame players. The high-tech story of computer gamecommunities is about people searching fora place that feels like home, surrounded by others

—

even if they are only virtual representationson a computer screen

—

who understand them. This story is necessarily intertwined with the riseand spread of home computers and the Internet, but its seeds were planted here in LakeGeneva.

It‟s almost impossible to overstate the role of Dungeons &

Dragons in the rise of computergaming, even if the game itself was originally all pen, paper, dice, and notebooks. Scratch

almost any game developer who worked from the late 1970s until today and you‟re likely to find

a vein of role-playing experience. Some of the biggest computer games have explicit roots in

D&D. Richard Garriott‟s long

-running Ultima series was originally based directly on his highschool D&D games. The 1996 hit Quake was named after a character in the long-running D&Dgames played by the developers at id Software, and Quake was originally conceived as amedieval-themed role-playing game. Indeed, without Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, computergaming communities would likely look radically different than they look today.

Gygax wound up publishing Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 under the imprint of a new company

called Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) started by himself and a few associates. He‟d expected it tobe a success, although in the war gamers‟ highly specialized world, that usually meant

sales ofabout 8000 copies. He and his friends had optimistically forecast a big hit

—

which meant sellingmaybe 50,000 copies, making it a near-record breaker. The game reached far beyond theirexpectations, spreading largely by word of mouth across college campuses around the United

States. By the time it had been out a year, Gygax and his partners were revising TSR‟s

estimates. Maybe it would ultimately sell a million copies, they thought, stunned. Even that waswell short of the truth. By the early 1980s, when Dungeons & Dragons and similar gamesreached the peak of their popularity, the number of people playing role-playing games in theUnited States was somewhere between four and five million, Gygax estimated.Those early role-playing communities had roots in earlier games, just as computer gamerscould later look to Gygax and his kin as predecessors. Serious, adult-oriented war games, usingtoy soldiers, had become popular in Germany in the late1800s, and the games spread acrossEurope and America. Even committed pacifist author H.G. Wells had been a devotee, writing abook on the subject called Little Wars in 1913. In mid-century America, a game publisher calledAvalon Hill started releasing strategy games based on the Civil War, Revolutionary War, WorldWar II, and other battles, helping to initiate a renewed interest in war gaming; Gygax and

Arneson had been among devotees of that company‟s games, and their local groups in Lake

Geneva and Minneapolis were dedicated to that type of play before the advent of role-playinggames.Paper gamers, as they would come to be known after the rise of the computer age, served verymuch as prototypes for the kinds of digital communities that would come later. The players weremostly male, mostly young, and mostly white and middle class. Computer researchers andprogrammers

—

a demographic that seemed drawn in disproportionate numbers to fantasy

novels like J.R.R. Tolkien‟s Lord of the Rings series—

loved the game. They played it in itsoriginal form, and because their medium was code and computer, not paper and dice, they triedto replicate its magic on their machines. Throughout the 1970s, digital versions of the gameappeared on university and other publicly accessible networks, and spread quickly throughprogramming circles.Paper games were heavy on violence and fantasy, as computer games later would be. In thebest cases, storytelling and genuine role-playing defined play, although these elements variedwith the quality of the imaginations of people running the g

ames. In Gygax‟s mind, at least, ithasn‟t been an accident that so much of gaming tradition has been centered on violence, from

chess to war games to D&D to Quake, nor that players tended to be males.

“Games tend to answer a lot of deep instinctive things,” he says. “Maybe its men‟s maleaggressiveness that makes them want to play games. There‟s a competitive aggressiveness togames, even Monopoly. You‟re there to win.”

But whoever was playing, Dungeons & Dragons created the kind of communities sustained bysimple physical presence. The games were played in garages, basements, and dorm roomsacross the country by small groups of people. The factthat their games took them outside themainstream of American popular entertainment culture helped solidify their bonds. Over thecourse of a night, a weekend, or even months

—

amid piles of empty soda cans, pizza boxes,

and more than a few “roaches”—

players worked together to get out of each dangerously lethalsituation their Game Master threw them into.