A Generation of Floggers

 I was musing on the death of Gary Gygax the other day. I never met him , but I had friends at and out of the TSR farm. When I was at First Comics in the early days, we had a couple of escapees from there, and by a process I never understood, John Ostrander was paired up with Tim Truman and I was paired up with Bill Willingham. The former gave rise to Grimjack (set in MY city of Cynosure, thankyouverymuch), and the latter, though nowhere near as successful, did produce the kickass Outrider backup and the single best issue of WARP evah. (Bill is now the writer of one of the most fun comics out currently--Fables.)

Jeff Albrecht was also a good friend, and the very last regular series I ever did in comics was a TSR book--Gammarauders, which was fun and a half. But I was never a D&D fan, even though many of my closest friends (especially in those pre-computer days) were intensely and heavily into it. Something about it turned me off. 

It wasn't quite like the colossal disappointment I felt when I encountered my first digital arcade game (Centipede, in some New Town bar or other): "You mean that's it? The strategy is to shoot at everything as fast as you can?" As a pinball addict, this was, instead of the enhancement I'd hoped for, a severe truncation. With D&D, the problem was a little more refined: how could you really call it a game when you had one person, the Dungeon Master, shaping the entire game, while the rest ran around in it. I don't know whether it offended my democratic sensibilities, or whether I was not sure that I wanted to run around in somebody's (severely circumscribed) fantasy world and enjoy it. Wouldn't it be better to read a fantasy book instead? 

So I always wondered what the appeal of D&D---and its computer and console successors--was, and why I so completely missed it. And Yesterday I realized just what Dungeons and Dragons is that made it so seductive.

D&D is golf.

Now I have a horrified fascination with golf, both as the game itself and as a cultural instrument. I  found it highly interesting that the Japanese are completely golf-crazy, and working back from that gave me some insights.

1) There is no way to play it at home.

2) It requires large areas of land, and not any land, but an elaborately prepared course.

3) It is untimed.

These three simply embody the aristocratic life at play: property, servants, and unlimited leisure. No wonder it exercises a draw far beyond its virtues as a game. (Which exist: it wouldn't survive as a pastime if it weren't actually fun.) But I'm after something else here, namely

4) Although you can play in groups, you are actually playing against the landscape.

Golf is, in a fundamental way, as Mark Twain had it, 'a good walk spoiled." Because while a golf course is situated in nature, the actual extra-human aspects are all abraded away, and nature is reshaped into a purely human, and more, arbitrary shape. It's green and quiet but that's it. Even the formal garden's at Versailles have flowers and trees--and makes pleasing designs. A golf course is nature planed down to a puzzle, and not a very intricate or interesting one. And that has to do with play: if you plant a maze on your manor grounds, solving the puzzle once is enough.  You don't steal out of the house while the dew is on the rose on Saturday to get in a couple of rounds of maze walking.

And that's Dungeons & Dragons all over. Although you play in a group, you really play against the landscape. And while it looks like a puzzle, the puzzle aspects are planed down so you can play on the ground. It's untimed (relatively speaking)--and if a computer is your dungeon master, can be a solitary thing in a landscape (even by the standards of fantasy fiction) highly artificial.

Miniature golf takes the essence of golf--playing against the landscape--and de-aristocratized it--but D&D did it even further. The golf course became graph paper, and the woods and irons became +3's and +5's on a chart--and the aristocratic illusion got mapped from Blenheim Palace to Middle Earth.

Now I have no idea if the golf metaphor is an insidious thing or a salutary one: there's a big temptation to triumphantly say 'And that's what's wrong with kids today! TOO--MUCH--GOLF!" It's another type of gameplay, and a peculiar one: a puzzle without the intellectual challenge, a road race without speed, and a fight in which competition takes only a minor part. It's either (as I found) a center lacking just about any of the good stuff, or a locus amoenus of relaxation and delight.

I tend to think it's not simple love of the gameplay that does it, or golfers would play miniature golf if a real course were not available, or set up a croquet field, or even play pinball, whose play is, at the core, similar. It gets borne up by the dream of aristocracy and nature. In the same way, if Gary had come up with this war game (which it really is) and marketed it, like Avalon Hill, as a real-world game, we would probably not even remember it, or him. It was borne up by the way in which J.R.R. Tolkien made the landscape of The Lord of the Rings real, and evocative, and a character in the book. Dungeons and Dragons was a good walk spoiled in Middle-Earth. And it is really interesting that one of the hidden things that it did was bring the golf model of gameplay, previously so restricted, into so many corners of our culture.