Gary Gygax, the creater of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) died earlier this week. Gygax is considered by many people to be the crowning example of nerd.
            D&D is a role playing game from the 70’s. Way back, in the70’s, young men played D&D the old fashion way, with paper, pencil and some 20 sided dice.
            Today, hours are being lost to role playing games of a new breed. The personal computer has revolutionized the role playing game experience. Now that the Dungeon Master (DM) has been replaced by a computer program, there is no need to have a group of friends to adventure role play. Wasting your life away in the funk of your parent’s windowless basement is now packaged by the convenience of the internet.
            World of Warcraft (WOW) is a prime example of this phenomena. We all know of, or have heard of someone, who, is wasting their life away right now, battering some helpless wood sprite to death with a “Mighty Sword of Heroic Strength X 10.”
            The dialogue surrounding D&D during the 70’s was amongst nerds and geeks.These same men would end up becoming the forefathers of the internet itself.
            The computer industry owes credit to Gygax. It was the role playing game craze in the 70’s that drove computer scientists to create random number generators and virtual physics. California in particular was swept with the math of randomness and how to program it artificially. University of California Berkeley is one of the centers for this branch of computer science.
             In those days computer scientists developed the earliest frameworks of the USENET where public discussion was carried out on bulletin boards. Topics on these bulletin boards ranged across a large spectrum, including D&D.
            Gygax wrote incomplete rules. Nerds who had a good grasp on how to do a better job of artificially creating reality jumped all over the chance to come up with better “systems.” Right up to this point in time nerds are still in the race to create the best role playing universe.
            D&D is directly linked to anyone who enjoys the internet. It is part of the flowing consciousness of the online universe. When you take a step back and look at the time spent on the internet, you could imagine that all of us who use it, are gamer geeks.         
            So next time you see a manna tapper or a dice roller, be sure to give him a high five for helping create the biggest time waster of all time… the Internet.