I’ve just finished reading about the death of Scott Norberg and, to be honest, I’m lost for words. I feel a strangely potent mix of numbness and outrage, but I have no way to express it.

One thing I can say is that there is no way this should have been an insurance payout; people should be doing time for murder.

It’s been a bad month; first Gary Gygax, and now Arthur C. Clarke.

Eerily, I found these comments, while going through some source code, here at work, yesterday:

    StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

    StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

    StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

Which, as well as being a strange foreshadowing, just goes to show how great a cultural impact he had¹.

1. OK - so a programmer quoting sci-fi isn’t that spectacularly unlikely, but you get the point. [↩]

So, it’s not news to anyone by now, but Gary Gygax, who is widely regarded as the inventor of role-playing games, has died.

I think it’s safe to say that without the influence of Gygax (and others like him; Dave Arneson,Marc Miller, and Kevin Siembieda leap to mind,) I would not be the man I am today. Reason enough to visit his house and make sure he’s dead, some might say. But that would be unfair — he did so much more than lead me to a life of geekery; he invented a new type of game that, you could argue, fundamentally changed our perception of play, and led more or less to every game that came after it. From the kids (young and old,) who still meet weekly to eat pizza and playDungeons and Dragons, through all of the other games that brought their own style and personality to the hobby he invented and all the computer games that aim to recreate that same feeling through a keyboard and a monitor to the global juggernaut that is World of Warcraft, they all owe a debt of gratitude to E. Gary Gygax. Put simply: the world of entertainment would not be where it is today without his input.