RPGs changed your entertainment world

Roleplaying games have a relatively short history, in terms of books, dice, paper and pencils.  While many give people like Gary Gygax of TSR fame most of the credit, that would be wrong.  There were others like Dave Arneson, M.A.R. Barker, Ken St. Andre, who all created worlds and rules to experience them, similar towards, superior to, perhaps they were even independent of contact with Gygax.  I am not attacking Gary Gygax, what he did was absorb all of the ideas he came in contact with and place them in a context that was to become the template for all games thereafter.  However changed, they had an origin, and usually were variations upon his publishing product. *1 (I am fortunate to have interviewed both Gary Gygax and Ken St. Andre.  While the Gygax interview was lost when PopThought was hacked, the St. Andre interview is still on this site.)  From the middle 1970s companies such as TSR, Chaosium, Flying Buffalo, White Wolf, Game Designer's Workshop, Game Workshop, R. Talsorian Games, Steve Jackson Games, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Atlas Games and many more contributed to providing an enormous choice of systems, settings, and games.  Games such Dungeons and Dragons, Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest, Ars Magica, Chivalry and Sorcery, Arduin, Talislanta, Empire of the Petal Throne, Jorune, and many more offered worlds and systems to explore, conquer, build for players of all sorts of interests.

Some will point to an origin of the concepts of fantasy, in the original literature of such, as found with J.R.R. Tolkien, Roger Zelazny, Lord Dunsany, Poul Anderson, Ursula K. LeGuin, C.J. Cherryh, Michael Moorcock, and of course many more.  While these are all great writers, with impact upon the concept of fantasy, they weren't placing their work in a concept of how to play or live or adventure in their worlds.  If you assume all fiction is in various ways open to development and open to being playable, perhaps it might be, it is still not the same as having a game to adapt such fiction for use.

You might ask what is the big deal with this all, it is just a game, right?  Well, no.  It isn't.  The concepts of all these game creators and world designers weren't just one and done, played and left behind.  They inspired much of the fantasy RPGs on computer and video games.  Even if the games have internal algorithms to decide outcomes, they use the same concepts that the original game creators used.  Knowing all this might be simply extra facts to you.  You might have use of it, or probably don't.  That isn't important.  What is important, is that in this throw away society we ignore those who created what we wish to play, read, watch, listen to, and perhaps do so so we won't think about the cost of being a creative talent. *2

I am also pointing this out because society tends to look at things backward.  Examples would be, the movie Andromeda Strain is just like Outbreak.  Or, the Spartans remind me of Nazis.  But that is, of course, backwards.  And yet, it happens all the time.  Even more oddly to me, I've met born again Christians who tell me playing Dungeons and Dragons is evil, or from the devil. Yet, they watch fantasy movies, read fantasy books, and play video games based upon the concepts that Dungeons and Dragons used, and popularized. If you are playing a fantasy adventure game, in video or computer game form, think about the facts of what went into your being able to play it.

Lastly I suggest that without the doors opened by fantasy RPGs to the common person, we might never have had the film series of Lord of the Rings, nor perhaps Game of Thrones.  It bears consideration, what effect the power of creative role playing has had throughout all media.

1- The Interview with Ken St. Andre
2- Mass interview about Gary Friedrich deals with Marvel