D&D Career Training? and goodbye Gary Gygax...

Good bye and God Bless Gary Gygax. 

Don't know who he is?  He was one of the co-inventors of that famous teenage fan boy hobby, Dungeons & Dragons.  Mr. Gygax passed away last week at the age of 69.

An entertaining March 10 column, "Quest for the Teenage DM", by the Wall Street Journal's "Real Time" columnist Jason Fry commemorates Mr. Gygax's contribution to teenage culture.  (DM = "dungeon master" for the uninitiated - and no, it's not kinky.  DM is just the phrase to describe the host of a game that often includes fictional adventures in dungeons, castles, etc.)

"Hearing he'd died, I found myself thinking about D&D again -- and realized Mr. Gygax's game had a lot more influence on my life than I'd thought." says the WSJ's Mr. Fry.  Reading Jason's column, and some of the web articles it links off to, helped remind me of how much fun I had playing D&D as a boy and young man. So, I'd like to take his tribute one step farther and praise Mr. Gygax for the inspiration and training that he helped offer millions of young potential entrepreneurs with his complex yet imaginative game.   

I’d even draw a parallel from learning and playing D&D to advancement in many professions. Understanding, following, sometimes manipulating, and even inventing complex rule sets is what many white collar jobs are all about – banking, law, politics, etc.  Allowing young people to try on different personas and test the rules is a lot of what drives much of today's hot web properties like Facebook, too.

It would be interesting to poll startup CEOs in their 40’s – I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find a high number of them were former D&D players. What is a startup CEO if not a DM?!

Most especially I see parallels with the most modern of professions – "web master". This job obviously even derived its name at least partially from D&D. Outside of pure entertainment industry jobs like film direction and video game design, starting a web site is the closest job I know of to being a DM.

Building web sites offers the CEO/web producer/creator a blank canvas for creation of a user experience. Setting up a new web business is all about creating incentive systems to encourage the user behavior you desire, aided by graphics and often by an underlying narrative or mission statement. Real time feedback is instantaneous and progress is definitely measured by statistics. Sound familiar?

Now that my work involves setting up new web site businesses, advising web startups, and writing books (Internet Riches) and blogs (www.ScottFoxBlog.com) about new e-businesses, I realize how much influence the technical rule sets and structured imagineering of D&D may have had on my career.

I also wonder if video games have replaced the imagination required by Dungeons & Dragons with pre-developed visuals and story arcs, just as music videos wiped out album cover art, and hyper-realized movie fantasies have replaced the need to actually sit down and read Tolkein and Harry Potter.

Too bad, if so. Not sure what will be left for my kids to imagine for themselves.

Godspeed, Gary. Thanks for helping to bring so many imaginations alive.

[Did you play D&D or do you still?  Do you agree that Gary Gygax's game may have helped you become a better entrepreneur?  Let us hear from you in the "Comments"!]

Comments

[Bog97th]

Thanks for the article and Thank you my Gygax for all the friends made, the thoughts provoked and the great times of the past, present and future from the the best RPG ever.

[Carlos Gutierrez]

As a former D&D'er with dozens of characters under my belt, which, by the way, also held a sleek black satin pouch of my dice, I mourned Gary's passing and remembered those 8-hour D&D sessions I used to enjoy with my friends back in the day.

Indeed, D&D was thinking on your feet, being plausible to the circumstances, problem-solving, and above all learning to work with (and assemble) a team that was focused on the mission/objective. All traits of the entrepreneur.

Theatre of the mind....at its best.