Brad King - Dungeons & Dreamers: A Story of How Computer Games Created a Global Community

Copyright 2014 by Brad King and John Borland
ETC Press

Smashwords Edition
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Bios

Brad King earned his masters from the University of California at Berkeleys Graduate School of Journalism in 2000. While there, he won the Wired magazine Excellence in Technology Writing award. After graduating, he worked for Wired and Wired.com. In 2004, he was the producer and senior editor for the MIT Technology Review Web operation. Hes been an advisory board member for South by Southwest Interactive for more than a decade, and hes hosted its Accelerator program since 2009. King is currently an assistant professor of journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where hes also the director of the universitys Digital Media minor.

John Borland has been writing about technology and its effects on popular culture, politics, and communication since the mid-1990s. A graduate of Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeleys Graduate School of Journalism, he began his reporting career covering politics and elections for the California Journal in Sacramento. With more than a little geek in his blood, he migrated to the Internet early, working for CMPs TechWeb and then CNET News for nearly a decade. At CNET, he won a number of national and regional journalism awards, including the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Best in Business award, and the Northern California SPJs Excellence in Journalism award. Since 2006, he has lived in Berlin, Germany, as a freelance writer.

Dedication

For my wife, who patiently allowed me to hide in my room for weeks on end.
Brad King

For Aimee, who reads every word I write with empathy and just the right amount of criticism.
John Borland

In the beginning were the pencil, and graph paper, and the rattle of twenty-sided dice rolling against a tabletop.

To generations that have grown up associating games with screens, keyboards, and multi-buttoned controllers, this might sound as quaint as hand-cranked automobiles or phones with wires. But in truth the seeds of one of the worlds largest entertainment industries, as well as of some of the most vibrant cultures native to the new digital environment, lie here. From pencil, paper, and dice came digital swords and magic spells, chainguns and rocket launchers, clans and guilds, and, ultimately, rich virtual worlds filled with people who, in many cases, wanted to do nothing but talk.

This book is about the rise and maturation of computer game developers and communities of computer game players since the early 1970s. As the story opens in 1972, the arcade video game craze was just starting to build, driven by game designers and players at Atari and other smaller companies. But in the small Wisconsin town of Lake Geneva, a group of people was gathering who had no interest in playing games electronically, and saw no point in moving pixels around a screen. They were concerned instead with storytelling, and with the ability to play parts in each others stories. That desire and the Dungeons & Dragons game that resulted from it would over time have a profound impact on the development of computer games and their players communities.

Its almost impossible to overstate D&D s role in the rise of computer gaming. Scratch almost any game developer who worked between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, and youre likely to find a vein of role-playing experience. Some of the biggest computer games have explicit roots in D&D . Richard Garriotts landmark Ultima series was originally based directly on his high-school D&D games. The 1996 hit Quake was named after a character in the long-running games played by the developers at id Software, and the game was originally conceived as a medieval-themed role-playing game. Indeed, without D&D creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the history of computer gaming communities would likely have taken a radically different path.

Role-playing games had roots in earlier games, just as computer gamers could later look to Gygax and his kin as predecessors. Serious, adult-oriented war games that utilized toy soldiers as virtual armies had become popular in Germany in the late 1800s, and the games had spread across Europe and America. Even committed-pacifist author H.G. Wells had been a devotee, writing a book on the subject called Little Wars in 1913. In mid-twentieth-century America, a game publisher called Avalon Hill started releasing strategy games based on the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and World War II, which helped renew interest in war gaming. Gygax and Arneson had been among devotees of that companys games, and their local groups in Lake Geneva and Minneapolis were dedicated to that type of play before the advent of role-playing games.

Paper gamers, as they would come to be known after the rise of the computer age, served very much as prototypes for the kinds of digital communities that would come later. The players were mostly male, mostly young, and mostly white and middle class. Computer researchers and programmers, a group drawn in disproportionate numbers to fantasy novels like J.R.R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings series, loved the game. They played it in its original form, and because their medium was code and computer, not paper and dice, they tried to replicate its magic on their machines. Throughout the 1970s, digital versions of the game appeared on university and other publicly accessible networks, and spread quickly through programming circles.

Paper games were heavy on violence and fantasy, as computer games later would be. In the best cases, storytelling and genuine role-playing defined play, although these elements varied with the quality of the imaginations of the people running the games. In Gygaxs mind, it hasnt been an accident that so much of gaming tradition centered on violence, from chess to war games to D&D to Quake , nor that players tended to be male (though other game scholars have certainly emphasized the cooperative elements of play, even in violent games).

Games tend to answer a lot of deep instinctive things, Gygax said. Maybe its mens male aggressiveness that makes them want to play games. Theres a competitive aggressiveness to games, even Monopoly . Youre there to win.

But whoever was playing, Dungeons & Dragons created the kind of communities sustained by simple physical presence. The games were played in garages, basements, and dorm rooms across the country by small groups of people. The fact that their games took them outside the mainstream of American popular entertainment culture helped solidify these players bonds. Throughout the course of a night, a weekend, or even monthsand amid piles of empty soda cans, pizza boxes, and more than a few marijuana roachesplayers worked together to get out of each dangerously lethal situation their game master threw them into.