I am in stunned shock as I learn of the passing of another legend and personal hero within a week, Gary Gygax. The details I have are scant, but I know from my last correspondence that he was in good spirits though in poor health. I just did not know how poor.
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I was a fan of his Role Playing Games, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Top Secret, Gamma World as well as some others that came out after it was established that there was a market to sell a game that existed only in the imagination. I asked Gary about this pioneering of a “conceptual concept” sale and he laughed in remembrance. How do you explain what a role playing game is when games used some form of equipment: Twister’s spinner and mat; Monopoly money and board; poker chips and cards…. Imagine the introduction: “Hi. You don’t know me and I have something you have never heard of and cannot see and when you play you cannot touch. Will you be part of my distribution network?” And whom would you approach to sell the rulebooks for such a game? Book stores? Toy stores? FAO Schwartz?

It was an inspiring phone call I had with my hero that evening, now, as a man considerably older than the 14-year old who played the game at lunch breaks and after school. I had grown up and my appreciation for what it meant to be E. Gary Gygax in the 1970s was deeper with my experience as an adult. How did he handle his PR back in those days with the Tom Hanks’ film and the talk shows supplying him with a crisis that Theosopically assailed his very product concept and one he could not avoid? There was no rule of PR back then. It was not a Tylenol repackaging and transparency moment, which would later become the Gold Standard for PR students to follow. These were spiritual attacks, gathering the unseen forces in salvos of rhetoric and judgment against a conceptual game, conceptualized individually by its every individual player. How do you handle that kind of crisis in the international media? How did I become who I am? What lessons did I learn looking at hypothetical problems and operating from different points of view simultaneously? Could there possibly be any other job for me other than public relations consulting using my creative problem solving and verbal communications skills? He had heard this line of flattery before from lawyers, businesspersons and, not the least, computer technicians.
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After the RPG concept was widely understood, I remember the personal computer games started. First there were Prose games then there were graphics. Is it any wonder I can see the corollary between my experience as a player and AUTOCAD? I seemed to be running that software in my head at every game session, seeing the different POV in solving problems and imagining the textures from spoken words.
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You know, from Poland to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin the time difference is something like 7 hours. My 23:00 was his 4pm. I could have gone on speaking to him and listening to his story for longer but as a responsible adult I had to be up in the morning and shoulder my responsibilities. He did not see life quite like that, laughing that he never grew up and that made all the difference to his success. What a wonderful way to look at life towards the end. Maybe I should have cared a little less about the time then and remained in that moment?
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Hindsight is 20/20 isn’t it? But the most important skill is foresight, which brings me inescapably back to Ernest Gary Gygax. And it always will.
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photo by Alan De Smet
.PLAYER NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
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.WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120486500666119109.html
.NEWSWEEK
http://www.newsweek.com/id/119782/page/1
.FORBES
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitaldownload/2008/03/gary-gygax-dung.html
.THE BOSTON GLOBE
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/08/my_escape_to_the_dungeon/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+–+Today%27s+paper+A+to+Z&referer=sphere_related_content&referer=sphere_related_content
.THE TORONTO STAR
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/Buzz/article/326529
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