In the days since news went ’round the interwobs about the death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax, I’ve come across a number of tributes to the man who was truly the Dungeon Master’s Dungeon Master. Some of these have taken the form of fond — and sur­pris­ingly candid — remin­is­cences about old D&D campaigns.

Two pieces in par­ticular caught my eye: Jason Heller’s piece at The A.V. Club, about the impact of D&D on his “lack of a life”, and a piece by Wired editor Adam Rogers at the New York Times, which has some inter­esting things to say about yesterday’s D&D nerds being today’s Web 2.0 cyberlords.

I have a clear memory of being intro­duced to D&D in Grade 4. I’m fairly certain that the adventure involved an encounter with a carrion crawler (but then, show me an intro­ductory D&D adventure that didn’t) and, pos­sibly, a living statue. Or living ooze. Or living ooze on a regular, non-living statue. There was a statue, anyway. It may have been booby-trapped and con­cealing treasure.

At first I was fas­cinated mainly by the dice and the maps. By Grade 5 I was playing in a cam­paign with my friend’s Dad as Dungeon Master, and including among its players a number of guys from Melbourne University. Which was kind of intim­id­ating for a 10 year old.

I started to get a sense of the storytelling at the heart of the game, the freedom to invent. One day while vis­iting my friend I dis­covered his Dad’s hand­written notes for an upcoming adventure, and piles of exercise books describing the cam­paign uni­verse in exacting detail. The whole enter­prise seemed huge, and com­pelling, and so much richer than regular life, or even the world of fiction. This was a fiction in which I was a player.

When I moved schools in Year 8 I dis­covered that people were playing D&D 550km away from Melbourne. Our Saturday night games through Year 11 and 12 weren’t dis­similar to today’s marathon internet gaming ses­sions in terms of dur­ation, involvement of junk foods and sur­rounding air of fuggy fartiness.

I was still playing D&D a couple of years ago, playing in one cam­paign and running another, a gothic horror, slightly steampunk cam­paign set in Victorian London.

Adam Rogers’s New York Times piece describes the exhil­ar­ation of rolling up a new char­acter or cre­ating a new dungeon, and there’s a par­allel to be drawn with the way we’re con­stantly signing up to new webapps:

Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo col­lection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly mani­fested identity, a char­acter playing the real world.

It’s true: every time we fill out a new profile and start hailing fellow internet trav­ellers, it’s an oppor­tunity to re-imagine ourselves, to roll-up a new char­acter and go looking for rumours at the tavern.