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I have never played Dungeons & Dragons. I had never heard of Gary Gygax until he died last week.
I write fantasy and I have never written a novel that was secretly a book version of my D&D campaigns. That’s because I never had any. What’s more none of my writer friends have ever done that either. Even those who do play D&D.
I do not dispute that Dungeons & Dragons has had a huge influence on role playing and video games. I’m less convinced of its impact on fantasy books. So unconvinced that the next person who claims that all fantasy writers—really? all?—are deeply influenced by Dugeons & Dragons gets violence committed upon their person by someone mean and cranky I will hire for the purpose.
It’s simply not true. Fantasy is a huge field. Vast and wide. I’ll buy that some High Fantasy has been influenced by D&D, but not anywhere near the scale of the J. R. R. Tolkien influence. That man made High Fantasy. I’ll even go as far to say that D&D is more influenced by Tolkien than High Fantasy is influenced by D&D.
I am not knocking D&D. Some of my best friends play it. I’d even let my sister marry a D&D player. But me? I’m not a role-playing kind of girl. I’m just saying that the people making these vast claims for D&D are the ones most influenced by it and perhaps don’t have sufficient perspective. There really are plenty of fantasy writers who’ve written books entirely outside the land of D&D. Oodles of them!
Not all fantasy writers are geeks.1 I even know a few non-geeky science fiction writers. Shocking, but true.
Following each holiday, we enjoy turning the cards into collage art. It ends up being a joint massacre of our card collection, but it's a nice way to condense, reuse & recycle the stash. Here's our Valentine "work of art."
By: Stacy & Kenzie (almost 4 yrs. old)
Mama's Doodles
With my due date looming near(er), we're trying to include Kenzie in preparatory projects for the babe. She's helped paint the room, picked out our gender neutral clothing ensembles, and we made these little gifts for the baby.
This is a super easy project for kids:
1. Cut fine grit sandpaper into small portions (3x3's would work well). **I didn't do this and learned the hard way!!
2. Color an image on a fine grit sandpaper with your everyday Crayolas. Make sure and get a healthy wax build up on the sandpaper (Press Hard).
3. Lay the sandpaper, image side down on your fabric choice. (or directly on the onesie if you'd like to be done a few steps sooner!!) Iron the image well to insure the color is transferring.
4. Machine stitch around your image edges to give it extra whimsy, or perhaps, ahem...make sense of the scribbles? This here little guy is a FROG, by the way. :)
5. Attach to a onesie, t-shirt, pants leg, whatever. & Voila. It's an easy Big Sister gift to the new baby...
6. Set the color by tossing into the dryer for 20 minutes. Launder as usual.
We've another version of a darling but LARGE image of big sister holding the baby's hand. We also have an alien. (Yeah....don't know what we're going to do with that one.) But, we're going to frame the large sentimental image and turn it into wall art. I'll post a picture as it's completed.
By: Stacy & Kenzie (age 3.5)
Mama's Doodles
To close up my little family's advent season , we drew the following activity: make a snowman out of paper or snow. At the time, we didn't have any snow. We decided to junkadoodle one instead.
Merry Holidays!!!
By: stacy & kenzie, age 3
Mama's Doodles
This is for Holli's contest. We (or, rather, I) had envisioned a dragon theme to match my gals dragon costume, however things soon got out of hand (as they typically will with a 3 year old wielding paint brushes). I quickly ditched the "planned" part of the project and just aimed to survive...
Kenzie painted. I arranged the junk. She whined while I arranged the junk. (she had other ideas).
But, I think we like the outcome:
It was fun, albeit, er, ahem...a wee bit stressful for those of us who aren't so patient. Honestly, I don't know who made the biggest mess - her or me?
By: stacy & kenzie
Mama's Doodles
I'm taking a brave step into using my photoshop program. I'd like to play around with digital illustration, but I find the whole photoshop process terribly overwhelming. Today, while playing around I discovered that I can create coloring pages from digital photographs in just a few steps. Kenzie prefers this one, although there were other photos better suited to the process.
To make your own coloring pages:
1. Open an image in Photoshop and size to fit your paper. I've been using an 8x8 size.
2. Create a "duplicate layer."
3. Make sure your foreground is set to black and the background is set to white.
4. Go to Filter--> Sketch --> Photocopy and adjust the detail and darkness settings.
5. Clean up the image by adjusting the levels. Go to Layers--> New Adjustment Layer --> Levels and move the slides accordingly until the image is crisp.
6. Print!!
*** You may need to tweak these directions depending on the photo. Some photos required that I "reverse" the image with: Image>Adjust>Invert. Whatever, the case - don't ask me!! I'm truly a photoshop novice.
I'm imagining coloring books, which would be supersweet gifts to cousins or a great memento of a birthday party or other big event... You could create a book of family members that aren't seen as frequently as you'd like... This could be a fun playdate activity, etc.
We're off to color Kenzie some purple hair!!
**P.S. I'm sure this a "been there done that" concept for many of you. I, however, was thrilled to end up with anything usable from my first photoshop experience. :)
By: stacy and kenzie (age 3)
Mama's Doodles
**DON'T FORGET TO ADD YOU NAME FOR THE LABEL BELOW**
It was an adamant and persistent request that we make art. That we make an elephant today. RIGHT NOW. Frankly, my heart wasn't in it, but Kenzie's sure was. I'm glad I played along though - she does enjoy this so much.
She chose the junks. She did the paints. We both worked on gluing the bits down to create this (which was extremely difficult to photograph for some reason):
A close-up of Mr. Elephant:
By: stacy & kenzie, age 3
Mama's Doodles
I think it made *many* fantasy readers, which boosted the genre.
I often say I majored in journalism and minored in D&D at university, but it didn’t influence my fantasy writing: in fact, what I found was that I preferred being the DM (Dungeon Master)to playing the game because I kept trying to massage the campaign into some kind of coherent story.
I quit playing partly because I had no one to play with (*sniff*) but also because one day I looked at the several hundred pages of background material I had created for the game (we never played published modules; modules were for sissies!) and thought, “You know, I could have used all that creative effort on writing a couple of books.”
So, loved the game, but major influence on fantasy? I seriously doubt it. Tolkien still rules the roost there.
Hmm. I think you are a role-playing girl. It’s just that, like most writers, you do your role-playing on the page when you’re writing a story. Or at least, that’s how I feel some days.
I gotta agree, Tolkien has influenced much more than D&D, and I have a close friend whose whole family agree with me. And you know what? Some of my favorite books are so obviously based off of Tolkein, but that doesn’t matter, cuz Tolkein RULES!
Oh, and I just found a rweally funny title: The Agony and the Ecstasy…In Your Pants. Tell me that does not make you giggle!
I think it needs to be clarified that D&D had a profound influence on HIGH fantasy/EPIC fantasy. That whole Tolkienesque subgenre. Which you, Justine, don’t write. I haven’t really encountered too many people saying “all fantasy owes tons to D&D.”
(Granted, I haven’t been reading every single piece on Gycax’s death. I was a high-fantasy-novel geek, and never heard of him before last week. I do think he has achieved the best kind of influence, though — profound, but private. And, uh, lucrative. And this adorable tribute.)
Perhaps it’s that a lot of the media at large don’t quite realize that fantasy has subgenres, or that fantasy equals fantastic/non-mimetic elements of all kinds, which would include practitioners like Poe and Twain and Mary Shelly and Alexander Pope, and is not the exclusive domain of bands of multispecies medieval adventurers on a Quest for a Talisman to Save The World.
oh, thank goodness. i was starting to worry that i would have my fantasy/sf/geekiness card removed for not even having *heard* of d&d when i was the appropriate age to start doing that. too busy reading tolkien, i imagine.
I’d say that D&D brought more readers to fantasy, considering how it brought a lot more men into reading books (perhaps even making it a bit more socially acceptable[though mostly for the geeky subcultures in high school]), but I agree that Tolkien is the man of high fantasy, not Gygax.
The few campaigns I played were never novel worthy, anyway. No matter how cool it was that my husband set an entire village of evil frog/bears on fire, it’s not that easy to throw it into a book, and have wholescale destruction be completely funny.
Gina has it exactly right–sure, Tolkien made high fantasy, but D&D surely did create a ton of fantasy readers–people who might have have picked up those Tolkien books if not for D&D. (And of course, Tolkien obviously greatly influenced D&D.)
And I would disagree that some SF/fantasy writers you know are not geeks. I think that being an SF/fantasy writer automatically makes you a geek–an Alpha geek, in fact, if that flowchart floating around the intarwebs is to be believed. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a geek–I’m one and proud of it–it’s just that I think writing an SF/fantasy novel is just a pretty geeky thing to do, no matter how cool you are. I mean, China Mieville? He’s pretty cool, right? But he’s certainly a geek (he’d even tell you so himself).
Hmm. Never played D&D either. I guess I’d try it, I just haven’t had a chance, and I don’t really know anyone who plays. I’ve also never read *gasp* Lord of the Rings. Eh. I guess I don’t like High Fantasy as much as… mild fantasy? Whatever you call it.
Gina Black: I think it made *many* fantasy readers, which boosted the genre.
That I can agree with, especially boys.
Karen: I think you are a role-playing girl. It’s just that, like most writers, you do your role-playing on the page when you’re writing a story.
I disagree. Role-playing implies that you are playing the role of your characters. Which I do not do. I never feel like I am any of my characters. Writing—for me anyway—is very distant from acting.
John Joseph Adams: I think that being an SF/fantasy writer automatically makes you a geek–an Alpha geek, in fact, if that flowchart floating around the intarwebs is to be believed.
And I think that definition of geek makes the word meaningless. I’ve seen that chart and I don’t share any of its preoccupation and haven’t done any of those activities except writing fantasy.
Many of my friends are geeks. Hell, I even married one. But I am not a geek.
We can all agree that you are not a geek, Justine. Certainly not with those boots!
But Patrick that implies that geeks don’t know great boots when they seem them. I know many well-dressed geeks.
I wonder how many fantasy readers who started in D&D ever realize to what extend Gygax was stealing with both hands from pre-existing literature.
I don’t mean just Tolkien (and Moorcock, and Lovecraft), but things like Vance’s Dying Earth, which shows up all over the place in the first-edition books.
How do you define a geek, then? (Don’t mean to be quarrelsome, just curious.)
John Joseph Adams: Geeks have a fanatic engagement with technology—especially computers. Also with science fiction in all its forms. There’s war gaming geeks and D&D geeks etc. etc. But basically it’s an intense engagement with a specific set of interests.
I have neither the intense engagement nor more than a passing interest in most of the particularly geeky subject areas.
I stand corrected. So many writers; so many processes.
Karen: You is not corrected. As you say there are many different processes. I can only speak for me. Especially as I just recently found out that many writers don’t wear hats when they write. How crazy is that? How on earth do they concentrate?
Hmm. The definitions I’m familiar with are broader than that I think.
“Geek” used to be more negative — in the 80s (U.S.), a geek was someone who severely lacked cool but wasn’t book-smart enough to be a “nerd.”
But now you can “geek out” over just about anything. I think it depends on the ability to recite long strings of esoteric facts that have nothing to do with your career. E.G.: I know many a “Buffy geek” who knows jack-all about computers. (I’d be a Buffy geek, I love it that much, but I don’t rewatch and I don’t know enough to refer to episodes by their titles, or what exact milestone took place in what episode or what other, later episode had a callback to aforesaid milestone. I’d need reference materials.)
I’m considered “geeky” by some because I’ll apply intensive lit-crit criticism to a comic book or to “Supernatural,” or to Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.
Okay, I reread Justine’s comment and there’s more overlap there than I thought. Sorry.
This part of your definition: “But basically it’s an intense engagement with a specific set of interests.” is 100% on point, I think, and is really the true definition of a geek. The sentence preceding that, however, I think is not–those are just types of geeks; not all geeks are enamored with technology, computers, etc.
You don’t have an “intense engagement” with fantasy literature? Your wrote a couple scholarly books on it. That seems pretty intense. Fantasy is “particularly geeky” subject area.
But, hey, if you don’t want to call yourself a geek, I’m fine with that. I was just trying to understand where you were coming from.
BTW, I didn’t mean to imply earlier that I drink that flowchart’s Kool Aid–it’s just a bit of silliness and most of it is just played for laughs. I guess I just agree with it that writing an SF/fantasy novel seems like the ultimate act of geekiness.
No, I really don’t have an intense engagement with science fiction. Probably because I wrote a book about it. I couldn’t even tell you the last sf book I read. Can’t stand the stuff.
If you start calling everyone a geek who likes something then the word becomes meaningless. It really has to be a passionate engagement to qualify. And “geek” in the way it gets used without a qualifier means technology and science fiction-y things. You don’t call someone obsessed with horses a geek, you call them a horse geek.
And calling a fantasy writer a geek because they write fantasy is absurd. It’s a professional engagement. It’s a job. Are lawyers therefore law geeks? I would some of them are, but many of them aren’t. A geeky engagement is different to a professional engagement. The two can co-exist but they are not the same.
Clearly you missed the memo that only Raymond Feist’s fiction actually counts as fantasy.
David: There appear to be a lot of memos I’ve missed.
Well-dressed geek is just a geek in diguise.
You said: “No, I really don’t have an intense engagement with science fiction. Probably because I wrote a book about it. I couldn’t even tell you the last sf book I read. Can’t stand the stuff.”
I didn’t say SF, I said “fantasy literature.” I thought that since you wrote fantasy, that would qualify as an intense engagement. I thought that if you did not have such an engagement with fantasy literature that you would probably write something else.
You said: “If you start calling everyone a geek who likes something then the word becomes meaningless. It really has to be a passionate engagement to qualify.” I agreed with you that it has to be a passionate engagement.
You said: “And “geek” in the way it gets used without a qualifier means technology and science fiction-y things. You don’t call someone obsessed with horses a geek, you call them a horse geek.” Sorry, I didn’t realize we were defining the standalone use of the word “geek.” I was thinking of it as something that you would pair up with a defining adjective. It sounded to me like you were denying any kind of “geekdom” not just that you were not a computer-loving, SF-loving type of geek.
You said: “And calling a fantasy writer a geek because they write fantasy is absurd. It’s a professional engagement. It’s a job.” So you’re saying, then, that you only write fantasy as a job? You don’t love it?
Are you calling Justine a geek?
John: I’ve never written any scholarly books about fantasy literature. I wrote one about the science fiction community. And edited another about feminist science fiction.
Well, anyway, I’ll leave you alone now. If there was any question as to my geekhood, I think I proved it with all this debating on this topic.
John: Nothing wrong with being a geek.
Though debating is not only a geek thing!
“But basically it’s an intense engagement with a specific set of interests.”
so a jock obsessed with football is a geek?
say what?
oh i guess thats already been addresed… fine then
I think D&D had a profound influence on fantastic fiction. Just not the sort of fantastic fiction that you and I read.
D&D was a mashup of fantasy tropes: it had stuff from Tolkien, a magic system adapted from Jack Vance, elements of mythology and epic, and character types largely drawn from sword & sorcery.
There followed a sort of mashup fantasy fiction. Chiefly the Dragonlance books, of course, which were explicitly based on D&D, but plenty of others as well.
Weis & Hickman’s sales figures could probably knock us all into a cocked hat, assuming of course that you could find a cocked hat at Wizards of the Coast.
Dragonlance, based on one set of games, even spawned games of its own, plus video games and at least one feature film.
Before D&D, sword & sorcery was a viable genre. Now it’s all been sucked into the mashup game-fiction genre.
So D&D did, in fact, have a massive influence on fantastic fiction, though since it generated its own audience outside of the traditional F&SF audience, we haven’t noticed it quite so much. It’s an enormous revenue-generating machine in the middle of the room, creating an enormous amount of noise and light, but we polite bystanders are trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Ah, this debate. I remember it well. Justine is not a geek. She is more… an anthropologist of geekdom that has soaked up some native customs, married into the tribe, etc. I think that’s what we decided, three mojitos in.
I am a well-dressed geek, but I’ve never played D&D and don’t really understand it. Also, my only interaction with “High Fantasy” outside of Tolkien’s LOTR and The Hobbit (Does Pullman and Lewis count?) is in the movies, which are always tolkien rip offs. that, and Tairen Soul, which I love.
I read more high fantasy masquerading as science fiction (or vice versa — how would one classify Dune?)
Also, I think that saying all fantasy writers owe a debt to Gygax is valid, because his creation helped the fantasy market, just like all YA writers owe a debt to Rowling, whether or not they write fantasy. However, just as I don’t think that “to be a YA writer is to consider writing a vampire novel” as one journo recently put it, I don’t think being a fantasy writer is being deeply influenced by Gygax. I am a Ya fantasy writer who is neither influenced by D&D or has ever considered writing about vampires.
Diana = WoW player = Geek
i would not marry a D&D player…
but I could marry a geek..
One other thought on this. D&D did have an influence on much the field, it’s just at some multiple number of removes. Without the success of D&D the whole role-playing game world would have been very different and possibly it would not have happened at all or happened much later.
That in turn would have changed the online and computer gaming world significantly. An awful lot of readers and writers have come to speculative fiction through the many games that owe a powerful debt to Gygax and D&D. To ignore that secondary influence on the genre is to miss much if not most of the impact of D&D.
Never claimed not to be, Pat. Though I only play with my husband, and I don’t play very often. I think it’s more like the wives who watch football b/c their husbands do.
Late to the party so just a few thoughts:
Justine: Instead of mean and cranky henchmen to cause bodily harm, you should really invest in henchment who enjoy the henching - makes them so much more effective…
On Geekdoms: I always felt the defnition of Geek requires both a devotion to some thing or interest that requires a practiced or acquired skill or knowledge, coupled with a nonconformity that places the person at least somewhat or in some way outside the mainstream social acceptance.
Therefore, anyone can really be a geek if they devote significant energies toward something the mainstream would find not worthy of the kind of energies or devotion the geek chooses to devote.
On D&D: Coming from sleepy suburban America in the late 1980s through very early 1990s, we weren’t allowed to play D&D (or hang with those who did) becuase it was satan’s board game ;}
Final Thought: being devoted to a geek-like undertsanding of Buffy is not, by definition, geeky, becuase the devotion is well-deserved and ethereal. :}
Emily
Gina Black hit the nail on the head. D&D and the whole RPG underground was/is a very synergystic meme, which via the Mensa and PC-boom vectors helped expand a multi-media Fantasy market through the 1980s and early ’90s. That market not only included/generated books, comics,and games,but also cult films, and tv-shows, which in turn inspired writers and fans-to-become writers alike.
Without an increasing readership, publishers buy fewer books. So the literary fantasy boom of the 80s and 90s (featuring a preponderance of newer female writers and fan-fic vets) fed off the fandoms created by fantasy gaming and the books which alternately inspire or were inspired by such games.
Laurell Hamilton (whose books contain plot elements and pacing reminiscent of both RPGs and video gaming) admits to her early D&D addiction as a useful precursor to writing novels. So do many of the script writers for various Star Trek spin-off series.