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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Friday, March 07, 2008

PARANOIA in -- The Wall Street Journal? 

There is no greater proof of adventure gaming's pervasion of society than the presence on The Wall Street Journal editorial board of a former D&D player. In "Mind Games: Dungeons & Dragons Immersed Players in Another World," a tribute to the late E. Gary Gygax in the March 7, 2008 Journal (page W13), Brian Carney reminisces fondly of his youthful RPG sessions. In passing, Carney mentions the existence of other non-D&D games:
As D&D grew, it spawned a succession of imitators: Gamma World, a role-playing game set in the future; a Cold-War spy game called Top Secret; even an amusing, Kafkaesque parody-game called Paranoia, in which the rules were a secret and all the other players really were out to get you.

There is also no greater proof of the tabletop RPG hobby's decline, its hopeless identification with a graying generation, than Carney's cantankerous old-guy railing against World of Warcraft: "At the risk of sounding like a geek and a curmudgeon at once, in my day we did it the old-fashioned way [...] exploring a world that existed only in our imaginations." Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!

(The online version of "Mind Games" is behind the Journal's detestable paywall.)

[Update March 9: Gloryosky, the Journal has a second reformed gamer, and he's not behind the paywall! "Quest for the Teenage DM," an installment of Jason Fry's column "Real Time," is perhaps overlong, but includes a sidebar with several links to similar reminiscences -- notably Paul LaFarge's standout Believer magazine profile of Gary Gygax, "Destroy All Monsters" from September 2006.]
Posted by: Allen Varney / 12:51 PM

Comments:
That's no proof, Allen. It's true that the hobby has had its top days quite some time ago. Everywhere there are old folks who can't (or don't want to) keep up with modern developments, complaining that everything used to be better in the old days. Still, our gaming club celebrated its 20th anniversary two years ago and we're still as strong as we were used to be back in the days. And that's all due to new members of the younger generation. I still have hope that someone from their age will come up with a radical hot new idea to reinvent our hobby. MMORPGs learned a lot from what we thought up. Maybe we can learn new ways from MMORPGs or other sources of inspiration. And I'm sure there will be people who won't like it. If it lifts our hobby from its current depression, I'll be happy.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : March 08, 2008 5:58 PM
 
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