An Ode to Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons

I am sad to read about the passing of Gary Gygax, the co-creator and designer of the first fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons from Wired, Huffington Post and New York Times. Sometime back in my life when I was young and brash, I used to spend hundreds of hours in fantasy role-playing games in my secondary school days. The irony is that by meeting people from all walks of life through Dungeons and Dragons, I learned more about myself and what inspired to move forward in my dreams. Today, we talked about the World of Warcraft and EverQuest, fantasy MMORPGs where we take on avatars to save the world from life-breathing dragons or fulfilled a quest like finding some magic item like the Philosopher's Stone. All this started from the pre-web 0.0 time, where we used pencil and paper and let the dungeon master offer a story for all of us (the adventurers) to seek adventure out in our imagination. Today, we signed on an avatar, and use the latest computer graphics for us to traverse into the virtual world of fantasy.  In some sense, role-playing games played a part in my life in teaching me to dream and imagine what could be impossible can be now made possible with the advances of technology. While I stopped to focus on my personal dream to study physics after junior college, some of my friends are still continuing their campaigns on role-playing games using pen and paper, despite the advancement of technology in computer games today. Nothing of such would be possible if we did not have someone like Gary Gygax, who took the first step to make a game that spurred our imagination. He may have died but his legacy lived on.