Gary Gygax has died. His wasn’t a name I’d thought about in years, probably since my freshman year of high school, but when I read the news during a little piece of downtime this afternoon, I had to pause for a couple of beats.

Gygax, y’see, was partially responsible for getting me to where I am today. As one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, he provided adolescent nerds like me with a way to focus our frustration with everything that goes along with being adolescent nerds–teasing/abuse from peers, bemused looks from adults, etc–on imaginary quests and acts of heroism. I never was a serious D&D player, but for a couple of years, some friends and I would get together from time to time and battle our way through a world created entirely of words, where the results of encounters were determined by rolls of strangely-shaped dice.

The appeal isn’t hard to understand, especially if “being” yourself isn’t all that much fun: if you are, say, a bookish adolescent male with few social skills and no magical powers to speak of. What’s more, D&D offers its players a moral clarity rarely found in the real world: your character has an alignment; he or she can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Most players choose good; the paladin, a virtuous knight with magical powers, is a perennial favorite, although the evil-leaning dark elf is also popular. In practice, though, the transformation of player into character often turns out to be cosmetic: the fearless paladin and the sexy dark elf both sound and act a lot like a thirteen-year-old boy named Ted. And what Ted likes to do, mostly, is kill anything that crosses his path. It’s little wonder that Dungeons & Dragons was uncool in the 1970s and ’80s.

Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, there were plenty of apocryphal stories about kids who’d taken their roleplaying a bit too seriously, gone off the deep end, and sacrificed neighborhood toddlers to some strange god. This gave the game a bit of an edge, at least in the eyes of our peers, and perhaps a little of that rubbed off on us, the gamers. I remember one acquaintance being a little shocked that I played D&D but didn’t look like a Satanist.

By the middle of my freshman year, D&D had been replaced by pseudo-industrial music (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, etc) as our group’s menacing pop-cultural affiliation of choice. Now, I wasn’t a really angry kid–my parents’ marriage was stable, everything I needed was provided, I was smart enough to get mostly good-enough grades (except for math) without trying terribly hard–but I was frustrated with the social order of high school and, by extension, the world. I got very little respect from other kids in my grade, because I wasn’t athletic and was a bit of a dork. I felt like my teachers insulted my intelligence, rightly or wrongly. I was too afraid to get into any real trouble, so I didn’t even want to go to the keg parties that I wasn’t invited to attend. I had my friends, my radio show (we had a radio station, about which more another time), the band, some books, and music.

That was enough, it turned out. As I progressed through high school and learned how to get over myself and actually try to be friends with some of the kids whom I’d hated for so long that I’d forgotten why I hated them to begin with, I set the stage for my own development into adulthood and quasi-maturity. By the summer after my high school graduation, our social groups had become, as they always do, more fluid, to the point where my participation in a scavenger hunt that devolved into a rather sketchy party wasn’t awkward or weird at all, for me or for anyone else there.

Progressing through college saw some logical extensions of my high school interests. Instead of gaming there was writing, culminating in a webzine that ran for several years before finally dying. My high school pit orchestra experiences led me to play in actual bands in college. And I think because I had the outlet for my negative emotions back in high school, I was comfortable enough with myself to take on leadership roles, to be social, to let go.

So thanks, Gary Gygax, though I suppose I ought to thank Trent Reznor as well, and Al Jourgensen, and whoever created WWPT, and everyone else who made high school bearable. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to let out my emotions harmlessly, for keeping me from doing something stupid, for preventing me from throwing away my opportunities. Thanks.