I stumbled upon an 2002 interview of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax by Deus Ex and Dishonored designer Harvey Smith for Game Developer magazine. The text of the interview itself isn’t particularly extraordinary. Smith’s questions are good, though sometimes betraying a little awe. Gygax’s responses are too well-oiled to give much real insight.

But here’s a founder of the RPG talking to a designer of immersive sims, a videogame encapsulation of Gygax’s ideal for the RPG, which he describes in the interview as:

“The players are not acting out roles designed for them by the GM, they are acting in character to create the story, and that tale is told as the game unfolds, and as directed by their actions, with random factors that even the GM can’t predict possibly altering the course of things.”

Maybe aside from the random factors, that’s immersive sims, right? With Harvey Smith as the GM. (I guess he was working on Thief: Deadly Shadows at the time?)
EDIT: Correction from Randy Smith: “Close! That was me! Harvey was directing Deus Ex: Invisible War down the hallway.”

Or, at least, immersive sims play more to that ideal than what Gygax was working on at the time, an ultimately unreleased MMO based on a post-D&D RPG he designed called Lejendary Adventure.

Few MMOs are designed to allow players and random factors to dictate the story. They’re usually primarily designed for social relationships and for the grind. Rich player stories can come out of MMOs, but they’re generally the exception within uncountable hours of predictable and controlled play.

So, for me, Smith’s interview is about inversion of roles, where Smith, the student, espouses the true value of RPGs, while Gygax, the master, has ended up labouring well outside the magic circle that he legendarily did so much to establish. In that sense, I don’t think Smith owed Gygax any awe (EDIT: Harvey Smith respectfully disagrees about the awe thing!)

I’ve been on a bit of a D&D history kick lately, having read Jon Peterson’s keenly disentangled examination of TSR’s explosive growth and implosive devolvement Game Wizards, and listened to an excellent podcast series called When We Were Wizards, which is a slightly more garish account of the same period but features direct interviews with a lot of key figures.

Both reseat Gygax’s legend by restoring Dave Arneson as D&D’s co-contributor, and structure D&D’s early history around the feuding they fell into when they tried to transform their hobby into a business. It’s fascinating, but I’d also love to read more about the more creative side of that period, in which its many, many module and expansion designers and writers filled out and pushed beyond the rules set by Arneson and Gygax (and their gaming groups).

RPGs are a unique form of media in the sense that their players tend to occupy and take over the worlds and systems that are created for them. In many ways, Arneson and Gygax gave up their control over D&D at the moment they first allowed people outside their group to play it, and I think this was a core tension underneath all the corporate and legal machinations that played out across the late 1970s and 1980s as Gygax fought Arneson, partners, investors, banks, and other fell beasts, to control D&D.

Creators can’t, ultimately, absolutely control RPGs.¹

I think Smith was steeped in this truth when he interviewed Gygax. As a videogame designer creating levels and systems that give players the chance to tell their own stories while guiding them along the game’s own, dancing between control and freedom would have been second nature.

I interviewed Smith about the player-freedom designed into Dishonored 2 a few years ago, and he said this:

“It’s more like we’re rubbing our hands together in delight and we’re hoping that down the road people get that, you know? They have that magical moment where they play and maybe they have to play twice or talk to a friend, or maybe they just sense when they play that maybe it could be… It’s a little stress, like, ‘Ahh, should I do this or that?’ And then they see the results of what they’ve done and it’s wondrous. Games are one of those things that are still full of wonder.”

I wonder if Gygax knew who he was talking to?