Why A Fantasy Festival?

… and why in Lake Geneva?

Gary Gygax (1938-2008) was a novelist, game designer, entrepreneur, and visionary who lived in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and was the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons® game in 1974. The game, D&D® for short, was the first role-playing game ever and, as such, was only the seventh type table-top game created by humanity.

Can we say who created chess? Or dice? No, of course not, but we can name the person who co-created Dungeons & Dragons®, and he did it in our lifetime, in the United States, in the little town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. And it changed the world.

Cities and towns all over the world base their entire economy upon their most famous sons—authors among them. Certainly Lake Geneva is famous for Gary Gygax. Tens of millions of fans worldwide have read his works and played Dungeons & Dragons® and they flock to Lake Geneva yearly (in March!) to attend Gary Con. They know Lake Geneva is the birthplace of their beloved hobby and the hometown of their favorite fantasy author, and yet, the town has little to no recognition of this. At most fans can only drive past the house where he created D&D® or set some gaming dice upon an engraved stone at the Riviera fountain.

Establishing a memorial and embracing the legacy of Gary Gygax would make Lake Geneva a true Mecca for gamers. Having a memorial will bring the town revenue from hotel room tax and parking, year round, improving services, infrastructure, and quality of life for all residents. But to do that, the 40 million plus fans of D&D® and Gary Gygax need, not only a reason to visit, but a reason to park and walk around, stay overnight in hotels, purchase souvenirs, and patronize local bars and restaurants.

Can a game really change the world?

Why is the creation of Dungeons & Dragons® important? Did it really change the world?

Dungeons & Dragons® is a truly global phenomenon. An estimated 40 million people have played the game since it was created and it has been translated into dozens of languages. The sales tells us that 13 million people play it currently, and 9 million people watch livestreams of other people playing it. It pervades popular culture and has become part of the very fabric of our civilization.

Gary Gygax believed in the power of games to transcend age, gender, race, culture, language, religion, and class. Even as a child, that power drew him to games like chess, dice, tiles, and board-games. But all those games were based on competition. In a millennia of game design, a thousand years of human history, no one had broken this paradigm of us vs. them, victory or defeat. The purposes of games were to win, and losing meant failure.

But for the first time in thousands of years, D&D® gives us something different. It brings together into a single game all these disparate elements: the cooperative, unstructured play of children, the concept of a referee as an adjudicator, a story-teller, and the probabilities of dice. Dave Arneson made those connections and Gary Gygax codified it into D&D®. And together, they created this entirely new kind of table-top game – a game that doesn’t involve winning or losing. It’s a game whose only boundary is the imagination of everyone sitting around that table playing it. Where the shared experience became a reward everyone won.

And that’s why it’s such an important game for humanity. The world of this game is only realized when the players share in its creation together. That makes it the ultimate game of cooperation, inclusion, and collaboration – and those are the qualities that make us better human beings. That’s why this game changed the world for the better.

From the moment D&D® was created it spawned a legacy of imagination and creativity. It provided a cooperative environment where a group of players work together in a shared experience within a world realized by their immersion in it. It was not bounded by winning and losing and it was limitless. It leads to an outpouring of supportive creative groups that allow an expression of imagination that is unrivaled in this world.

Practically every game being played on home consoles, PCs, and across the internet, if they have classes, experience points, hit points, levels, avatars, player characters, or non-player characters, they owe their existence to D&D®. Every time you interact on the internet with an avatar in a game, you are role-playing a character, just like in D&D®.

It allows adults to play games of imagination like children. And that becomes one of the important legacies of the game because it spawns an entire generation of creative thinkers and dreamers. All of the fantasy and adventure role-playing games, board games, computer and video games, movies, TV shows, and novels we now enjoy -- a huge part of our human experience – they suddenly become possible in this moment.

But this simple idea, that no one in human history had previously thought to put together as a tabletop game, was a humanity-changing event. It has become part of the fabric of our history and changed the world.