The Boston Globe waxes poetic about Dungeons & Dragons and how it has influenced the popular culture for the past 30 years.

(can’t remember if the BG requires registration, excerpts below)

Peter Bebergal writes:

It started innocently enough. With a copy of “The Fellowship of the Ring” at my side and Styx on the record player, I was looking for something to help me rise above being bored, lonely, and unfulfilled. One day at school, a kid approached me. Having sensed in me an ally — the same urgent need to avoid getting beat up that day — he timidly asked if I wanted to play “D&D” after school.

(haha, Styx)

Our influence is now everywhere. My generation of gamers — whose youths were spent holed up in paneled wood basements crafting identities, mythologies, and geographies with a few lead figurines — are the filmmakers, computer programmers, writers, DJs, and musicians of today. I think, for the producers, the movie version of “The Lord of the Rings” was less about getting the trilogy off the page and onto the screen than it was a vicarious thrill, a gift to the millions of us who wished we could have dressed up as orcs and ventured into catacombs and castle keeps ourselves. Only a generation of imaginations roused by role playing could have made those movies possible.

I’d argue the influence went thusly, m’lord: LOTR (the book, ya creatins!) » D & D » MMOGs, et al, but D & D certainly did its part in carrying the torch. I, personally, never played D & D and none of my friends have ever admitted to doing so, (seems even more time-consuming than an orc-based MMOG), but the appeal of slaying dragons is universal.

That and ninjas.

A guildmate passed along this thread re: some hosers using the time-immortal speed hack in World of Warcraft.

I’m not an IT guy, so I have no idea how hard it is to code safeguards against the use of Gear and the like, but jeezus, we’re going on AT LEAST five years that these tools have been used. No one has a solution? Anyone?

When we’re talking about PVE, doesn’t impact me in any way, but PVP’ing against some wanker that strafes around at light speed is gonna be a bitch.