gygax's tome is therefore the progenitor of the injunction that "system matters"-not "system matters" as a basis of critique, but "system matters" as a justification for a system (i.e. however, the book appeals to its own necessity as the final word on all matters, and it upholds gygax's vision as the ideal according to which to structure your own party. "look at your character sheet to decide what to do". It does not necessarily feature the closed interactions that later traditional games do, i.e. gygax is therefore correct to notice a difference in enjoyment of games along gendered lines, but he is wrong to attribute it to biological difference when it is actually a social function of how girls and boys are raised and socialized.įinally, i suggested that gygax’s ad&d actually opened up the space for "traditional" games to emerge: i talked about how these structural constraints (or lack thereof) allow d&d players to simulate their fantasy endlessly, and how the enjoyment derived from pursuing this fantasy differs between (typical) women and men. d&d is also infinite because it is a game without an end, which it accomplishes by shifting goalposts in the form of experience levels. d&d is open because instead of being contained inside its own explicitly-defined rules, it opens the set of interactions to anything the players say happens. i argued that what sets apart (old) d&d from other games is that it is open and infinite. Last time we talked about the structural underpinnings of (old school) dungeons & dragons as a language or a system of interactions.