Dave Arneson, Alternative Historian

Dave Arneson, the other half of the Gary Gygax Dungeons and Dragons team, died yesterday. I recall in high school, the 80’s sometime or other, when not embedded in GammaWorld, being fascinated with a magazine issue D&D Blackmoor module, “The Garbage Pits of Despair”, which was quite excellent, and, I now find out, by the same Arneson. Reading up on his life, I particularly enjoy the story of his injecting alternate histories into his school-history class discussions. How can history even be discussed, if not in relation to what “didnt” happen? It takes some prowess, as a youth, to stand up, not necessarily to a specific teacher, but to a specific, unstated flaw in an ontological practice. Most teachers, I suppose, wouldnt even have read philip k dicks “The Man in the High Castle”, and if they did, theyd still try to keep a “conversation” about “history” “on track”. If you just refer to wikipedia, an infinitely branching recursive forward-facing history datapoint, at this moment, it refers to “conversation” thusly:

“In most conversations, the responses are a spontaneous reaction to what has previously been said. Conversations are an ideal form of communication in some respects, since they allow people with different views on a topic to learn from each other. A speech, on the other hand, is an oral presentation by one person directed at a group. [link]

It seems later in life he became an educator himself after working with special ed students in California for awhile and later evolved a particular focus on using games in education:

Living in California in the late 1980s, he had a chance to work with special education children. Upon returning to Minnesota, he pursued teaching and began speaking at schools about educational uses of role-playing. In the 1990s, he began working at Full Sail, a private university that teaches multimedia subjects, and continued there as a professor of computer game design until his death. [link]

… other better life remembrances on wired and ars technica.