Charlie Stross has posted the best explanation I've yet seen for the rise of D&D-playing nerds (like me) to their (our) current position of global domination. At least on the intertubes. And our heads.
Sad to say, the political landscape of the early to mid 21st century has already been designed -- by Gary Gygax, inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.
Gary didn't realize it (D&D predates personal computing) but his somewhat addictive game transferred onto computers quite early. And then gamers demanded -- and got, as graphics horsepower arrived -- graphical versions of same. And then multi-user graphical versions of same. And then the likes of World of Warcraft, with over a million users, auction houses, the whole spectrum of social interaction, and so on.
Which leads me to the key insight that: our first commercially viable multi-user virtual reality environments have been designed (and implicitly legislated) to emulate pencil-and-paper high fantasy role playing games.
Bow before the might of our d20!
Mr. Stross is also one of my favorite authors, and if you're a fellow member of the overnerd elite, you'll really like his stuff.
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