Dave Arneson died this week. If you're a gamer, this is important. Pushing aside the human tragedy of a man dying of cancer at 61 (for which I extend my sympathies and best wishes to his friends and family) this is because Dave Arneson was important. Arneson, with co-creator Gary Gygax were the developers of Dungeons & Dragons, a game whose influence on the gaming industry cannot be understated. Even if you've never rolled a twenty-sided die, if you've ever shot a head crab in Half-life 2, pummeled your best buddy in Street Fighter IV or cried over Aeris in Final Fantasy VII, you are the beneficiary of Arneson's work. Dave Arneson, you see, was the creator of the hit point.

In my 2004 interview with him, Arneson describes the development of the Dungeons & Dragons rules and the hit point:
We had to change it almost after the first weekend. Combat in Chainmail is simply rolling two six-sided dice, and you either defeated the monster and killed it … or it killed you. It didn't take too long for players to get attached to their characters, and they wanted something detailed which Chainmail didn't have. The initial Chainmail rules was a matrix. That was okay for a few different kinds of units, but by the second weekend we already had 20 or 30 different monsters, and the matrix was starting to fill up the loft.


I adopted the rules I'd done earlier for a Civil War game called Ironclads that had hit points and armor class. It meant that players had a chance to live longer and do more. They didn't care that they had hit points to keep track of because they were just keeping track of little detailed records for their character and not trying to do it for an entire army. They didn't care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn't want the monster to kill them in one blow.
Doesn't seem like much, does it? Just a nerd in his attic playing a silly game with his equally nerdy buddies. Consider though that the idea of a set of points that get reduced when a character gets hit until they eventually die is the basic mathematical models for the life system of almost every game ever created. At the beginning of the game era, game characters had only two states -- alive or dead. When Pac-man touched the ghosts, he died. Getting hit with a torpedo in Spacewar meant your starship was gone. The hit point allowed for states between life and death and created a world of gameplay possibilities that wouldn't have been possible without it. Would the hit point have been invented without Arneson? Possibly -- even probably. But Arneson did it and for that he deserves to be remembered.

In fact, memory is the other major issue that Arneson's loss brings up. We are losing our history -- specifically gaming history. A few weeks ago I wrote a news story on the opening of a videogame museum in Rochester, New York. As I pointed out then, electronic gaming is now 30-some odd years old depending on how you count it and if we're not careful, we could easily lose precious pieces of cultural history in the way we now have huge gaps in the early history of movies. Consider this -- when was the last time you saw a 3.5" floppy disc? Or a 5.25" one? Are there any Imsai computers left in the world (the computer Matthew Broderick uses in WarGames?