So an interesting thing happened to me the other day: I felt like maybe I wasn’t geeky enough.

As anyone who was a geek as a child and is still a geek now will know there is a moment, usually not even a definable one, where the moniker ‘geek’ stops stinging and you begin to see it as a badge of honour instead of an insult. Besides, these days everyone knows who really runs things and it isn’t the ‘cool’ kids. So I haven’t been ashamed of geekery for many years. But I also haven’t thought “Hey, you know, I should probably be a bit more geeky”.

So why now?

Well, the thing is, Gary Gygax is dead. Gary Gygax is dead and I’ve never played a game of Dungeons & Dragons in my life.

I’m too much of a geek to just go “well that’s a good thing” and leave it at that, because I’m well aware of the influence the game and the man have had on our culture. And by ‘our’ culture I’m not just talking about geeks. I’ve been reading all the heartfelt dedications to him this past week, seeing how so many minds and lives were moulded by their experiences with pen, paper and platonic solids. It makes me feel like I have missed out on something. Something now irretrievable. Not because the man himself is dead, for the game will probably live on longer than all of us in one form or another, but because those days of parents’ basements and the thrill of staying up late are gone. Those tomes will never seem arcane to me now. I like to think that I’m still quite open-minded, but the stakes are raised each time your mind is blown and goblins probably won’t do it anymore.

I cut my geek-teeth on golden age science fiction and early 8-bit gaming, from the glorius 16 shades of green on my father’s Amstrad, to the amazing adventures of Pitfall Harry. Soon enough I was coding and writing myself. And in the end, though I’ve never rolled a 20-sided die in my life I guess I’ve arrived in a similar place to a lot of the people who learned to geek that way. Even so, it still seems like a bit of a shame that I’ve never played.

Hopefully I can find some friends who feel the same, or are at least open-minded, and rectify the situation.