PopTen's Top 10 Geek Gods Includes Gygax, Salvatore, and Livingstone

PopTen posted a list of the Top 10 Geek Gods, and with entries like Gary Gygax, Ian Livingstone, and R.A. Salvatore, the tabletop gaming industry is well represented, joining literary luminaries like Tolkien, LeGuin, and Howard, or cinematic creators like George Lucas. It's a fun list, but who would you have included in a tabletop gaming list?

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The PopTen list:

• H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds, etc.)
• J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings)
• Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian)
• Ralph Baer (first home video game console)
• Ursula K. LeGuin (Earthsea)
• Gary Gygax (Dungeons & Dragons)
• George Lucas (Star Wars)
• Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson*, John Peake (PopTen calls them "anonymous", but by name)
• R.A. Salvatore (a Drizzt)
• Richard Garfield (Magic: the Gathering)

*No, the other Steve Jackson

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'd probably replace Salvatore with Mark Rein*Hagen or Shigeru Miyamoto. Wells also deserves a double-mention for Little Wars.

Edited to add: though, if you wanted a TSR fiction author in there, I'd go with Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman over Salvatore for impact.

 

[Lanefan]

How is H. P. Lovecraft not on there? It seems like you can't take a 5-foot step without bumping into some Cthulhu mashup or derivative.

The copyright ran out a few years ago on (most? all?) of Lovecraft's work, meaning everybody and their little dog Toto can now freely make use of it. And as it's still popular for some reason, that's exactly what's happening.

Really, if you read the fine print, this list is not the Geek Gods, it's the Fantasy-Gaming Gods, which explains the absence of more widely-known geek luminaries such as Gene Roddenberry and Stan Lee. Consequently, I rate this list's title 45% clickbait.

Yeah: Salvatore out; Roddenberry in. After that, while there's various people one might include who do you bump to make room?

Lanefan

 

[ddaley]

Apparently that list was posted in 2010!

 

[77IM]

Yeah: Salvatore out; Roddenberry in. After that, while there's various people one might include who do you bump to make room?

If we're talking about broader geek culture, then we need to include someone to represent the comic book geeks (Stan Lee seems like the obvious choice, even if there were more influential people back in the beginning), and the computer geeks (I'm going to give this to Linus Torvalds, over such other strong candidates as Gates, Wozniak, and Babbage), and the video game geeks (if I can only pick one, it's Shigeru Miyamoto). So that's at least 3 more spots needed. I'm not sure there's a singular luminary who can represent anime geeks, or robotics geeks, or cosplay geeks, or maker geeks, or horror geeks, or SCA geeks, or... well, the list goes on and on and gets increasingly niche.

So I'd scratch off Games Workshop: wargaming is cool, but it's too niche to make the top 10. And ditto for Richard Garfield and M:tG. And Ralph Baer is not nearly as famous as Miyamoto. And much though I like LeGuin's work, I don't think she's been as influential as Stephen King or J. K. Rowling or Jules Verne or Mary Shelley or any number of other famous authors, so that one's a bit iffy to me. (TBH deciding between all the famous authors would probably be the hardest part of such a list...)

Finally, regardless of whether we're considering broader geek culture or just the narrow band of fantasy-gaming culture, I think I'd put Dave Arneson's name up there along side Gary Gygax's, as part of the same entry (the way the Games Workshop guys get three names on one line). The two co-creators of D&D contributed very different things to the early game but I think both were essential.

 

[Ghal Maraz]

Apart from the fact that (science) fantasy tabletop miniature wargame is hardly more niche than RPGs (while it's true that many, many concepts introduced by the like of D&D has been highly influential on the videogame industry) - in fact I would say it's the other way around -, Jackson and Livingstone are also the minds behind the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (and thus, behind all the Eighties' gamebooks' movement), and Livingstone alone has been President of Eidos Interactive, with a guiding hand on some high profile franchises like Tomb Raider and Hitman.

And still we have Salvatore on that list.

 

[Queer Venger]

Why is Salvatore listed on the same list as Tolkien; really? One is a 2-bit fantasy writer, the other a linguist who practically invented the fantasy genre. Even Martin and Sanderson have more right to be on a top 10 than Salvatore.

 

[VengerSatanis]

H.P. Lovecraft all night long!

 

[Celebrim]

I think it highly likely Mr. Gygax would be deeply offended by this 'honor'.

 

[Morrus]

I think it highly likely Mr. Gygax would be deeply offended by this 'honor'.

What an odd thing to say.

 

[redrick]

It's an odd list.

That being said, for better or worse, Gygax is definitely a "geek god." Not only did he co-create the first major rpg which enjoys significant popularity and cachet (in geek circles) to this day, but he is also cited to win all manner of arguments. No cogent RPG argument is complete without a well-sourced Gygax quote. It's like citing Marx or Engels when publishing a physics paper in the Soviet Union.