Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (82 page)

Majority governments are more stable than coalitions and are usually able to call elections at a time that is politically advantageous for them—when they think they stand a good chance of retaining power. Sometimes, a prime minister can even step down and be replaced without new elections being held. This happened recently in the U.K. in 2008, when Tony Blair resigned as head of the Labour Party. Because the party still controlled Parliament, they simply chose a new party leader (Gordon Brown), who then became the new prime minister.

To understand how this differs from a presidential system, compare it with what was going on in the U.S. in 2006: The Democrats took control of Congress—despite the fact that there was still a Republican president in office with two years left in his term. Under a parliamentary system, this couldn’t happen, because whoever controls
the legislative branch of the government (parliament) also controls the executive (the prime minister).

Both systems have their pros and cons. Advocates of parliamentary democracy point out that it is more responsive to social and economic changes. If a prime minister makes an unpopular decision and loses his base of support, he faces a swift removal from office—unlike the American president, who can lose both popular and congressional support and still serve out the remainder of his term.

On the other hand, in situations where political coalitions are difficult to build and maintain, critics charge that parliamentary governments can be unstable. Italy is the most-common example of this: Since becoming a parliamentary republic at the end of World War II, Italy has had 62 governments in 62 years. To be fair, that doesn’t mean that there is no functional government in Italy, just that there is a high turnover rate at the prime minister’s office. (They’re still a highly developed modern democracy with the seventh-largest economy in the world.)

The relative stability of a fixed-term presidential system is not without its shortcomings, either. In the U.S., five of the last seven presidents have been forced to work with a Congress controlled by the opposition party. Critics complain that partisan bickering in such situations can lead to legislative gridlock—as it did in Washington in 1995, when the Republican-controlled Congress and the Democratic president (Bill Clinton) couldn’t agree on a budget and the federal government actually shut down all nonessential services for 26 days.

The boundaries that define president and parliament can get even fuzzier. Some presidential governments also have a prime minister (such as France, Egypt, South Korea, and Russia), and some parliamentary governments also have a president (Germany, India, Italy, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh).

And then there’s the Queen of England. The U.K. is a constitutional monarchy, which means that it is has a democratic government that evolved over time out of an absolute monarchy (see
“The Magna Carta,” page 429). Over hundreds of years, the kings and queens of England gradually lost their political power to parliament. Today, the queen is a figurehead—she plays the same role in former British colonies like Canada and Australia—though she does so through an appointed
governor-general
who acts as her representative. The emperor of Japan has a similar job in his country.

So when you read the paper or listen to the news, remember that no two governments are exactly alike, and that the word “government” itself can have multiple meanings depending on the political system being described. Kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers play different roles in different countries, and “democracy” comes in different shades. The easiest way to understand international news stories is to check a current almanac or the Internet for background information on a given country. Give it a try and impress (or annoy) your friends with your informed observations about the state of the world. Oh, and vote for Uncle John for President in 2012.

Here are a few of the contraptions that Wile E. Coyote ordered from the ACME company in his futile attempts to capture the Roadrunner
.

• ACME Atom Re-Arranger

• ACME Bat-Man’s Outfit

• ACME Female Road-Runner Costume

• ACME Invisible Paint

• ACME Iron Bird Seed

• ACME Junior Explosive Kit

• ACME Dehydrated Boulders

• ACME Little Giant Do-It-Yourself Rocket-Sled Kit

• ACME Earthquake Pills

• ACME Super Speed Vitamins

• ACME Giant Rubber Band

• ACME Jet-Propelled Unicycle

• ACME Instant Girl

• ACME Anvil

• ACME Triple Strength Fortified Leg Muscle Vitamins (Family Size)

Here’s the second installment of our story on one of the biggest game fads of the 20th century. (Part I is on page 393.)

G
ETTING ORGANIZED
As much fun as Dave Arneson’s game—Blackmoor—was to play, it still wasn’t very organized. It would have been difficult for new players to learn to play such a complicated and innovative game, let alone host their own sessions without Arneson there to explain everything. It took Gary Gygax’s organizational skill to boil the game down to a coherent set of rules that anyone could follow—complete with lists of monsters, character types (such as fighters, clerics, wizards), weapons, spells, and so on. But what rules! Gygax’s first draft was 50 pages long. After sending it out to a few dozen gamers for their input, he revised and expanded it to the
150-page
version that became the first commercial edition of the game.

It was at about this time that Gygax finally found a solution to a problem with dice games that had annoyed him for years: When two six-sided dice are rolled together, the odds of getting a 6, 7, or 8 are much greater than the odds of rolling a 2 or a 12. Gygax wanted the odds of getting each number to be the same. In the past, he had accomplished this by having players draw numbered poker chips from a hat. But pulling poker chips out of a hat was a bit clunky for a game that was going to be sold to the public.

Gygax found his solution while flipping through a school supply catalog. The common six-sided die is a
regular polyhedron
—a solid figure with identically shaped and sized sides (in this case, a cube with six sides). When he found 4-, 8-, 12-, and 20-sided regular polyhedrons in the catalog, he decided to use them as dice along with the conventional six-sided dice. (Dungeons & Dragons also uses 10-sided dice, but they’re not regular polyhedrons).

At this stage, the game was known by the working title “Fantasy Game.” Apparently neither Gygax nor Arneson thought “Black-moor” was descriptive enough or had enough marketing pizzazz to work as the new game’s title, so that name was given to a scenario within the game instead. Gygax thought a two-word title would work best, so he wrote up a list of words that described or were related to the game—monster, journey, dragon, adventure, quest, dungeon, treasure, and so on—and paired them in different combinations. Then he asked friends and family members to pick the pairs they like the best. Gygax credited his four-year-old daughter with picking the pair that became the game’s official title. “Oh, Daddy,” she told him, “I like Dungeons & Dragons the best!”

Finding a publisher turned out to be a lot more difficult than picking a title. When Gygax pitched Dungeons & Dragons to Avalon Hill, the biggest publisher of war games in the United States, they didn’t know what to make of it. A game with no opponents? No real winners and losers? No definitive ending? And what about all those weird dice? Dungeons & Dragons had strayed so far from its military origins that executives at Avalon Hill didn’t even recognize the game, let alone understand it. They passed.

Gygax decided that he had no choice but to publish the game himself. Together he and a childhood friend named Don Kaye pooled a few thousand dollars and founded a company called Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR for short. They printed 1,000 copies of the game, which went on sale in January 1974 for $10.00, plus an additional $3.50 for the dice. (Arneson received royalties for co-creating the game but did not join or invest in TSR.)

Dungeons & Dragons caught on with college students first. It spread from school to school by word of mouth—it
had
to spread that way, because after printing the game, TSR didn’t have any money left to spend on marketing or publicity. Then it began to trickle down to high school and junior high school students, as the college kids came home and taught the game to their younger siblings.

The first printing of 1,000 copies sold out in just seven months. When another 5,300 sold in less than a year, TSR ordered another 25,000—this at a time when Avalon Hill’s best-selling game ever had sold only 10,000 copies. As impressive as these sales figures were, they represented only a fraction of the total number of people who were playing the game. Bootleg photocopies of Dungeons & Dragons outnumbered official copies by as much as two to one in the early years. While this would have been a problem with other games, TSR didn’t mind, because these bootleg dungeon masters were introducing thousands of new players to the games. Many would go on to buy legitimate copies of their own.

By 1979 TSR was selling more than $4 million worth of games, dice, and other Dungeons & Dragons accessories a year, and sales were predicted to nearly double over the next 12 months. Then in August of 1979, a troubled Michigan State University student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared into the steam tunnels underneath the school and was not seen again for weeks. Egbert was a Dungeons & Dragons fan, and rumors began to circulate that he’d gone into the tunnels to have a real-life dungeon experience. He was either still down there living out his fantasy, the story went, or had gotten lost or killed trying to find his way back to the surface.

The truth was more tragic: Egbert was struggling with depression and drug addiction, and he had gone into the tunnels to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills. When his attempt failed, he left the tunnels and hid out at a friend’s apartment for about a month before letting the police know he was OK.

Egbert’s disappearance had nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons, but no one knew this until he reappeared. During the weeks he was missing, his story provided journalists with a tantalizing hook into the game fad that was sweeping the country. Religious groups had warned from the start that any game that featured as many demons and magic spells as this one did had to be the work of the devil, and now with Egbert’s disappearance their claims found a national audience.

Gygax was dumbfounded by their accusations. The spells and demons in the game were as imaginary as the gold and treasure. And to demonstrate the absurdity of his critics’ claims, Gygax invited them to try to deposit the loot in their bank accounts.

As silly as the controversy was, it dragged on year after year. In 1982 Egbert’s story was dramatized in a fictionalized TV-movie called
Mazes and Monsters
, starring 26-year-old Tom Hanks. In 1983 a woman who blamed her son’s suicide on a curse he “received” while playing the game formed an organization called Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (B.A.D.D.) and spent more than a decade leading a moral crusade against the game. Even
60 Minutes
got in on the act, airing a story in 1985 that questioned whether the game had driven some players to suicide.

But if Gygax worried about the impact of the controversy on the game’s sales and popularity, he needn’t have. The media attention actually boosted sales: Instead of doubling in 1979 as they’d forecast, sales
quadrupled
to more than $16 million and kept right on growing after that, finally peaking at $29 million in 1985.