Bloggers/First Generation Roleplayers 1970-1976

Or the "If you are reading this, then I am dead movement."  A way to record a history that would otherwise be lost in the mists of time.

Over on MeWe, Adam Bragg said "In 10+ years get ready for a wave of "end of an era" style retrospective posts as RPG bloggers cover the death of the first gen roleplayers... " to which I replied, "Maybe all those who belong to that era and blog should write their own post for that. In blogger you can set a future date for the post and you can keep moving the date forward so when you die and can no longer move the date forward it will automatically post. All those posts can start with the phrase, if you can read this I am dead... and then offer your final thoughts about the "end of an era" from those who were part of it. That is a great suggestion, I think I will do a post on it."

So with his permission I am quoting and using the idea.

Now some of the First Generation Role Players of which a few have blogs or other public presence have either passed away already or will be over the next 10 or more years and at some point someone(s) are going to write "end of an era" style retrospective posts as RPG bloggers cover the death of the first gen roleplayers... "

Now I ask you guys, do we really want to leave this to those who may not even understand old school gaming? I say that we should not! So here is my proposal.

If you are one of us old guys (or girls) that were part of the first generation of Dungeons and Dragons, that first generation of Role Players and maybe you wrote your own game or you just house ruled D&D, I want to suggest that you should each write your own retrospective, your own epitaph of the era that you were part of. If you have a blogger blog it is easy, write you post and put the publish date a few months in the future and keep updating that future date until one day you pass away and then it automatically gets published.

I suggest that we all format it as a follows: First a little gallows humor by starting it off, "If you are reading this I am either dead or too close to it to prevent this from being published." Or something along those lines, then talk about how you got into playing D&D in the first place, and then whatever you want to say about the game, your participation, etc. When the history is written about the end of the era once all of us old gamers are gone, we need to have our voices and our perspectives out there so we are heard too.

Most of us are not famous or even semi-famous, but we have seen what they wrote about Gygax and Arneson and the others that have passed, those well-known enough that they got a mention, even one or two.

Someday in the dim mists of the future when they write about our day, those early days, lets give them more to go on than the more mainstream stuff. 

Here is another tip. When you post anything to your blog, after it is posted go to the Internet Archive and use their Save Page Now feature after every post.

 Save Page Now

 

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Only available for sites that allow crawlers.

If you use it after every post, it will do two things, one is preserve every post and you won't be one of those blogs that only has a post here and there saved and it will IMO improve the odds that your site will be crawled and remembered by the Internet Archive when you final post, your epitaph drops.

If you are one of our younger readers, when those epitaphs drop, do yourself and future writers a favor and save that post to the Internet Archive for your departed fellow gamer.

If you will commit to do this, then post in the comments and say, "Yes, I will write my own  retrospective, my own epitaph, so that all of us ordinary blokes can be remembered when the histories are written.

Also please share this post everywhere and spread the idea. All of you younger gamers. When these final posts drop. Share them a lot and then back up the shared post to the Internet Archive. Let's not give future historians any excuse to get it wrong. Remember many historians don't use primary sources, only secondary or more removed from the original source, so quoting and citing is key. You younger people may want to remember all of this for your own stuff to.