I wish we could manage to save things like this for reddit; this guy wasn't even tangentially involved in SEOing anyones websites and he hardly had any thoughts on improving click-through.
You're joking, of course...but I can't help but point out that the Dungeons and Dragons empire has been very successful, and has influenced many of the biggest software makers in the world over the years (and I shouldn't need to point out that the most profitable video game in history is a direct descendant of D&D).
Perhaps we have a different definitions of "direct descendant" in this context. I don't see how the similarities, and thus the philosophical lineage, could be any more clear or direct than it is, without actually being made by the folks who made Dungeons and Dragons. I don't really care to argue semantics. The influence is obvious and inarguable, whether you wish to call it descent or something else.
This is Hacker News. I'm sure many hackers don't care about SEO techniques and how to improve click-through; this is not a website only for web 2.0 entrepreneurs.
I guess D&D falls into the "do your own thing" category of entrepreneurship. It may have been inspired by an existing product (war games), but ultimately became a new type of game and had no guarantee of an eventual payoff.
BTW is anyone else a bit surprised by the light tone of the articles about Gygax's death? All the headlines I see seem to be jokes, and I wonder if that's because he was a geek and not, for example, an athlete or musician with "devastated" fans. [Just a somewhat cynical observation.]
