Was D&D Inevitable?

A very long time ago, I read an anecdote in a book (I forget the title and who it was by - my memory is now like a dusty attic full of boxes covered with labels too faded to read). In it, a professor had put to his students a poser: if you were to go back in time and assassinate Albert Einstein, Gustave Eiffel, or Isaac Newton, then whose premature death would in the long term be more significant?

The professor's answer was Gustave Eiffel. Sooner or later the discoveries of scientists like Einstein or Newton would have been found out by other people, since they were indeed 'discoveries'. But nobody would ever have made the Eiffel tower if Gustave Eiffel had not done so.

The anecdote I suppose only fully works if you appreciate the Eiffel Tower very much, but the point is an interesting and provocative one: artistic achievements are more important than scientific ones. This is because science is, if you like, 'out there'. We can find it. And we will find it, given long enough. Artistic achievements, on the other hand, are genuinely unique: once they're done, they're done, and each one is the by-product of a confluence of forces - genetic, experiential, circumstantial, subconscious - that will never come together in the same way twice. 

This argument, however, can only be pushed so far. It depends what level of abstraction you are talking about. It's probably true that nobody would have written The Big Sleep if Raymond Chandler had died as an infant. But it is impossible to imagine that crime fiction would not have existed even if all the major crime authors we now know of had never been born. Its creation feels inevitable given what we know about human beings; once it became possible to imagine the solving of crime as an endeavour in itself, it was inevitable that people would begin to write stories about it.

This places the fantasy genre in an interesting position. If Tolkien (and the other authors who had roles to play in the formation of the genre) had all failed to survive infancy, would people nowadays be describing the existence of a thing called fantasy? Our instincts gesture towards 'yes', although I think crucial elements of it would have been different - an interesting question to speculate about and argue over.

And it also places RPGs in an interesting position. If Gygax and Arneson had not been born, or if their paths through life had gone in different directions, would tabletop RPGs have been invented by somebody else? Is the playing of RPGs a feature of human sociality that would always have emerged, albeit in different genres? Or is it simply the case that D&D was in the right place at the right time?

My own feeling is that it was inevitable that tabletop RPGs would have been invented sooner or later, although they may not have been as explicitly high fantasy in tone. (One can even imagine them as having emerged as a sort of parlour game, perhaps more along the lines of the crime or romance genres than fantasy.) This is because of the inevitable connection between games and storytelling. When we sit down to play a game, provided it is not entirely abstract - like, say poker - we tend instinctively and intuitively to create narratives around it. We immerse ourselves in the imaginary world in which the game is taking place, and we project our personalities into the protagonists - whether they be pieces trotting around on a tabletop board or sprites in a video game. We do all this naturally, and the building blocks for RPGs are therefore always already there. And they would have been always already there for somebody to pick up and systematise;  it just happened to be Gygax and Arneson who did it. 

That it was those two men should not be overlooked, of course. And it raises further interesting questions: what was it about those men, and the period in which they lived, that caused them to come up with what they came out with. It also poses curious further make believe scenarios: is there an alternative universe in which Gygax and Arneson were really into Jane Austen, or Shakespeare, or Sci-Fi, or Miss Marple, and dreamed up a tabletop RPG based on that love, rather than that the 'our world' Lake Geneva boys had for Lovecraft, Vance and Tolkien?