Arneson is nearly always mentioned side-by-side with Gygax in the last 10-20 years. 

I suspect that if you polled “the average people” no more than 5% could even recognize the name “Gary Gygax”.

What “common man” is angered when he looks at a bottle in a video game and doesn’t see a gay joke on it?

The counter-argument is that, now that they’ve said the material is homophobic, they’re now admitting to intentionally keeping homophobic content in their game. They’re either dedicated bigots who showed cowardice when faced by “SJW” outrage, or they’re showing cowardice now and backing down when faced by “anti-SJW”…

Instead, it’s one mass saying “remove the content! BOYCOTT! Anyone who likes the game is homophobic! BOYYYYCOTTTTTTTT!”

Right. Literally the worst possible response here was to say “it’s homophobic, sorry, we’re taking it out” and then to cave in to trolls and say “well, our fans are mad at us so we changed our minds”.

The fact that it’s such a lazy and low-effort joke honestly strengthens the argument for removing it. I’m sure there were people who overstated their offense at the joke, but it’s not unreasonable to say “this isn’t cool, will you take it out?” It is much more ridiculous that people decided to go to the barricades for…

“However, a portion of our community made it loud and clear they felt removing ‘Ogay’ was censorship and should be protected by free speech. Voidpoint wanted to listen and we respected this decision.”

Mother 3 fan translator Clyde Mandelin has been working on tools to do on-the-fly translation comparisons of games for several years now. The tool also integrates a Japanese-to-English dictionary. People who find this interesting might enjoy taking a look at his work. These days he mostly compares official English…

Sorry, I should clarify that! I’m saying that Kuntz is characterizing Gygax as motivated by jealousy (in this piece he literally says that Gygax was “stone-cold jealous”), not that he himelf is jealous. Kuntz has every reason to think poorly of Gygax, but that is naturally going to color his assessment of Gygax’s…

Yeah, I overstated that he isn’t mentioned -- I meant that in the text describing the origins of the game they don’t name names. And in every official source I’ve seen he’s always named side-by-side with Arneson.

The origins are disputed, as this article mentions. It’s just a brief mention at the beginning of a single-page introduction to the book. In the absence of a full recounting of the history (which WOTC has published elsewhere), not naming names is probably a good decision. Even if you mention Gygax and Arneson,…

I’m not sure how much of that casual version is known by new D&D fans. I mentioned elsewhere that Gygax isn’t even mentioned by name in the Player’s Handbook. Because the story isn’t new, I think an article like this would be better written from a neutral viewpoint, not as a debunking. That is: I think that the facts…

Yeah, agreed. What I think it’s important to avoid is the tendency to counter the original deification with a counter-deification where the original ‘god’ becomes the Devil. Lee/Kirby, Edison/Tesla, Gygax/Arneson, and so on.

The problem with this is that there was an entire genre of computer gaming, the CRPG, that lifted the mechanics of D&D and ran with it. There was obviously an enduring appeal there.

The 5e PHB doesn’t directly mention either Gygax or Arneson, but it alludes to both of them. There hasn’t been an official policy of Gygax deification for a long time.

But popular culture pretends that Lee did it all alone, created every Marvel hero alone.

Right, I agree. I think it’s pretty clear that Gygax was, at the very least, not a very good businessman, which resulted in him doing some shitty things. But him being an asshole doesn’t mean his contributions didn’t matter (which is how I read Kuntz, who ascribes everything Gygax did to jealousy and a desire to…

That’s true, but it’s also mostly the oldheads who know who Gygax was in the first place. WOTC/Hasbro don’t emphasize him in their marketing materials. The 5e PHB avoids naming names entirely, but alludes to both men:

To be fair, this piece is kind of reported like this is a new revelation, and it describes a kind of deification of Gygax that really hasn’t been the case for a decade or more. At this point, I suspect that anyone who knows enough about D&D to know who Gary Gygax has also heard about Dave Arneson.