The Spirit of White Box

Do It Yourself
It was late 1977 by the time I came into contact with White Box and the exciting new hobby that was growing up around it. It was a time to make dreams real and visionary gamers had been doing that in a big way since 1974 when White Box was released and the new hobby started to spread. The LBB supplements had all been released by Christmas of '77 and I was fortunate enough to score them all except Deities and Demigods. Visionaries like Dave Hargrave (Arduin Grimoire) and M.A.R. Barker (Empire of the Petal Throne) were already publishing their independent takes on the game and folks at TSR were busy with the Advanced Game. Recognizing the steep learning curve, Prof. Holmes and TSR had published the Basic Set to assist newbies like me in learning the game. I friend of mine got the Basic Set, I got the LBBs and together with other friends who enjoyed games, we started the long process of figuring it out for ourselves.
I was a freshman in college at the time, so I had the ability to think, or that was what was generally expected of me in the classroom. Thinking for myself was encouraged in the college I attended with an emphasis on figuring things out on our own. I was an art major, so creativity was also expected. I can recall going at White Box like I did so many other things at the time, in spurts of "starts" and "stops", periods of action and inaction. By the end of the school year, however, my friends and I had developed a play style which seemed to us to pretty well fit the rules. What we didn't understand, we made up.
White Box expects the players to put a lot of themselves into the game. It is an exercise in using one's imagination to create fictional characters and imagine them going on adventures, helping to create a collective story by making decisions on behalf of the fictional characters, rolling dice, making suggestions, etc. The game expects even more from the referee who not only plays the other characters and adjudicates the action during play, but must spend considerable time in preparation by drawing maps, creating monsters and NPCs and all the rest that the players are likely to encounter once play begins. That is much of the appeal of White Box. It is a vehicle for the creative use of one's imagination, a way to entertain oneself and our friends through collective imagining and developing a story together. The story may be as much about when "So-and-so" boasted loudly only to roll a one and everyone laughs, as it is about the fictional heroes grabbing the legendary treasure.
In the books and movies and comics that inspire the fictional heroes of our game, we are passive observers who follow the adventure by reading/watching. White Box shows us how to actively interact with the fictional setting through the mechanics of a game. What was passive becomes active. What was done for us becomes done by us. That is the spirit of the White Box.