The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange

I wish there were 277 more pages in this book

I liked this book so much I gave the hardcover edition to my mother to read to try to understand "what roleplaying games are like." She had to watch me grow up playing them in the '80s, after all, so she probably had feelings of bewilderment much like those of Mark Barrowcliffe's parents. This is a very enjoyable, funny look at RPG fandom and the reasons people play RPGs (particularly the reasons they played RPGs in Britain in the late '70s and early '80s). The book's depictions of RPGs are, of course, squalid and snarky; Barrowcliffe's teenage D & D games were apparently a boys' club of nerds picking on each other and killing each others' characters, which meshes only about.... 40%... with my own experiences. But it's not entirely cynical; the author also praises many aspects of roleplaying and does a very good job explaining their appeal and the importance they had in the lives of his friends and social group. (This is first and foremost a personal story, an autobiography, not a history of RPGs or anything like that.) Barrowcliffe never descends into making fun of RPGs in a shallow way ("ha ha ha D & D heavy metal the '80s Pac-Man ha ha ha" "ha ha ha aren't we so cool for not being into this stuff"). While no aspect of RPGs are spared, from pompous storyteller/actor types to hack-and-slash jerks, it's an entertaining and actually touching look at roleplaying games written by someone who actually understands them. I wish there were more RPG-themed books like this -- books which attempt to bridge the preconceptions of people outside and inside the fandom.

"There was a metaphor there for my entire adolescence--wishing something to be something else so very hard that is almost is but, crucially, isn't." (234) I think he got it! Mr. Barrowcliffe--I love that utterly English surname--captured the essentials and the feel of role playing games in the late 1970s and early 1980s. All the elements are there: * The misfit cadre of players. * The late-night, weekend war-gaming. * The costuming. * The supplementary literature, from Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition) to Lovecraft (The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre). * The parental friction. * The fundamentalist oppression (Mazes and Monsters). * The fights. * The bullying. * The in-game backstabbing. * The snobbery. * The crazy-quilt collection of ever-updated rules. * The milieu crossovers. * The hobby shops that supplied us. * AND the steady flow of new product from TSR--"An adolescent fool and his money are soon parted." For those of you who missed out, or never understood, this book explains it all. * The title is a parody of The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author. And I think that is appropriate, because of how compelling the system can be. Not just the gaming, but also the environment, the sub-creation involved in the fantasy world. If you are in a hurry, read pages 139 and 140. Barrowcliffe explains why fantasy games are so compelling: it is not just playing, or reading, or writing, but how the games stokes the imagination: "The power of the story, either writing or reading or listening to one, is that the imagination is tied to something that makes it go forward. ..." "D & D is, I believe, something virtually unique and unprecedented in human history. It's a story you can listen to at the same time as telling it. You can be surprised by the plot's twists and turns, but you can surprise too. It' more interactive than any other sort of narrative I can think of. If its subject matter were more serious then it would be considered a new art form ...That is why D & D is so addictive when it's played right. It's like the best story you've ever read combined with the charge a good storyteller feels as he plays his audience." (139-140). Exactly. That is why the best Game Master I ever had was also a thespian. D & D--and all role-playing games by extension--are really a form of experimental theater. * The setting is the war-gaming world, but the conflict is "coming of age" (American Graffiti,That Was Then, This Is Now). D & D is not so much a crutch in dealing with the twilight zone between childhood and adulthood, but a brace. Think clearly: we create this fantasy world to help us deal with the Real World. In this safe "virtual reality" environment, we learned teamwork, budgeting (in the game and in buying the latest update), record keeping, dealing with "the roll of the dice" both good and bad, managing

I adore this book. Perhaps I should not admit how much I identify with the author's geekiness. His honesty about being a young misfit fills me with delight and glee, and I found myself smiling and chuckling all through the book. I can already predict it is surely going to be one of my favourites books of 2009.

Geeks, nerds, dweebs . . . today they rule the world, but what truly lies in the past for these kids who girls didn't want to be anywhere near? "The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange" is the memoir of someone who was in no way the cool kid, someone who instead of doing normal things like defacing public property or having teen pregnancy scares, spent his hours believing he was an elf who went around stabbing dwarves in the face. Detailing the life of a D & D nerd, it's a picture to be looked at from the other side, revealing that only minor differences separate one type of nerd from another. "The Elfish Gene" is riveting reading, an excellent pick for memoir collections.

For the record, I have never played Dungeons and Dragons. What's more, I wouldn't have the slightest idea where to even start playing. Fortunately this didn't keep me from understanding the basics of what is going on in "The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange," which is basically all about coming of age in 1970s England with the help of then-new-and-impressive Dungeons and Dragons. Mark Barrowcliffe gives the constant impression that he was intensely annoying and possibly insane, but it's a fun little read about the passionate obsessions of youth and the appeal of ubergeekery. In the summer of 1976, Barrowcliffe was aspiring to be cool and edgy, with a burgeoning interest in the opposite sex. Then he discovered wargaming in school. And by attempting to weave more fantastical stuff into his wargames, he inadvertently fell in with a new school club that was playing an utterly new kind of RPG -- Dungeons and Dragons. Soon Barrowcliffe was not only a gaming fanatic for anything fantastical, but was also enamored of "Lord of the Rings," Michael Moorcock, Led Zeppelin and anything else with a faraway fantastical edge. Suddenly everything else in life went to the wayside to make room for a strange world of dungeonmasters, elves, magic-users and primal bad guys. Unsurprisingly, that level of obsession tends to cause a bit of annoyance -- from family, friends, and members of the opposite sex (well, what do you expect when you greet a "slattern" with a cry of "What, fair maiden?"). And Barrowcliffe soon discovered the downsides of D & D as well as the upsides -- including oblivious parents, dabblings in chemical "magic" and an egomaniac dungeonmaster -- as he struggled through an adolescent's rapidly changing world. Hoo boy. "The Elfish Gene" is fundamentally a book about "growing up strange" -- it's definitely saturated in Ye Olde Role-Playing Games from beginning to end, and Barrowcliffe's obsessions are undeniable ("I'd already begun to suspect that the D & D system might not be the EXACT recreation of real life that I'd taken it to be"). But in many ways, it's the adolescent journey of a highly imaginative adolescent who's struggling to find his place in the world, and uses D & D (and many accompanying games) as the doorway to that. And Barrowcliffe is fearless in exposing all the dorky, dumb things he did as a teenager. It takes some real guts to show the world that you were once immature, irritating, enslaved by the concept of "cool" and tended to dress like a total dork. Fortunately he's able to strike a nice balance between self-deprecating mockery (both then and now) and rosy-hued nostalgia for the 1970s, his hometown and the feeling of being an overenthusiastic young boy ("I think the idea that women might fancy good-looking, well-adjusted men who are nice to them is too much for the average fantasy-head to bear"). But despite his adrenaline-charged forays into strange worlds full of mystical beings (and apparently