(subtitled: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange, a memoir) by Mark Barrowcliffe
The book is well written with a very consistent tone– but my attitude toward it varied dramatically over the course of the book. As it began, I empathized with his younger self, and remembered how D&D (and roleplaying) felt to me. I was annoyed, though, at his constant running down of himself and his friends– as a roleplayer, I felt like he was bagging on all of us. In the end, he really is, though there’s a lot of wistfulness as he talks about his early days.
In many ways he was a lot like me, squared. My love of gaming and friends squares into a horribly dysfunctional obsession; his sense of superiority is unbounded and turns him into a jerk around friends and family. His focus on cool reminds me of mine… but even more of Dan’s, with his desire to be the only one in on the obscure, his distaste for anything that turns popular.
In the end, it’s a great look at someone very like a more extreme version of me and my friends in junior high and high school. The same jealousies, dominance issues, and friendship choices loomed in his life. In the end, he sets up fantasy and reality as the dichotomy and chooses reality. For him, that’s victory, and I’m happy to let him mark it so. (Of course, I also note that my own identity is quite wound up in roleplaying– despite all the differences between us, I mostly ignored them and read along as if I was almost him. The differences in nation, schooling, social circles, and the like weren’t a huge consideration… which shows what an issue it is for me.)
I liked it, both for the familiarity and the differences. It’s a little amusing the ends he has go to in order to remain apart from the world of fantasy… but only because I’ve made little effort to separate myself from it. Something tells me that it’d be as painful a scab to pick… if I chose to. For now, I still look forward to gaming in the old folks home with my wife.
3 replies on “The Elfish Gene”
Did the author suffer from any of the geek fallacies so common in gaming social groups?
All of them, and more extreme than anyone I’ve ever met in person. That was the difficulty I had with the book at first– he nailed the cliche so precisely.
Over the course of the book I realized that lots of factors contributed, and that I’d judged him over harshly, but he exemplifies being a geek.
Glad you liked the book Scott.
My own responses to it have changed over time – it was written getting on for four years ago now (I think!) and I have a different view on gaming to the one I did at the time.
I writing is like psychotherapy in some ways – you go through various stages in your attitude to the people or circumstances that brought you to the couch. For part of The Elfish Gene I think I was in something of an angry phase with D&D, thinking ‘how could I have let this dominate my life so much?’
I only got that in flashes – notably when beginning and ending the book. For most of it I looked back with a sort of amazed fondness for the time. Yes, I was an idiot but I’m sort of proud of that. I was uncool, but so what? I’ve known many cool people in my life and very few of them turn out to be interesting in the long run. Being cool is all about limiting yourself, in my opinion anyway.
Now, a few years after having written the book and having had contact with a few gamers, the flashes of anger have gone. I think I was unlucky in my D&D group – most notably that most of them were so much older than me. When you say that I was hard on my group, I think it worth pointing out that I toned much of what I wrote down – most notably in the case of Chigger, about whom I couldn’t find anything nice to say, so in the end I said hardly anything at all. His favourite hobby in later years was to sit outside people’s houses at 3 in the morning sounding his car horn in order to wake them up, before driving away sniggering. I think he was about 28 by the time he gave that up.
The age difference meant that I was the victim of various shades of bullying, though there were many positives too. D&D has, for better or worse, shaped me. And I got to meet Billy, who I think would have been a remarkable character in anyone’s life.
I have started to move back towards gaming and I’ve been commissioned to write some fantasy novels now.
If I was writing the book right now then I’d leave it exactly as it is – apart from the first and last chapters, which I’d modify to be slightly less angry.
As for being a geek – I am, although I fail on the computer literacy. I was always drawn to words rather than systems, as the book says
Anyway thanks for the comment, it means a lot to get feedback.
Mark