Having read the book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks a few days ago, some
people recommended a number of other books to read along the same lines, so in
the spirit of seeing if the others were more generous about gaming, I picked up The Elfish Gene.
It has to be said that in the first few pages, I wasn’t convinced that
this book was going to be any different…
How did I figure this?
End of chapter one, closing paragraph gave me all the warning I should
have needed…
And I quote (which I'm going to be doing quite a bit of in this review...)
“I hope to provide an answer for anyone who has every looked at a man
and thought ‘Why is he such a w*****?’
For many boys who grew up in the seventies and eighties, our peer group
and education constituted a sort of w***** factory. This is the story of the operation of its
most efficient department.”
I hope that this was perhaps an attempt at "Edgy" humour and continued
reading…
It turns out that the aforementioned “Edgy” humour was present through the
whole book, except it wasn’t "Edgy" and it might have been humour to some, but only
in a Jeremy Kyle sort of way. The story
is of the author in his formative years and his encounters with a variety of
people as he took up D&D and proceeded to let it eat his life…
The story itself is unremarkable, he finds D&D at a formative age
(which we all did) and proceeds to let it consume his life, becoming (and I
quote) “Uniformly sarcastic and unpleasant to everyone, especially my
friends, I’d learned by playing D&D that this was the only way to get on
with people.”
For those thinking I’m cherry picking quotes, I am, but they’re the
best way of demonstrating the arc that this book takes, if I was to take every negative thing that goes on, this would be a few thousand words rather than a few hundred...
Some of it is meant to be amusing, but it points out the worst parts of
everything that he talks about, such as being hit on the head by the dinner
ladies, being humiliated by women and having nothing but Nazi’s that play
D&D as friends. This might be
something that is supposed to engender some sort of sympathy towards him as a
person, but given his general behaviour towards other people, I got the impression
that his behaviour was the same as, if not worse than the people he was
associating with.
Again, I’m writing this off the back of reading the book, so my anger
at a lot of the sentiments expressed is still raw, and I’m finding that
while there’s a proviso at the end of the book (page 327 for anyone interested)
that it could have been masculinity and not D&D that did the mental damage
to the author, it’s like a paper making a retracted apology on page 26 when the
headline was in 72 point on the front cover…
The whole book gave me the impression that he was trying to generate a
certain kind of feeling about the people who play games, as with Fantasy Freaks
and Gaming Geeks, there’s a whole undercurrent of “People who do this are obsessive
weirdo’s who need professional help…” and that the thing that saved him was
when he realised how much those who did this were socially bereft losers and when
he found a girlfriend, he lost all interest in roleplaying…
So the Frog Prince got kissed and voila…
His friends who played D&D ended up being unemployed, dropouts,
overweight religious nutjobs, or just unsociable gits who still played D&D… (and I quote) “One D&Der had a D&D
Wedding, this is the sort of thing that is so embarrassing I’m almost ducking
under the desk as I type.”
The author went on to have a normal life and was able to resist the addiction of D&D and keep control of
his obsession…
And this paints what picture
of gamers exactly…?
We’re back to poking creatures at the zoo with sticks here, this book
doesn’t contain anything regarding the good things in roleplaying, only the
dark side of a time when everything was darker, and if that was his experience,
then hands in the air, it must have been terrible for him and I understand why
he wrote this horrific account of gamers.
That said…
I’ve never encountered anyone who’s had this bad a time with anything
and stuck with it unless they were being coerced, and he certainly wasn’t being
coerced, this was all down to him. I’d give him a free pass for any show I run to have him come and see that
gaming is a healthy thing that promotes a whole range of social skills that
seem to be absent in the people he knew.
The book that he's written paints a picture along the lines of the
horror story that was ‘Mazes and Monsters’ and perpetrates the myth that gamers
as a group are just maladjusted sociopaths when nothing could be further from
the truth.
(Well, most of us anyway...)
We’re not perfect, but we’re not what you played with…
I’ve got one more book to read from the recommendations list and I’m
hoping that it’s got something hopeful in it rather than the nightmares in
here.