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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not the celebration of nerddom that you might be expecting,
This review is from: Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange (Paperback)
In The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange, author Mark Barrowcliffe presents his memoir of what it was like to grow up during the 70s in Coventry, England and being utterly, hopelessly, and unhealthily obsessed with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. As someone who was himself once obsessed with D&D to the point of being able to recite entire blocks of text from the Monster Manual or tell you how many level 3 spells an 8th level Magic-User could cast, this was a good enough hook for me. I'd been there, albeit about a decade later and on the other side of the Atlantic. I wanted to compare notes.The problem is that it's difficult to figure out who the audience for The Elfish Gene is supposed to be. Barrowfliffe certainly goes in to a lot of detail about his obsession with the game, and I think that any past or current D&D player would be hard pressed NOT to identify with something from the book. Maybe it would be the way the author would show up at schoolmates' houses awkwardly hoping for a game, or maybe how he delighted in his discovery of the area where D&D and heavy metal overlapped in a Venn diagram. Or maybe how his parents would --as only a loving if confused parent can-- feign interest in his nattering about hit dice, kobolds, and +5 vorpal swords. Likewise, Barrofcliffe does have some genuine insights about how kids see social class, what drives teenage boys to be sardonic bastards, the nature of counter-cultures, hero worship among the self-loathing, and like. It's all very introspective and again it's sometimes interesting to compare experiences from my own adolescence. There are also a few really funny bits to the book, and Barrowcliffe is not without the ability to occasionally turn an amusing phrase or describe a situation so absurd that it can only be a true tale born of childhood's own brand of logic. There is, for example, the time he plans to ignite a balloon full of lighter fluid in order to recreate a fireball spell, but sets his friend's bathroom on ablaze during a test run. Or the time that he decides to evaluate his ninja abilities by jumping, practically naked, from his bed into his dirty clothes hamper (of course!), only to miscalculate things and end up knocking himself out and leaving his befuddled parents to conclude that it must have been some bizarre masturbation ritual. Because, frankly, that's more believable than the ninja thing. On the other hand, Barrowcliffe isn't describing all this in the context of nostalgia. Not even the wry, "can you believe what we used to think was cool" brand of nostalgia. From the opening pages of the memoir, it's clear that the author thinks that getting into D&D was a huge mistake for his teenage self, and that if he had only chosen a different path --one populated by girls and carburetors and maybe cricket-- he'd have actually been happy, well adjusted, and better off in life. In fact, he's downright disdainful of the game and those who play it, right up to the epilogue where he makes a half-hearted attempt to join a modern day game and ends up deriding the players and literally running for his life. There are just no upsides to the game in the author's view. Everyone who plays it does so because he's a socially inept, hopelessly nerdy git. This is mostly because Barrowcliffe is (well, was) himself a socially inept, hopelessly nerdy git and he doesn't bother to see past his own experiences. While D&D certainly attracts the nerdiest of the nerds (surely even more true of early adopters in the 70s than it is today), there are many positive things the author could have said about D&D if you weren't so bent on self-deprication. It encourages reading, it develops logical reasoning, it fires the imagination, and it's an inherently social game, just to name a few. But there's none of that; the treatment of the game is entirely lopsided. A more complete book would have delved more into the history of the game and how it evolved, along with the author, over the course of its life. There would have also been more examination of the gaming subculture on a wider scale, as well as its many offshoots into other forms of entertainment. Of course, you can say that this is a memoir, and since Barrofcliffe gave up D&D for life and developed other interests, he can't very well talk about all that, can he? And that's fair enough. But it remains that Barrowfcliffe doesn't understand about role-playing games or the attendant culture. He understands about being a socially retarded teenager seeking escape from life. And yes, there's a difference.
36 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Youth of Horrors,
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange (Hardcover)
As a 30-something male who spent a good deal of my teen years playing wargames and role-playing games, I'm squarely within the target audience for this "growing up geeky" memoir by English novelist Barrowcliffe. However, much as I desperately wanted to revel in the trials and tribulations of his '70s Coventry youth, I just wasn't ever able to connect with them. It's kind of obvious to say, but when a memoir doesn't work for me, it's because I'm not really enjoying the company of the author.My problem lay in the combination of his obsession with D&D and his total social ineptitude. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware of the obsessions of youth and had my own ones, however that never really turned me into the complete idiot that is Barrowcliffe at ages 12-15. (To be fair, he repeatedly admits with hindsight that he was an exceedingly annoying and foolish kid -- but that doesn't make his antics any less cringeworthy.) Maybe the problem is that he only had one obsession, whereas all my gamer friends have multiple obsessions, ranging from sports to music to cars to politics to art, etc. By this standard we were more "well-rounded" than Barrowcliffe and his cohort, even though we were still generally social outcasts. The difference was that we generally didn't worry too much about it, and made plenty of good friends through other interests. So my experience with gaming kind of contradicts one of the book's main themes, which is that "normal" kids don't play RPGs and engage in imaginative play. It's also somewhat illuminating to me that he basically ditches D&D after reinventing himself as a heavy metal fan, and immerses himself in a different social space. None of the gamers I know ever really stopped gaming by choice. For us, there was never any problem gaming on Friday night, going to a punk show with a girl on Saturday, and playing football on Sunday. It wasn't until we reached our 30s and had more career and family commitments that we had to let go of RPGs, simply because it was impossible to schedule regular 8-hour gaming sessions. And for all his elaborations on how D&D dominated his life, Barrowcliffe rarely succeeds at explaining what makes it so compelling. Quite the opposite, his descriptions of gaming sessions sound utterly awful. Then again, I didn't start playing until I was in my late teens, and the overall tenor was a whole lot more mature than the chaotic, backstabbing sessions described in this book. Some of the gaming stuff he describes is amusing, but mostly it's just kind of sad. In the end, I guess the book is perfectly fine as a memoir, I just had a very hard time relating it to my own D&D experiences. Certainly there are some funny anecdotes, interesting stuff about the early days of RPGing, some quite good stuff about coming of age in England in the '70s, as well as a rather heartbreaking story of friendship lost. But mainly, the book just made me wish that one of my old gang of gamers could find the time to DM a cool mid-level campaign for us.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Pain and Pleasure of Obsession,
By
This review is from: Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange (Hardcover)
Mark Barrowcliffe's "The Elfish Gene" (no connection to Richard Dawkins) is a story about obsession. Not just any obsession, but the kind of seductive inner-world obsessions that are common to men - a positive force for the species, but dangerous for those on the edge of the male personality curve tending towards Asperger's-like behavior or mental illness ala "Zen and the Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance."Growing up around the same time as Mark, I remember the delight of D&D from that era (although the author dwells overmuch on the original rules which were quickly forgotten once the 1st edition AD&D manuals came out) - and like Mark, I also remember how my hobby also dovetailed with fantasy in all its forms: Books (Tolkien & Moorcock), Music (well, maybe not Hawkwind, but certainly Rainbow and Rush) and Occultism (Aleister Crowley and H.P. Lovecraft being the most popular.) I guess what sets Mark's gaming story apart from everyone else's (besides the fact that it's set in Britain) is the extent to which he let his obsessions eclipse him, and the unusual amount of self-loathing that accompanies his retelling. Too much of anything is rarely good, but it's clear that once one gets past the general build-up and introductions that Mark's fantasy hobby life was a rich source of creative and social pleasure for him as an unremarkable kid growing up in working-class England. His self-loathing, however, is mainly in retrospect - taking the form of a man who feels a need to distance himself from his past in order to prove that he's a Well Adjusted Adult Now who can Look Back On His Past And Mock Himself For It. "The Elfish Gene" includes a fascinating character study of Mark's two best friends - Billy (the rationalist pedantic wit) and Andy (the socially domineering dungeonmaster) along with key issues of Great Concern to any young man growing up - betrayal, adolescence, girls, adulthood and the 800lb gorilla called Reality. Of important note is that Mark's Cure, which not all of his friends discover, is to find an outwardly-directed life as compelling as his inwardly-directed one beginning with the opposite sex. It is interesting to note that while Mark gradually slides towards normalcy once discovering this, his relationships with women seem rather shallow, not rising anywhere near the level of his fantasy life. This differs from his best friend Billy, whose own gaming obsessions indirectly lead to years of personal misfortune only to eventually become Born Again - giving the appearance of trading one obsession for another.
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