Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange [Hardcover]

Mark Barrowcliffe (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 1, 2008

"[Barrowcliffe] writes how D&D twisted his teenage development — and about how twisted teenage development is in general. It's easy to read in a weekend, and thanks to several hilarious, unbelievably well-remembered recountings of dialogue-heavy extreme nerdiness, begs a movie adaptation."—Seattle Times

“Barrowcliffe's retrospective self-awareness is by turns poignant and amusing ... as fantasy movies dominate the box office; the author offers a timely, appropriate memoir of addiction recovery ... worth a few hours holed up in the basement." -Kirkus Reviews

"I urge you to buy it yourself and make up your own mind. You'll love discussing it with your friends. There's not a whole lot written about gaming, especially from the inside, and The Elfish Gene belongs in every gamer's library." -Enter the Octopus Blog

"This is a good, funny book, and I am enjoying the heck out of it so far.  Barrowcliffe ... has an excellent writing style that is light and funny, and when he describes the game, you feel his excitement as he rolls the dice.... I hope [it] intrigues you as much as it intrigued me." -Geekscribe.com

Summer, 1976. Twelve-year-old Mark Barrowcliffe had a chance to be normal. He blew it. While other teenagers were being coolly rebellious, Mark—and twenty million other boys in the 1970s and ’80s—chose to spend his entire adolescence pretending to be a wizard, a warrior, or an evil priest. Armed only with pen, paper, and some funny-shaped dice, this lost generation gave themselves up to the craze of fantasy role-playing games. Spat at by bullies and laughed at by girls, they now rule the world. They were the geeks, the fantasy war gamers, and this is their story.

Mark Barrowcliffe grew up in Coventry, England. He worked as a stand-up comedian before writing his first hit novel, Girlfriend 44. He has written two other acclaimed comic novels, Lucky Dog and Infidelity for First-Time Fathers. He lives in Brighton, England.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As a 12-year-old in England in 1976, Barrowcliffe (Lucky Dog) made a fateful choice: he started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Role-playing games were just beginning their rise, and Barrowcliffe, along with 20 million other socially maladapted boys, spent his adolescence in dining rooms and basements as a druid, warrior or magician, throwing oddly shaped dice and slaying monsters. While D&D allowed Barrowcliffe to escape his mundane, much-bullied existence in an all-boys school, it also threw him into an equally cruel nerdiverse of Nazi wannabes, boys with nicknames like Rat and Chigger, and his polymath, Falstaffian best friend who once ate a still-frozen chicken pie on a bet. Barrowcliffe, whose own schoolboy nickname was Spaz, wonderfully captures the insensitivity, insecurity and selfishness of the adolescent male. His eye for the oddities of 1970s British life is equally astute. At times, Barrowcliffe's relentlessly self-deprecating humor descends into a tedium of self-loathing. The book also loses some of its focus toward the end when D&D gives way to heavy metal clubs and tolerant girlfriends. However, these are minor imperfections when measured against the quality of the author's vision. Barrowcliffe renders all the comedy and sorrow of early manhood, when boys flee the wretchedness of their real status for a taste of power in imaginary domains. (Nov.)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—In this autobiography, Barrowcliffe tells the story of a self-proclaimed nerd living in 1970s Coventry, England; Dungeons & Dragons; and the boys who played it. He provides a humorous look into the world of fantasy role-playing at a time when computer RPGs didn't exist and people were forced to use their imaginations. He recounts his foray into the game, his struggle to belong, and what ultimately led to his "growing up." The writing is often self-deprecating and combines views on the city with detailed descriptions of the gaming sessions. Despite-or, in part, because of—the long descriptions of gaming, this book will appeal to those interested in the RPG phenomenon. The author's character development leaves readers with a strong sense of who these boys were and why they played the game. This book is ideal for anyone who is into fantasy role-playing or interested in the cultural and social implications of such games.—Kelliann Bogan, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Soho Press; First Edition edition (November 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569475229
• ISBN-13: 978-1569475225
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #835,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the celebration of nerddom that you might be expecting December 15, 2009

By H. James Madigan

Format: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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars The tale of an obnoxious youth March 11, 2009

By C. Ho

Format:Hardcover

I grew up less than 40 miles away from the author (Coventry, England) at the same time (11 in 1978 vs 14) and went through a very similar phase of intense Dungeons & Dragons obsession. The early chapters of this biography spoke to me like no other book ever has. There is so much in the descriptions of the era and the game that shook long-lost memories from the depths of my mind. In fact, I find it difficult to fathom how readers not from the UK, growing up in the same time frame could possibly understand many of the references that Barrowcliffe makes. Things such as Letraset lettering templates, Scalextrix slot racing cars, Bontempi pipe-reed organs, Debbie Harry (of Blondie) singing "Heart of Glass" on "Top of the Pops". These are the icons of growing up in UK in the late 70s. I have my exact equivalent memory for most of what Barrowcliffe writes about in the early chapters of the book when he is talking about his discovery of D&D, waiting for the books to arrive in the mail (post) and making a pilgrimage to a store that carried such wondrous role-playing games. So I consider myself a bullseye in terms of target reader.

And yet, I found the book to be extremely annoying by the middle and end. This is where we get a glimpse of the irritating personality that is the author in his youth. And although the author tries to put himself at a distance from it, one can't help but feel that he hasn't really changed at all, but is simply covering up his new-found self knowledge that he does behave in an obnoxious way.

One could count this as a success, since a biography is meant to convey the story of the subject. But usually, I prefer that the subject of a biography actually have something "worthy" to learn from, an insight into the mind and personality of a person with qualities that I wish to learn about. Unfortunately, Barrowcliffe isn't such a subject.

37 of 46 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Youth of Horrors October 31, 2008

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format: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.