Customer Reviews

The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barrowcliffe seems to have decided that because he had a completely socially inept experience of playing D&D as a teen, that's the only experience anyone could have had. Worse, he plays the stereotypes for all they're worth, but they're just that: stereotypes that the non-gaming world has about D&D and its players.

I had a different experience of D&D. Sure, the people I played with were a little geeky, but girls played the game, everybody dated, and mostly we weren't obsessed ... well, maybe that one 9-week grading period where I got a D in English. My theory is that whatever you do a lot of in high school creates a kind of social currency and shared language with those people you did it with. Whether it's sports, theater, music, euchre, roleplaying games, the result is that you create friendships based on the doing, and what you did is at the root of those friendships. At least that's how it worked for me.

So don't buy into Barrowcliffe's version of reality. Read it as his memoir, not the memoir of anyone who's ever played the game, because he is an exceptional case.

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 a lot of ethereal maidens), the real drama here is in the real world. Barrowcliffe roams through shops, makes (and loses) friends over his beloved D&D, and has it shape every single part of his persona. Most shockingly, he gets kicked out of his first group by the chilly, egomaniacal Porter, and though he finds a haven with older gamers there's still plenty of tension and conflict. Call it a cautionary tale for people who try to misuse their dungeonmaster power.

But despite the clashes between gamers (usually because of Porter's inexplicably dislikes), Barrowcliffe crams the book with funny story after funny story. You can't make this stuff up -- chemical "fireballs" in a bathroom, RPGing with cosmetics, purple prose, teenage Nazis, and the distinct lack of breeks. And he has a knack for funny, wry prose in any situation ("I will make your flesh sing a song of ecstacy such as will echo through the caverns of your soul. Happily shalt thou spend thy sweet seed." "Right, cup of tea?").

"The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange" is an off-kilter, ubergeeky memoir of adolescence in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, and Mark Barrowcliffe knows how to keep it fun and interesting.

In the interest of full disclosure: I am a former gamer, and although I no longer play Dungeons & Dragons or other role-playing games, most of my friends still do and I remain a staunch fan of fantasy fiction, films, comics, etc.

I really enjoyed The Elfish Gene until I got about two or three chapters from the end. Barrowcliffe's memoir is fast-paced and funny, and I defy anyone male (gamer or otherwise) who grew up in the last quarter of the 20th century not to find at least an anecdote or two that they can identify with. But this whole "D&D is the worst thing you can possibly get into as a young adult" conclusion is just beyond the pale. I realize he's trying to be amusing, but I doubt anyone who has a child who has gotten into hard drugs or gang activity will find themselves laughing.
At the risk of sounding like a humorless blowhard, we (gamers/fantasy fans) get enough of this crap from people who've never been involved with our hobby. I guess I'm still puzzled at the mentality that supposes it's okay to get obsessed with fantasy football or old cars or American Idol, but getting involved with role-playing games makes you an agent of Satan.

End of rant. I'll conclude by saying that I'd give the book three and a half stars if amazon would let me, just 'cause the funny parts in the book are really funny, but as there's no way I'll go up to four on it, it gets three.

PS Heavy metal doesn't suck. But I wouldn't expect a Smiths fan to understand that.

Barrowcliffe, aka "Spaz," never had it in his genes to be normal. It wasn't going to happen. Long before he heard of D&D, he was a dysfunctional, anti-social kid bottoming out on the skids. His masochistic attraction to those who despised him would have led him to a group that "delighted in being cruel to other boys" regardless of whether D&D was involved or not. He blames his "wasted" years (pre-drugs anyway) on a game, of all things, when clearly it was a self inflicted wound received in an environment - industrial working class Midlands England - that gave the world the spectacle of soccer hooligans and punk as a dominant lifestyle. Without the game, it seems he would have spent his formative years sniffing glue and burning things. Later in life when he had a chance to be "normal", he ditched his day job for a writing career. The author does not seem to be able to form a clear picture of what the "normal" life he says he holds in such high regard would actually be like.

The gaming culture has always been a little different between the U.S. and U.K. Perhaps that explains some of the adolescent level sadism on display in "The Elfish Gene". I regret that critics, i.e. outsiders, are hailing this book as the last word in memoirs about growing up in the early days of D&D. I see it instead as a painfully sad story about the life of an abject and exceptionally detached teenager. That the author blames his troubles on a game is like blaming a robbery on a jewelry store window display. It's either a continuing delusion, or an apparently successful bit of "nerdsploitation." It reinforces a negative stereotype by holding up a pathological case as a typical example.

It may come as a shock that a large percentage of us who "grew up strange" in the early days of D&D had girlfriends, good hygiene, were decent at sports, knew how to communicate with adults, had other talents and interests, spent most of our time outdoors, enjoyed the game for the story telling and social fun aspects, knew not to take it seriously, thought LARP was the height of ridiculousness, and never had the slightest bit of trouble separating games or the occult from reality. No one we knew came close to being as detached or irritating as "Andy" or the author. In fact we were "strange" mostly because we had more well rounded lives than the so-called normal kids.

The book is hilarious, unflinching, and you come away feeling sorry for anyone who's ever lived in Coventry. For that I give it 2 stars. For those interested in an adult view of a severely disturbed boy, I recommend it. However, for anyone, especially someone who was not there, interested in a more general picture of growing up with D&D in the 70's and 80's, it really should be avoided. As a looking glass into the general case of adolescent fascination with D&D, "The Elfish Gene" is considerably out of focus.

I used to play AD&D extensively growing up, and I was very much looking forward to this book as a throwback to how much fun it can be to have this game as a part of your life. The problem is that Barrowcliffe was exactly the type of player that I did my best to avoid playing with - he was completely obnoxious, awkward, and socially inept. I don't understand in any way how someone could have had a quality experience playing a game of AD&D with him. Sure plenty of the people I played with were geeks/nerds, but they were all fundamentally nice and fun to be around.

I'm sure this book works well as a tale of Mark Barrowcliffe's life, but I just could not identify with him at all. I'd love to read a similar book written by someone who had a little more fun with the game, and spent less time fulfilling all of the terrible gamer stereotypes.

Boy, did I look forward to this thing's arriving in the mail. Having spent much of my teen years the same way, I was eager to hear this guy, a British comedian, recount his coming-of-age years behind a DM's screen.

Alas! This pretty much turned into a chore to get through, starting at about page 50. Here's why:

1. First of all, he's British -- not American, so you'll frequently have problems connecting emotionally to what he's talking about, since the book is filled with all sorts of British slang.

2. The guy's not as funny as he apparently believes himself to be.

3. The guy is not possessed of any insights that anybody else wouldn't be, if they sat down and thought about the matter for a few minutes. (e.g., "Maybe our love of fantasy gaming was a way of dealing with an unsatisfying social and home life . . .") Actually, he doesn't talk much about D&D really, I felt: it's more like he tried to cram it into what was fundamentally a narrative of growing up poor in England in the 70's, with the D&D being not so much a theme as a leitmotif.