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Finding our inner dragon slayer
FANTASY FREAKS AND GAMING GEEKS:
An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players,
Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms
By Ethan Gilsdorf
336 pp. The Lyons Press $24.95
Reviewed by Julie McGuire
The irony is that we all engage in some form of minor dress-up and role-playing...we all dress the part and adopt another character: Witty or Well-Adjusted, Stockbroker or Salesman, Happy or Perfect. Unless you’re not willing to play along and put on a mask, friends will say “You’re not yourself. What’s wrong?” Who, indeed, are you, if you’re not you?—Ethan Gilsdorf
Ethan Gilsdorf was twelve years old when his mother turned into a monster. A once athletic and artistic woman who was a “free-spirited divorced mother who invited younger men home, read The Joy of Sex, hosted wild parties, pounded nails, and rallied our neighborhood for endless projects” suffered an aneurysm, leaving her brain-damaged. The “Momster” as Gilsdorf and his siblings referred to her, was “shifty, sickly, needy, deformed, antisocial, frustrated, volatile, closed to the world.” As if this tragedy wasn’t bad enough, Gilsdorf entered his teen years as an outcast, feeling lost in a world that favored athleticism and good looks, social skills and poise. Gilsdorf was a self-proclaimed geek who “felt about as powerful as a three-foot hobbit on a basketball team.”
Like many geeky adolescent boys, Gilsdorf escaped a sometimes cruel world when Dungeons and Dragons swooped in to rescue him. D&D is a fantasy role-playing game designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson—the rock stars of the gaming world. For a few hours each week, he joined a group of other outcasts and became a heroic master of an alternate world. Gilsdorf slew dragons. He controlled his destiny.
Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a surprisingly intimate portrait of Gilsdorf, now a journalist and expert on fantasy and escapism, as he travels the country, the world, and alternate realities, on a journey of discovery. Ostensibly he is exploring the reasons for the proliferation of the fantasy and gaming worlds. But the reader knows that Gilsdorf is looking for himself.
Gilsdorf stopped playing D&D after high school. He was ashamed of his geeky image, and wanted to do normal things with cool people. A trip to the basement of his childhood home, however, would open a Pandora’s box. The blue cooler with his D&D gear “appeared just as a midlife crisis started to hit.... I had the sense that the D&D gear would somehow solve the riddle of who I was, where I had come from, and why I still needed imaginary realms.”
Gilsdorf is not alone in his need for imaginary realms. Along his journey, Gilsdorf meets members of the Tolkien Society and attends its Annual General Meeting. He visits Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a game store specializing in war games, fantasy games, and miniatures as well as science fiction/fantasy novels and accessories, where he joined in a D&D game for four hours. At Pandemonium, gaming fans can wander in and out and join ongoing games. It is like “joining random strangers for pickup basketball, give the game a spin.” Everywhere he went Gilsdorf was welcomed like an old friend. “Geeks are a tolerant people. They take in ‘the other,’ the misfit toys, and not simply because no one else would sit with them at the cafeteria table. They have felt the sting of not being included. They know what it is like to not feel cool.”
For some, tabletop or online gaming simply isn’t enough. After attending the Lake Geneva Gaming Convention, Gilsdorf decided to seek out the more fanatic fantasy freaks for some LARPing—live action role playing. Some LARPs attract as many as four thousand players. Gilsdorf became a monk at “Forest of Doors,” a LARP organized on the Internet but played out in the real world. The “primary allure” of LARPing is “found in the ephemeral heroism, random interaction with each other, and fantasy violence on a sprawling, amorphous stage.”
If you think the idea of LARPing is strange, it is nothing compared to the lives of people who literally live in another time. Just outside the village of Treigny, France, tourists can watch a crew of laborers constructing a medieval fortress known as Guedelon stone by stone, using only the methods that would have been available in the Middle Ages. And each August outside Pittsburgh, the Society for Creative Anachronism holds its annual event, “Pennsic War,” with approximately 12,000 medieval re-enactors who “pitch a sea of period tents and gather for seventeen days to fight each other, take classes, and party like it’s 1399.” Participants become friends over the years, but often they never know each other’s real names—they take on medieval personae for a more authentic experience.
I found Fantasy Freaks a fascinating read. I did occasionally become confused by all the acronyms, but I found it didn’t bother me. Gilsdorf’s writing was witty, informative, revealing, and honest. You do not have to be either a fantasy freak or a gaming geek to enjoy this book. It is for anyone who’s ever had a rough childhood, who’s every felt like a misfit or wanted to escape the trials and tribulations of the real world. In short, it is for the dragon slayer that lurks within us all.
Julie McGuire, fiction editor of The Internet Review of Books, is a paralegal. Her personal essays and poems have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and several small periodicals. She and her family live in Virginia.
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