Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I personally find it fascinating to compare Mark Barrowcliffe's The Elfish Gene to Ethan Gilsdorf's Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, because they're both the memoirs of AD&D players who're looking back at their gaming hobbies later in life, and yet come to completely different conclusions about them.
Gilsdorf's memoir is not only a celebration of gaming, but a very moving personal tale. Written as fantasy was coming into its own with the groundswell of popularity surrounding things like World of Warcraft and the first Lord of the Rings movie, Gilsdorf goes around trying to figure out why these are popular now, overturning the ubiquitous stereotype that fantasy previously had. In doing so, he confronts his own childhood interest in the game, acknowledging that it was something which helped him avoid confronting what happened to his mother after she'd had a stroke that left her not only permanently disabled, but severely altered her personality. This ultimately allows him to find a degree of catharsis, since it pushes him to confront that aspect of his childhood; he even manages to reconnect with his absentee father along the way. It's a very personal tale, but ultimately an uplifting one.
Barrowcliffe's story is the exact opposite; he's not here to honor gaming, but to bury it. As he says right in the front of his book "this is how young men become wankers." He tells the story of how he became a total jerkwad falling in with a jerkwad crowd, and puts gaming as being either the reason for that or a major symptom of it.
The reason for the either/or given above is that Barrowcliffe vacillates with trying to figure out why he and his peers acted the way they did. In some places, he says that it's simply written into the male DNA to create or seek out hierarchies, and then ruthlessly climb them. In other instances, he says that gaming itself either fostered or abetted this urge, lionizing ideas of intra-group competition, acquisition being a goal unto itself, and that violence solves problems (he also touches on ideas of fantasy being very white and misogynistic). In turn, he also cites a third reason for why everyone acted the way that they did (and I personally find this one to be the most likely), which is that he and his friends were all massively bored. That is, they were raised by a generation that lived through both the war and the subsequent rationing, and now found themselves disaffected from their parents' dour realism and conservative approach to life, desperate to escape from what seemed like being pushed to embrace drudgery.
Whatever the reason, Barrowcliffe never comes around to forgiving gaming, instead treating his childhood as both a confessional episode and a cautionary tale. By the end of the book, after having made a break from the hobby, he ends with an anecdote about a school gaming club and feeling the urge to play coming back, only for him to turn and quite literally run away from it, or as he says, running "back to reality, the place I now call home."
