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The
Elfish Gene is
the story of a sad, pathetic, socially maladjusted boy who suffered
from borderline delusions in an effort to escape his sad, pathetic
existence. He fell in with a group of assholes and chose to continue
hanging out with that group of assholes even when it meant becoming an
asshole
himself and pissing over
the people who were actually his friends. In the process, he grew up to
be a sad, pathetic, socially
maladjusted adult.
Between those two points on his lifeline, he
played Dungeons & Dragons. Ergo, it is only natural for him to
conclude that D&D retroactively caused him to be a sad,
pathetic,
and socially maladjusted person.
He'd also like you to believe
that he got over being an asshole. But even in the controlled narrative
of his own book he can't hide the fact that he spends a great deal of
time considering himself "superior" to wide swaths of people. For
example, consider his thesis that "fatties are failures". Or the fact
that he considers the moment that he became a responsible adult to be
the moment in which he left an injured child in the middle of a park so
that he could try to hook up with a cute girl.
And not just any injured child: A child he had
actually injured himself.
(I wish I was making that up.)
To
the book's credit, most of Barrowcliffe's anecdotes regarding a
childhood spent playing D&D and other roleplaying games are
charming, resonant, and well-written. His struggle to differentiate
between delusion and reality is actually quit harrowing (and great
material for a memoir). I can even sympathize that, for a man like
Barrowcliffe who has difficulty differentiating fantasy from reality on
an everyday basis, D&D might be a dangerous addiction that
would
feed into his inherent predilection for delusion.
The problem I
have with Barrowcliffe, however, is that he claims his personal bad
experiences to be universal and then uses that claim as a bludgeon to
derogate gamers in general. (Which is, of course, nothing more than
Barrowcliffe's continued proclivity to be an asshole rearing its ugly
head.) His entire book is written around the thesis that "D&D
makes
you a bad person and you should run away from it as fast as you can".
(Which he literally does at the book's conclusion: "I could hear a
noise I couldn't place. Then I looked down and realized it was coming
from my feet; I was running. Something in my subconscious was rushing
me back to my wife, the dog, the TV, away from the lands of fantasy and
towards reality, the place I can now call home.")
It is perhaps
unsurprising to discover that I would consider this thesis to be
grotesquely repulsive and offensive. In no small part because there's
another story of D&D to be told: In my life, D&D was
the social
venue in which I learned how to interact with fellow human beings in a
mature fashion. D&D encouraged my development in both verbal
and
mathematical skills. D&D is the foundation of the passions
which
now shape my professional careers. And there are a lot of people like
me. People who didn't suffer from delusional mental
instability when they came to the game.
Barrowcliffe
writes, "Gary Gygax once pointed out that to talk about a 'winner' in
D&D is like talking about a winner in real life. If I had to
sum
D&D up that would be how I'd do it -- a game with no winners
but
lots of losers." It is perhaps notable that Barrowcliffe feels that
real life is populated by losers (there's his asshole tendency again),
but I find it more notable that his summary is the exact inverse of
mine. In my world, there are no losers in a roleplaying game. Only
winners.
Mark Barrowcliffe is
an alcoholic who wrote a book concluding that everyone who drinks is an
alcoholic. He is no doubt baffled that wine connouisseurs aren't amused
with the broad brush he's painted them with.
GRADE:
F
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