Growing Up Strange

I'm reliving some old memories with the help of the book I'm currently reading, The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing Up Strange, by Mark Barrowcliffe. I'm sure more quotes will be coming, but we'll start with this.

Yes, I spent my youth playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Even though the game was at its height played by millions of boys and two girls around the world, most people today have a hazy idea of what it is. They might know it involves shaking a lot of funny-shaped dice, they might know that players act out the roles of warriors, wizards and priests seeking treasure and adventure in a fantasy kingdom, they may have some recollection of scares involving Satanism and the occult. One fact, however, will be clear in their minds--that everyone who ever played the game more than once was a nerd. . . .

For five years of my life between eleven and sixteen, I never stopped playing D&D, not even to eat. To this day, I eat one-handed. The other was always for a rule book, a fanzine or a fantasy novel. After that I played less frequently--maybe twice a week--until I was twenty. Today, other than for research for this book, I don't play at all. The legacy of the game, however, is still etched on my personality. . . .

Though the forces that acted on me while I was a boy were particular to me, they were products of a wider male culture which helps, if that's the right word, men form their identities. D&D was more than a craze; it was a phenomenon, spawning films, cartoon series, toys, novels and, finally--its own undoing--computer games. An estimated 20 million boys worldwide have played the game and spent over £1 billion on its products. Anything that popular with young males clearly speaks to them on a deep level and says something about them. What it says is the subject of this book.

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I knew you were meant to kiss girls, but there was something else that you were meant to do first, and I didn't know what that was.

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I thought it very likely I might have this sort of untestable power myself. It was kind of logical--no good at sport, alrightish at my studies, there must have been some field in which I excelled. Magic had to be it.

It's difficult for adults to picture just what a grip these fantasies can take on a child. There's occasionally a reminder as a kid throws himself off a roof pretending to be Batman, but mostly the interior life of children goes unnoticed.

When I say I thought I could be a wizard, that's exactly true. I really did believe I had latent magical powers, and, with enough concentration and fiddling my fingers into strange patterns, I might suddenly find how to unlock the magic inside me.

I wouldn't call this a delusion, more a very strong suspicion. I'd weighed all the evidence, and that was the likely conclusion--so much so that I had to stop myself trying to turn Matt Bradon into a fly when he was jumping up and down on the desk in French saying, "Miss, what are mammary glands?" to the big-breasted Miss Mundsley. I feared that, if I succeeded, I might not be able to turn him back. It was important, I knew, to use my powers wisely.

There's nothing that you'd have to call a psychoanalyst in for here. At the bottom line my growing interest in fantasy was just an expression of a very common feeling--"there's got to be something better than this," an easy one to have in the drab Midlands of the 1970s. I couldn't see it, though. My world was very small, and I couldn't imagine making things better incrementally, only a total escape.