Geek poetry contest winners!
The results are in!
We sponsored a geek poetry contest with GeekMom.com and here are the winning poems.
Readers of Geek Mom were asked to submit a poem in any form of their choosing (haiku, rap, free verse, Klingon sonnet) on any geeky topic: Tolkien, Star Wars, Star Trek, gelatinous cubes, World of Warcraft war chants, hobbit drinking songs, odes to Harry Potter, ballads to honor Gary Gygax.
Sample winning haiku:
Samwise and Frodo:
You think they’re about to kiss,
But they never do.
--Natalie Jones
Poems that somehow managed to work in the name "Ethan Gilsdorf" (which, according to legend, is either Elvish or Elvis) were hard to resist. Winners got autographed copies of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
Hope you enjoy! The rest of the bards' fabulous winning works can be read here.
You can also read the other non-winning but nonetheless worthy entries here
You must see Marwencol
[For more information on Marwencol, seehttp://www.marwencol.com/ ]
Like all accomplished war photographers, Mark Hogancamp puts himself at risk.
He shoots fugitive moments of violence, anguish, and bravery. But Hogancamp’s work differs from others’ in one key respect: The combat zones he enters don’t entirely exist in the real world. It’s the battlefield of his emotions that he’s trying to capture on film.
Marwencol is a remarkable documentary about this peculiar man and the fictitious, painstakingly-detailed, 1/6-scale town he built in his yard. Set in Belgium during World War II and populated with dozens of buildings, military vehicles, and more than 100 foot-high, poseable action figures, Hogancamp’s simulacrum is called Marwencol.
“Everything’s real,’’ Hogancamp gushes at one point in the film, demonstrating how a tiny pistol in one soldier’s hands has a working hammer and replaceable clip. “That all adds to my ferocity of getting into the story. I know what’s inside every satchel,’’ he says.
Those contents include a stamp-size deed proving that Captain “Hogie’’ Hogancamp, the real man’s 12-inch alter ego, owns the doll-house-size, make-believe bar in this make-believe realm.
The fine line separating real from imagined is the focus of this poignant and provocative documentary, winner of the Jury Award for best documentary at the SXSW Film Festival. [Marwencol opens at selected theaters in more than 40 cities nationwide, starting in November and continuing into December and January. More info on theater dates here:http://www.marwencol.com/theaters/]
Geek pride comes to Providence
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WRNI) - For role players, gamers and sci-fi fans alike, the term geek doesn't have the same sting it used to. In fact, many are now embracing that very term. You can include authors Ethan Gilsdorf and Tony Pacitti on that list. They'll both be panelists tonight in Providence for R2-D20, and Evening of Sci-Fi Fandom and Fantasy Gaming Geekery. WRNI's Elisabeth Harrison spoke to the two authors about the event.
Violent Video Games Are Good for You
[upcoming events with Ethan Gilsdorf: NYC/Brooklyn 11/22 (panel "Of Wizards and Wookiees" with Tony Pacitti, author of My Best Friend is a Wookiee); Providence, RI: 12/2 (also with Pacitti); and Boston (Newtonville 11/21 and Burlington 12/11) More info ...]
Violent Video Games Are Good for You
Rock and roll music? Bad for you. Comic books? They promote deviant behavior. Rap music? Dangerous.
Ditto for the Internet, heavy metal and role-playing games. All were feared when they first arrived. Each in its own way was supposed to corrupt the youth of America.
It’s hard to believe today, but way back in the late 19th century, even the widespread use of the telephone was deemed a social threat. The telephone would encourage unhealthy gossip, critics said. It would disrupt and distract us. In one of the more inventive fears, the telephone would burst our private bubbles of happiness by bringing bad news.
Suffice it to say, a cloud of mistrust tends to hang over any new and misunderstood cultural phenomena. We often demonize that which the younger generation embraces, especially if it’s gory or sexual, or seems to glorify violence.
The cycle has repeated again with video games. A five-year legal battle over whether violent video games are protected as “free speech” reached the Supreme Court earlier this month, when the justices heard arguments in Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants.
Back in 2005, the state of California passed a law that forbade the sale of violent video games to those younger than 18. In particular, the law objected to games “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a “patently offensive way” — as opposed to games that depict death or violence more abstractly.
But that law was deemed unconstitutional, and now arguments pro and con have made their way to the biggest, baddest court in the land.
In addition to the First Amendment free speech question, the justices are considering whether the state must prove “a direct causal link between violent video games and physical and psychological harm to minors” before it prohibits their sale to those under 18.
So now we get the amusing scene of Justice Samuel Alito wondering “what James Madison [would have] thought about video games,” and Chief Justice John Roberts describing the nitty-gritty of Postal 2, one of the more extreme first-person shooter games. Among other depravities, Postal 2 allows the player to “go postal” and kill and humiliate in-game characters in a variety of creative ways: by setting them on fire, by urinating on them once they’ve been immobilized by a stun gun, or by using their heads to play “fetch” with dogs. You get the idea.
This is undoubtedly a gross-out experience. The game is offensive to many. I’m not particularly inclined to play it. But it is, after all, only a game.
Like with comic books, like with rap music, 99.9 percent of kids — and adults, for that matter — understand what is real violence and what is a representation of violence. According to a report issued by the Minister of Public Works and Government Services in Canada, by the time kids reach elementary school they can recognize motivations and consequences of characters’ actions. Kids aren’t going around chucking pitchforks at babies just because we see this in a realistic game.
And a strong argument can be made that watching, playing and participating in activities that depict cruelty or bloodshed are therapeutic. We see the violence on the page or screen and this helps us understand death. We can face what it might mean to do evil deeds. But we don’t become evil ourselves. As Gerard Jones, author of “Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence,” writes, “Through immersion in imaginary combat and identification with a violent protagonist, children engage the rage they’ve stifled . . . and become more capable of utilizing it against life’s challenges.”
Sadly, this doesn’t prevent lazy journalists from often including in their news reports the detail that suspected killers played a game like Grand Theft Auto. Because the graphic violence of some games is objectionable to many, it’s easy to imagine a cause and effect. As it turns out, a U.S. Secret Service study found that only one in eight of Columbine/Virginia Tech-type school shooters showed any interest in violent video games. And a U.S. surgeon general’s report found that mental stability and the quality of home life — not media exposure — were the relevant factors in violent acts committed by kids.
Besides, so-called dangerous influences have always been with us. As Justice Antonin Scalia rightly noted during the debate, Grimm’s Fairy Tales are extremely graphic in their depiction of brutality. How many huntsmen cut out the hearts of boars or princes, which were then eaten by wicked queens? How many children were nearly burned alive? Disney whitewashed Grimm, but take a read of the original, nastier stories. They pulled no punches.
Because gamers take an active role in the carnage — they hold the gun, so to speak —some might argue that video games might be more affecting or disturbing than literature (or music or television). Yet, told around the fire, gruesome folk tales probably had the same imaginative impact on the minds of innocent 18th century German kiddies as today’s youth playing gore-fests like “Left 4 Dead.” Which is to say, stories were exciting, scary and got the adrenaline flowing.
Another reason to doubt the gaming industry’s power to corrupt: More than one generation, mine included, has now been raised on violent video games. But there’s no credible proof that a higher proportion of sociopaths or snipers roams the streets than at any previous time in modern history. In fact, according to Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson, founders of the Center for Mental Health and Media (a division of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry), and members of the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School, as video game usage has skyrocketed in the past two decades, the rate of juvenile crime has actually fallen.
Children have always been drawn to the disgusting. Even if the ban on violent games is eventually deemed lawful and enforced in California, the games will still find their way into the hot little hands of minors. So do online porn, and cigarettes and beer. But these vices haven’t toppled Western civilization.
Not yet, anyway — although a zombie invasion or hurtling meteor might. Luckily, if you’re a good enough gamer, you’ll probably save the day.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, now in paperback.
win free copies of FF&GG!
Two cool ways to win a copy of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
Write a poem for wired.com/GeekDad/GeekMom
How do you win this coveted book, you ask? Give us a verse or two. Be it a free verse, a limerick, a sonnet, ahaiku, or a villanelle, on the geeky subject of your choosing (think “An Ode to Harry Potter” or the “Ballad of Gary Gygax”). Just put your entries in the comments webform here and we’ll choose the best five entries by Friday 11/19/10!Good luck, and geek on!
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Picking up steam: Why is Boston the hub of steampunk?
Picking up steam
Mashing modern days with the Victorian age excites role players, artists, and other fans of steampunk
When Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum bought a 1901 home in Sharon, they wanted to restore it top to bottom. And rather than force a modern interior design, they remodeled it with a Victorian twist.
In the kitchen, an antique cash register holds dog treats. A cast iron stove is retrofitted with a Miele cooktop and electric ovens. In the family room, a wooden mantle frames a sleek flat-screen TV, and hidden behind an enameled fireplace insert, salvaged from a Kansas City train station, glow LED lights from the home-entertainment system.
Unknowingly, the Rosenbaums had “steampunked’’ their home, that is, added anachronistic (and sometimes nonfunctioning) machinery like old gears, gauges, and other accoutrements that evoke the design principles of Victorian England and the Industrial Revolution.
“When we started this three years ago, we didn’t even know what steampunk was,’’ said Bruce, 48. “An acquaintance came through the house and said ‘You guys are steampunkers.’ I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a whole group out there that enjoys blending the old and new.’’
It’s not just the Rosenbaums cobbling together computer workstations from vintage cameras and manual typewriters. Local enthusiasts are mounting steampunk exhibits, writing books, creating objets d’art, and dressing up in steampunk garb for live-action role playing games.
To be sure, steampunk has been part of the cultural conversation for the past several years, as DIY-ers embraced the hand-wrought, Steam Age aesthetic over high-tech gloss. But recently, it seems to be gaining a wider appeal, especially here.
“Boston lends itself to steampunk,’’ said Kimberly Burk, who researched steampunk as a graduate student at Brandeis. “You have the MIT tinkerers, the co-ops in JP, the eco-minded folks.’’
Both a pop culture genre and an artistic movement, steampunk has its roots in 19th- and early-20th-century science fiction like Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’’ and H.G. Wells’s “The Time Machine.’’ Its fans reimagine the Industrial Revolution mashed-up with modern technologies, such as the computer, as Victorians might have made them. Dressing the part calls for corsets and lace-up boots for women, top hats and frock coats for men. Accessories include goggles, leather aviator caps, and the occasional ray gun. And there’s a hint of Sid Vicious and Mad Max in there, too.
Still, steampunk defies easy categorization. It can be something to watch, listen to, wear, build, or read, but it’s also a set of loose principles. Steampunk attracts not only those who dream of alternative history, but those who would revive the craft and manners of a material culture that was built to last.
“The acceleration of the present leaves many of us uncertain about the future and curious [about] a past that has informed our lives, but is little taught,’’ said Martha Swetzoff, an independent filmmaker on the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design who is directing a documentary on the subject. “Steampunk converses between past and present.’’
It also represents a “push back’’ against throw-away technologies, Swetzoff said, and a “culture hijacked by corporate interests.’’
For Burk, steampunk is more akin to the open source software movement than a retro-futuristic world to escape into. “Steampunk isn’t about how shiny your goggles are,’’ she said. “It’s about how cleverly you create something.’’
The urge to rescue and repurpose forgotten things led the Rosenbaums to spread the steampunk gospel. They’ve founded two companies: Steampuffin and ModVic, which infuse and rework 19th-century objects and homes with modern technology. They’re working on a book about the history of steampunk design. And, hoping some steampunker might want to live in a pimped-out Victorian crib, they purchased a second home in North Attleboro, restored it using their “back home to the future’’ philosophy, and put it on the market.
Bruce is also curating two steampunk exhibits. One will be displayed at Patriot Place’s new “20,000 Leagues’’ attraction, an “hourlong, walk-though steampunk adventure,’’ scheduled to open in December, according to creator Matt DuPlessie.
Meanwhile, “Steampunk: Form and Function, an Exhibition of Innovation, Invention and Gadgetry’’ recently opened at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham, a former textile mill already filled with steam engines and belt-driven machines.
“Form and Function’’ includes a juried show of steampunked objects (many by local artists) like a steam-electric hybrid motorcycle called “the Whirlygig,’’ an electric mixer powered by a miniature steam engine, and a flash drive made with brass, copper, and glass. Perhaps the most impressive piece is a rehabbed pinball machine whose guts look like Frankenstein’s lab — down to the colored fluids bubbling through vintage glass tubes.
“I like giving things a new life,’’ said Charlotte McFarland of Allston, exhibiting her first-ever steampunk creation, “Spinning Wheel Generator.’’
Such functional art objects tap into a nostalgia for a mechanical, not electronic, age. Unlike the wireless signals, microwaves, and motherboards of today, the 19th century’s gears, pistons, and tubes were visible and visceral. While the workings of a laptop can seem impenetrable, we can fathom the reality of moving parts.
“As the world becomes more digital, the world less and less appreciates machines, which will be lost,’’ said Elln Hagney, the museum’s acting director. “We are trying to train a new generation to appreciate this and keep these machines running.’’
Some of the most committed local steampunkers dress up in period garb and take part in live-action role playing games. Most “LARPs’’ (think Dungeons & Dragons but in costume) are swords and sorcery-based, but Boston’s Steam & Cinders is one of only a couple of steampunk-themed LARPs anywhere.
Once a month, some 100 players gather for a weekend at a 4-H camp in Ashby. The game’s premise? A crashed dirigible has stranded folks at a frontier town called Iron City, next to a mysterious mine. Engineers, grenadiers, and aristocrats vie for supremacy. There are plenty of robots to fight (players dressed in cardboard costumes sprayed with metallic paint), and potions to mix (appealing to the mad scientist in us all). Players stay in character for 36 hours straight.
“Yes, it’s a fantasy world and it’s not England,’’ said Steam & Cinders founder Andrea DiPaolo of Saugus. “But getting to dress in British garb and speak in a British accent is something I enjoy.’’
Meanwhile, publishers are striking while the steampunk iron is hot.
“We can tap into the enthusiasm of a reader who can imagine an alternative version of the 19th century,’’ said Cambridge resident Ben H. Winters, author of this summer’s mash-up book “Android Karenina.’’
Winters steampunked Tolstoy’s novel by re-envisioning Anna Karenina in a 19th-century Russia with robotic butlers, mechanical wolves, and moon-bound rocket ships. Sample line: “When Anna emerged, her stylish feathered hat bent to fit inside the dome of the helmet, her pale and lovely hand holding the handle of her dainty ladies’-size oxygen tank . . .’’
“Hopefully,’’ explained Winters, who also wrote 2009’s “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters,’’ “we’ll be adding to the fandom of the mash-up novel by introducing a new fan base: the sci-fi crowd.’’
Climb to Bruce Rosenbaum’s third-floor study and you feel as if you’ve entered one of those mash-ups. The attic space feels like a submersible, packed with portholes, nautical compasses, and a bank vault door. His desk is ornate and phantasmagorical, ringed with pipes from a pipe organ. It’s a place where you can imagine Captain Nemo banging out an ominous dirge.
“There’s freedom with steampunk,’’ Melanie added. “Almost anything goes.’’
+++++++
A Steampunk Primer
Not sure who or what put the punk into steam? Here’s a quick-and-dirty intro to some of the culture’s roots and most influential works, plus ways to connect to the steampunk community.
Books
Jules Verne: “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865), “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (1869)
H.G. Wells: “The Time Machine” (1895), “The War of the Worlds” (1898), “The First Men in the Moon” (1901)
K.W. Jeter : “Morlock Night” (1979)
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling: “The Difference Engine” (1990)
Paul Di Filippo: “Steampunk Trilogy” (1995)
Philip Pullman: “His Dark Materials” trilogy (1995-2000)
Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill: “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (comic book series, 1999)
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, editors: “Steampunk” (2008)
Dexter Palmer : The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010)
Movies and TV
“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (1954)
“The Wild Wild West” (TV series: 1965–1969); “Wild Wild West” (movie: 1999)
“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (2003)
“Steamboy” (anime film: 2004)
“Sherlock Holmes” (2009)
“Warehouse 13” (TV series: 2009-)
Steampunk info/community on the web:
The Steampunk Empire: The Crossroads of the Aether, thesteampunkempire.com
Steampunk magazine, steampunkmagazine.com
“Steampunk fortnight” blog, tor.com/blogs/2010/10/steampunk-fortnight-on-torcom
The Steampunk Workshop, steampunkworkshop.com
Other resources:
computer/console games: Myst (1993); BioShock (2007)
Templecon convention (Feb 4-6, 2011; Warwick, RI), templecon.org
Steam & Cinders live-action role-playing game (Boston), be-epic.com
Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation (Waltham, MA), crmi.org (“Steampunk: Form and Function” exhibit through May 10; Steampunkers “meet up” Dec. 19; steampunk course March, 2011; New England Steampunk Festival April 30-May 1, 2011)
Steampuffin appliances and inventions and ModVic Victorian and steampunk home design (Sharon, MA), steampuffin.com, modvic.com
--- Ethan Gilsdorf
We all role-play now
[Note: Ethan Gilsdorf speaks at the Boston Public Library Wed, Oct 20. Other upcoming speaking engagements: Attleboro, MA: Oct. 29th (part of a Creature Double Feature tribute!); Brattleboro, VT: Nov 11th; Somerville, MA: Nov 13th; Cambridge, MA: Nov 15th; Providence, RI: Nov 18th; Burlington, MA: Nov 20th; Brooklyn, NY: Nov 22nd. More book tour info here]
We all role-play now
Those Dungeons & Dragons skills can come in handy in the world of Facebook
"The Social Network,'' Hollywood's latest box office king, charts Facebook's meteoric rise to near ubiquity. Few have not heard of the world-girdling website or been ensnared by its tendrils. In six years, Facebook has woven its way into the daily lives of some 500 million users.
Whether to check up on friends' exploits or play games like "Mafia Wars,'' we've grown accustomed to its promise of instant intimacy and, some might argue, its voyeuristic pleasures. Many cheer the way Facebook has democratized the flow of information; no longer top-down, news is now horizontally and virally dispersed. Others gripe that it's warped our idea of significance, making what I had for breakfast as important as the latest developments in the Mideast peace process. Facebook's vast and sticky web of connection has caused us all to re-evaluate what we mean by "friend.'' And, I suppose, "enemy'' as well.
Unforeseen social aftershocks such as these have rippled in Facebook's wake. Others have yet to be detected. But there's something else at work with Facebook. It's actually making role-players of us all.
Role-playing? Like that conflict-resolution exercise your sales team endured last year? Or role-playing, as in Dungeons & Dragons - that strange and wondrous game I (and perhaps you) played back in the Reagan administration, rolling dice in a basement and slaying goblins and dragons and snarfing bowls of Doritos?
I'd argue all these experiences - including posting a witty Facebook update - are cut from the same role-playing cloth. We all share that desire to be someone else. To be better, stronger, faster; to appear more handsome, more clever, more attractive than our fleshy selves might ever be. "My, aren't we having fun?'' say our photos, snapped while we're half drunk and posted in a day-after haze. On my Match.com profile, I offer clues that might seduce. I suggest, in a whisper of pixels, "I am your ideal man.''
Not that role-playing is devious. It's a necessary counter to the way we've been civilized. While hidden behind the screen, we give ourselves permission to behave more dauntless or brazen than we'd allow in real life. We get to practice being the best version of the person we can be, or want to be.
That said, some role-playing experiences, especially offline ones, are deemed more acceptable than others. Dressing up as Tom Brady and painting your body blue and red for the big game? That's OK. Dressing as Gandalf and wearing a purple wizard hat for the big game? Not so much. Even as World of Warcraft and D&D and Harry Potter fandom have become passable in many circles, adults raiding Mom's closet for goofy clothes for "make-believe'' still remains verboten.
Except, of course, at Halloween. This odd holdover from pagan times is a socially acceptable way to bust loose. Here, costumes are fine. And playing "bad'' is encouraged. Being Dracula or Nurse Hottie for an evening can be instructive, even liberating.
The irony here is that even in our pre-Facebook existences, we've always engaged in day-to-day role-playing. At a wedding or cocktail party, on a first date or during a job interview, or when home for the holidays, we all dress the part and adopt another character: Brilliant or Well Adjusted, Stockbroker or Salesman, Happy Son or Perfect Mom. If you're not willing to play along and put on a mask, friends (and potential employers) will think, "What's wrong? Come on, get into character.'' Life is a dungeon crawl, full of monsters and opportunities to be on your mettle. Be prepared. Chin up.
So here's the rub. Eventually, we have to live up to these personas we've created. Many a first date has witnessed the crumbling of expectation's towers and spires. And despite my hundreds of Facebook friends, I wonder who I can really count on in times of trouble. When I really do need to be brave and slay that dragon.
Ethan Gilsdorf is author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, now in paperback. More info on Gilsdorf and the book here.
On the appeal of fantasy role-playing games
One of the author's D&D dungeon maps
We craved adventure and escape.
When people ask if I played sports in high school back, I tell them I was on the varsity Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) team, starting quarterback, four years in a row. (I was also president of the A/V club. And I memorized Monty Python sketches. And learned BASIC computer programming.) For me, RPGs (role-playing games) like D&D were empowering and exciting, and a clever antidote to the anonymity, monotony, and clique warfare of high school. In lieu of keg parties or soccer practice to vent our angst, we had D&D night. Who needs sports stardom when you can shoot fireballs from your fingertips?
I played every week, sometimes twice a week, from eighth grade to senior year, Friday night from 5:00 p.m. until midnight. JP, my other neighborhood friend Mike, and I first played by ourselves, then found a peer group of other gamers: Bill K., Bill S., Bill C., Dean, Eric M., Eric H. and John. Some of us had endured plenty: my Mom had suffered a brainaneurysm and came home damaged goods; Eric H.’s mom had died, John’s dad had suffered a brain injury similar to my mom’s, and JP was born with a disease that caused brittle bones, cataracts, and stunted growth.
I think on some level we knew we didn’t fit in. Perhaps we were weird. Girls were scarce commodities for us, and our group may have proved that tired cliché that outcasts, dweebs, and computer nerds couldn’t handle reality, let alone get a date for the prom. But nothing stopped us from playing, and the popular kids didn’t really care one way or the other. We were left alone to our own devices: maps, dice, rule books, and soda. It didn’t take long before words like halberd and basilisk became part of my daily vocabulary. Like actors in a play, we role-played characters—human, Elvish, dwarven, halfling—who quickly became extensions of our better or more daring selves. We craved adventure and escape.
One of us would be the Dungeon Master (DM) for a few weeks or months. Games lasted that long. The DM was the theater director, the ref, the world-builder, the God. His preprepared maps and dungeons, stocked with monsters, riddles, and rewards, determined our path through dank tunnels and forbidding forests. Our real selves sat around a living room or basement table, scarfing down provisions like bowls of cheese doodles and generic-brand pizza. We outfitted our characters with broad- swords, battle-axes, grappling hooks, and gold pieces. “In game,” these characters memorized spells and collected treasure and magic items such as +2 long swords and Cloaks of Invisibility and Rods of Resurrection. Then, the adventure would begin. The DM would set the scene: often, we’d be a ragtag band of adventurers who’d met at the tavern and heard rumors of dungeons to explore and treasure to be had. Or some beast or sorcerer terrorizing the land needed to be slayed. Before too long, we’d enter some underground world to solve riddles, search for secret doors, and find hidden passages.
We parleyed with foes—goblins, trolls, harlots—and attacked only when necessary. Or, wantonly, just to taste the imagined pleasure of a rough blade running through evilflesh. We racked up experience points. We test-drove a fiery life of pseudo-heroism, physical combat, and meaningful death. Whatever place the DM described, as far as we were concerned, it existed. Suspended jointly in our minds, it was all real. We were bards, jesters, and storytellers. We told each other riddles in the dark.
And each dungeon level would lead to the next one even deeper beneath the surface, full of more dangerous monsters, and even harder to leave.
At Least There Was a Rulebook
The joy in the game was not simply the anything-can-happen fantasy setting and the killing and heroic deeds, but also the rules. Hundreds of rules existed for every situation. Geeks and nerds love rules. D&D (and its sequel, AD&D, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) let us traffic in specialized knowledge found only in hardbound books with names like Monster Manual and Dungeon Masters Guide. As we played, we consulted charts, indices, tables, descriptions of attributes, lists of spells, causes and effects—like a school unto itself, filled with answers to questions about the rarity of magic items, crossing terrain, and how to survive poison.
And we loved to fight over the minutiae. (Sample argument: Player: “What do you mean a gelatinous cube gets a plus on surprise?” DM: “It’s invisible.” Player: “But it’s a ten foot cube of Jello! Let me see that . . . .” Player grabs Monster Manual from DM. Twenty minute argument ensues.)
We could tell a mace from a morning star, a cudgel from a club, and we knew how to draw them. We knew a creature called a “wight” inflicted one to four hit points of damage when it attacked. Could we recharge wands? No. If I died, I could be resurrected, because, according to page 50 of the Players Hand- book, a ninth-level cleric could raise a person who had been dead for no longer than nine days. “Note that the body of the person must be whole, or otherwise missing parts will still be missing when the person is brought back to life.” All good stuff to know. The trolls and fireballs may be fanciful, but they have to behave according to a logical system.
Like in life, fantasy rules were affected by chance—the roll of the dice. And, as if they were jewels, we collected bags of them: plastic, polyhedral game dice, four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, and twenty-sided baubles that, like I Ching sticks or coins, foretold our fortunes when cast. A spinning die, such as the icosahedral “d20,” could land on “20” (“A hit! You slice the lizard man’s head off and green blood spurts everywhere!”) as often as “1” (“Miss! Your sword swings wide and you stab yourself. Loser!”).
The lesson? Real life thus far had taught me that in the adult world, fate was chaotic and uncertain. Guidelines for success were arbitrary. But in the world of D&D, at least there was a rule book. We knew what we needed to roll to succeed or survive. The finer points of its rules and the possibility of predicting outcomes offered comfort. Make-believe as they were, the skirmishes and puzzle-solving endemic to D&D had immediate and palpable consequences. By role-playing, we were in control, and our characters—be they thieves, magic-users, paladins, or druids—wandered through places of danger, their destinies, ostensibly, within our grasp.
At the same time, we understood that our characters’ failures and triumphs were decided by unknown forces, malevolent or kindly. Such was the double-edged quality of our fantasy life, where random cruelty or unexpected fortune ruled the day. The game was a risk-free milieu for doing adult things.
It was also a relief to live life in another skin, and act out behind the safety of pumped-up attributes. D&D characters had statistics in six key areas: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma. These ranged from three to eighteen. Ethan the real boy’s stats would have been all under 10; his fighter character Elloron’s were all sixteens, seventeens, and eighteens.
And who wouldn't want to be that?
[adpated from Ethan Gilsdorf's award-winning travel memoir and pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, now available in paperback. For more info, see: http://www.ethangilsdorf.com/]
The author's old, worn-out D&D diceDungeons & Dragons Saved My Life
The author, circa 1982
The summer before my eighth-grade year, when I was 12, I learned to escape.
This was 1979. My mother had been home from the hospital for a few months, and my sister, brother and I were still coming to understand the “new Mom.”
This new mother had survived a brain aneurysm. Her left side was mostly paralyzed, and she behaved strangely. Sometimes she scared me. We called her the Momster.
I couldn’t tame her, not this beast, and I knew I couldn’t save her, either. I was stuck with a mother I didn’t know how to love
But later that summer, something wondrous happened—I learned how to face my demons in another way. I learned that sometimes, checking out from reality was not just a fun diversion, but necessary for survival.
An article about that mysterious, possibly dangerous, new game fad D&D
A new kid named JP had moved across the street from me. One hot August day, JP showed me a clever trick—how to step away from my own body and mind, my family, and travel to places I’d never even seen. A way out.
“Ever play D&D?” JP asked, standing in my kitchen, eyes bright and magnified behind his extra-thick glasses. He was quite short, frail-looking, but feisty and fast-talking.
“D&D?” I said. “What’s that—a board game?”
“Dungeons & Dragons? It’s not a normal board game. . . . See, you play a character. . . . There’s all these rules.” He rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a pile of books, then poured a sack of colorful objects onto the table. They looked like gemstones. “Check out these cool dice! See, I’m the Dungeon Master. I create a scenario, man adventure, a world. You tell me what your character wants to do.”
“Character? What do you mean?” I asked. This kid was weird.
Invented by two geeks in the Midwest, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the was only five years old back in 1979. Few had ever played anything like this before. Born of a similar swords-and-scorcery, myth-laden backdrop as J.R.R. Tolkien's world of Middle-earth, D&D was a game where you got to take action, be the hero, go on a quest. The game taught social skills, leadership, and strategy; it inspired creativity and storytelling, and provided rites of passage, accomplishment and belonging, even belief systems. I didn't get it at the time, but D&D and its ilk let people safely try out aspects of their personalities --- often dark, evil sides, or extroverted or flirtatious --- they could not or would not flex in "real life." The games connected folks tomagical thinking, to nature, to a primal, pick-up-your-battle-ax and kill mentalities long suppressed by so-called society. All of which would later serve me well in life.
D&D would open up a universe of creative expression to shy, introverted, non-athletic kids like me who felt about as powerful as a three-foot hobbit on the basketball team.
But at the moment, I was confused. I had no idea how play.
JP sighed. “OK, it goes like this. Pretend you’re in a dark woods. Up ahead on the path, you see a nasty-looking creature: seven feet tall, pointy ears, mouth full of black rotten teeth. ‘Friend or foe?’ it grumbles. Its fist tightens on the morning star in his hand, and it begins to heft it. Like this.” JP grabbed a frying pan off the stove. He swung it in the air. “What do you do?”
“What do I do?”
“It’s an orc. What do you want to do?”
“Uh . . . ” I stalled. What is going on? I thought. I didn’t even know what a morning star was. Or an orc.
"What are you going to do?" JP asked again, a little more impatiently.
“Uh, I’ll attack? With my sword. Do I have a sword?”
JP rolled the dice and squinted at a rulebook. “OK, your short sword strikes its shoulder. Black blood spurts out. It screams, ‘Arrghhh!’ You whack it for four hit points.”
“Cool.” I wanted to ask what a “hit point” was, but it didn’t matter. My anxiety, my weird home life, my mother’s limp, all of it began to fade. I was hooked. I didn’t know it at the time, but Dungeons & Dragons was about to save my life.
“Now the orc comes charging at you. He’s really mad.” JP bared his teeth for effect. “Now what do you do?” he asked, a big grin spreading across his face.
What do I do? I was 12. It was 1979. I had just discovered the power of escape, and vicarious derring-do. Later, I would learn much more about orcs and morning stars and a universe of wondrous things. There was so much I wanted to do.
Who needs varsity sports when you can be a wizard and shoot fireballs from your fingertips?
Adapted from the Prologue to Ethan Gilsdorf's travel memoir and pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, now in paperback. More info:http://www.ethangilsdorf.com
A virtual world that breaks real barriers
Rose Springvale is the avatar of Georgiana Nelsen, who cofounded Al-Andalus, a virtual world patterned after medieval Andalus in Spain, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims coexisted harmoniously under Islamic rule. [Courtesy of Rita King and Joshua Fouts]In Second Life's Al-Andalus, a virtual world patterned after medieval Andalus in Spain, avatars of Muslims mix with avatars of Jews and Christians to strive for a more perfect union.[from Ethan Gilsdorf's article in the Christian Science Monitor]
Thus far in the relatively short existence of online worlds and virtual communities, less than flattering stories typically float to the surface. The Internet is rife with tales of bad behavior: antisocial "trolls" posting inflammatory messages; players addicted to fantasy role-playing games; and marriages ruined by spouses staying up half the night to flirt in virtual spaces, even proposing marriage to people they've never met in the flesh.
Given the power of negative thinking, it's worth repeating: Not all that happens within the digital realms of monsters, quests, and virtual dollars is evil. Much of the zombie-shooting amounts to people having fun or finding an escape. But some online communities embrace a more lofty mission. They're forging new relationships across the chasms of nationality, religion, and language – long the unrealized dream of some who hoped the Internet could bring us closer.
One such place is Al-Andalus, named after a real nation that once existed in the Iberian Peninsula. From the 8th to the 15th centuries, the spirit of la convivencia, "coexistence," ruled Spain. Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived together mostly harmoniously, and created a vibrant artistic, scientific, and intellectual community.
The volunteers who "built" Al-Andalus in Second Life, the virtual world created by company Linden Lab, wanted to re-create that utopian place, particularly in the wake of the intercultural ill will brewing since 9/11. Only their Al-Andalus is made of pixels, not bricks, and peopled not by humans but their digital doppelgängers, or avatars.
"I'm a pacifist. I'm a mother," says cofounder Georgiana Nelsen, a business lawyer practicing in Houston who in Second Life (SL) goes by "Rose Springvale" (and, informally, the "Sultana"). "I want to always teach 'Use your words, not your hands.' And so this appealed to my personal desire to do something positive in the world rather than continue to foster things that are divisive."
After nine months of construction, Al-Andalus opened its virtual doors in July 2007, and now has 350 contributing members and receives thousands of day-trippers. The democratically run community (and recognized nonprofit) is roughly one-quarter Jewish, one-quarter Muslim, and the remainder Christian and atheist. The massive virtual grounds include a re-creation of the Alhambra and Alcázar fortresses and palaces and the Great Mosque of Córdoba, plus a caravan market, library (run by a Smithsonian librarian), theater, and art center. People can attend a flamenco concert; a meeting; or a religious service in a synagogue, church, or mosque – or even ride a magic carpet for an aerial tour (almost 180,000 have done so).
Read the rest here at the Christian Science Monitor
Impulsive Traveler: Boston's Harbor Islands shelter a multitude of surprises
In the ominous opening of Martin Scorsese's movie "Shutter Island," Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, playing federal agents, take a boat out to a craggy-cliffed island off the coast of Boston.
"My friends were watching the DVD and said, 'Wow! You have an island like that?' " said Phil Rahaim, a park ranger on the Boston Harbor Islands. He had to tell them, "Not exactly."
"Shutter Island" was partly shot on an island called Peddocks, but none of the 34 real harbor islands actually look much like the movie's CG-enhanced slab of rock. Nor have any of them ever housed an insane asylum conducting experiments with psychotropic drugs.
Geek Out!
Like when the planets align, there are a few times each year when geeks can fly their freak flags high and proud, in vast numbers, and at the same time in different parts of the universe.
This coming Labor Day is one of those weekends.
On the west coast, we have Pax, in Seattle, a three-day game festival for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers and a general celebration of gamer-geek culture. (And in the other corner, Atlanta, we have Dragon*Con. But more on that another time.)
In fact, Pax calls itself a festival and not a convention because in addition to dedicated tournaments and freeplay areas (The east coast version in Boston this spring had a very cool classic arcade game room, which was amazing! All your fave games like Frogger, Galaga and my fave, Robotron 2084), they’ve got nerdcore concerts from awesome performers like MC Frontalot and Paul & Storm, panel discussions like “The Myth of the Gamer Girl,” the Omegathon event (A three-day elimination tournament in games from every category, from Pong toHalo to skeeball), and an exhibitor hall filled with booths displaying the latest from top game publishers and developers.
But I was thinking that probably the best part of PAX (and similar events like Dragon*Con, the other big fantasy/science fiction fandom event of the year) is this: You get to hang out with kindred folk who love their games and books and movies and costumes. They will argue and defend their fandom universes to the death. They will argue why Tom Bombadil should not have been cut from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. They will battle over Kirk vs. Picard. They will annoy and astound you with their detailed, persnickety knowledge.
In other words, a geek is less what someone loves as it is HOW they love that object of affection. Geeks are passionate about their thang before it became fashionable and long after it’s passed from the public eye. Perhaps that’s the best definition of a geek.
If you’re headed to Atlanta or Seattle this weekend, check here for how to win a free copy of my book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, now out in paperback.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir-pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, now out in paperback. You can reach him and get more information at his website www.ethangilsdorf.com.
When literary authors slum in genre
There’s a curious phenomenon happening out there in LiteraryLand: The territory of genre fiction is being invaded by the literary camp.
While it could be argued that literary writers have always borrowed from fantasy, science fiction and horror, even stolen genre's best ideas, I think there's a new and significant shift happening in the past few years.
Take Justin Cronin, writer of respectable stories, who recently leaped the chasm to the dystopian, undead-ridden realm of Twilight. With The Passage, his post-apocalyptic, doorstopper of a saga, the author enters a new universe, seemingly snubbing his former life writing “serious books” like Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest, which won prizes like Pen/Hemingway Award, the Whiting Writer’s Award and the Stephen Crane Prize. Both books of fiction situate themselves solidly in the camp of literary fiction. They’re set on the planet Earth we know and love. Not so with The Passage, in which mutant vampire-like creatures ravage a post-apocalyptic U.S. of A. Think Cormac McCarthy’s The Road crossed with the movie The Road Warrior, with the psychological tonnage of John Fowles’ The Magus and the “huh?” ofThe Matrix.
Now comes Ricky Moody, whose ironic novels like The Ice Storm andPurple America were solidly in the literary camp, telling us about life in a more-or-less recognizable world. His latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death, is a big departure, blending a B-movie classic with a dark future world. The plot: A doomed U.S. space mission to Mars and a subsequent accidental release of deadly bacteria picked up on the Red Planet results in that astronaut’s severed arm surviving re-entry to earth, and reanimating to embark on a wanton rampage of strangulation.
And there’s probably other examples I’m forgetting at the moment.
So what’s all this forsaking of one’s literary pedigree about?
It began with the flipside of this equation. It used to be that genre writers had to claw their way up the ivory tower in order to be recognized by the literary tastemakers. Clearly, that’s shifted, as more and more fantasy, science fiction, and horror writers have been accepted by the mainstream and given their overdue lit cred. It’s been a hard row to hoe. J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Philip Pullman and others helped blaze the trail to acceptance. Now these authors have been largely accepted into the canon. You can take university courses on fantasy literature and write dissertations on the homoerotic subtext simmering between Frodo and Sam. A whole generation, now of age and in college, grew up reading (or having read to them) the entire oeuvre of Harry Potter. That’s a sea change in the way fantasy will be seen in the future—not as some freaky subculture, but as widespread mass culture.
Yes, Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing have delved into genre, although their works (A Handmaid's Tale, for example) was always taken as highbrow. Perhaps a better example: Stephen King, considered a hack horror writer for years who began publishing in the New Yorker in 1990. One wonders why the New Yorker finally caved and let him in the doors --- is this an implicit acknowledgement of his popularity? Or had King's writing gotten better. In any case, it's was a shocker when he began racking up impressive literary kudos, like in 2003 when the National Book Awards handed over its annual medal for distinguished contribution to American letters to King. Recently in May, the Los Angeles Public Library gave its Literary Award for his monstrous contribution to literature.
Now, as muggles and Mordor have entered the popular lexicon, the glitterati of literary fiction find themselves “slumming” in the darker, fouler waters of genre. (One reason: It’s probably more fun to write.) But in the end, I think it’s all about call and response. Readers want richer, more complex and more imaginative and immersive stories. Writers want an audience, and that audience increasingly reads genre. Each side—literary and genre—leeches off the other. The two camps have more or less met in the middle.
One wonders who’s going to delve into the dark waters next—Philip Roth? Salman Rushdie? Toni Morrison? Actually, it turns they already (sort of) have --- Roth explores alternative history in The Plot Against America;
Rushdie's "Magical Realism," of Midnight's Children, in which children have superpowers. You might even argue that Morrison's Beloved is a ghost story.
[thanks to readers at Tor.com, where this post originally appeared, for catching some errors and helping me revise this into a better essay]
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, which comes out in paperback in September. Contact him through his website,www.ethangilsdorf.com
Pixels of the Past
Pong, Space Invaders, Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Joust, Centipede, Tron, Dragon's Lair, and my personal favorite, Robotron 2084.
If you're a 30- or 40-something geek like me, you probably played video games as a kid. Not on the personal computer, which in the 70s and 80s was only in its infancy. I mean the big, hulking, stand-up video arcade machines. The ones that ate your allowance (or cafeteria milk money).
As I write about in the my recent article for the Christian Science Monitor "Video game museum gives arcade classics extra lives" (print edition archived here), these games have had a powerful effect on an entire generation. And now that generation is all grown up, like with a lot of childhood or adolescent hobbies looked back on with the 20-20 hindsight of adulthood, these old school arcade games create nostalgia. We have money, we have desire, and we want our childhoods back. If you have kids of your own, that's another reason to dip into the days of 8-bit pixels and dim, humming, cave-like video arcades. The ones near my hometown were called The Space Center and The Dream Machine. Cool.
When generations reach middle age, there's a curious phenomenon: a nostalgia for the way things were kicks in. For me, the "way" was that pre-Mac, pre-iPhone, pre-iPod, pre-Internet world where people called each other on payphones and left notes in each other's lockers to communicate, made plans ahead of time, and had to meet in public, in person (gasp!) in order to play a video game. None of this hunkering down for hours at a time to immerse oneself in online games; these games of yore, like say Missile Command or cost a quarter or fifty cents, and for me anyway, they lasted about 10 minutes tops. The little Pac-Man or Space Invader was iconic, symbolic, crude. It was like a metaphor for a little you.
The draw of old video games, like old anything, is a desire feel closer to a unspoiled experience. As Henry Lowood says in my article, video game game nostalgia is about "stripping away the surface layers associated with modern games gives them the feeling of being closer to something we might call core game-play." Modern games are inordinately complex and require the mastery of bunches of buttons. The arcade game had maybe two or three buttons and a joystick. Sometimes just a joystick ---- a cave man bone tool compared to games like Gears of War or World of Warcraft.
We want to be connected to that time when things were, yep, simpler. When we didn't have all these fancy 3D computer animation technologies that produced photorealistic environments. When you could register your initials on the top score list of your favorite game, and enjoy a moment of fame ... until the next person came along to knock you off the leader board.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, which comes out in paperback in September. Contact him through his website, www.ethangilsdorf.com.
Real-Life Role-Playing
Real-Life Role-Playing
When Max Delaney came to rural Maine 13 years ago, his itinerant family moved from town to town, school to school. With few social connections, he felt isolated. Like an outsider.
"It was hard for me to find people," says Mr. Delaney, now 21. "I was searching for a community." His academic performance suffered, and he didn't get along with his teachers. "I did not do well with authority in school."
Then, the year his family arrived in Belfast, a coastal town of some 6,300 on Penobscot Bay, he discovered The Game Loft and finally found his tribe.
Similar to other youth-development organizations such as Outward Bound or Scouting, The Game Loft also fosters risk-taking, leadership, and camarad erie. But for kids who find the football gridiron to be a foreign world, The Game Loft immerses them in a different sort of team sport.
Via table-top role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), Game Loft members play characters armed not with football padding and hockey sticks but chain mail, broadswords, light sabers, and magic spells. Working together, they charge onto battlefields and explore underground dungeons, seeking valor in these imaginary realms.
"I took to [role-playing] immediately," Delaney says. He joined as a member of The Game Loft, then started volunteering as a staff member, and finally became an employee. Along the way, the games he played built up his character in the real world.
"Killing dragons is a challenge," says Ray Esta brook, The Game Loft's codirector and cofounder. His center connects dragon-slaying to the challenges life throws at you. Via gaming, kids test out "roles," but in a safe, nonschool environment, in order to become functioning adults in society – connected, compassionate, and caring. "Good things happen to kids who game," he says.
Cofounder Ray Estabrook (standing) leads gamers in playing '1968: Gone but Not Forgotten,' a game he and his wife and co-founder Patricia created.
"I was [at The Game Loft] to socialize with kids who had mutual interest not only in games but conversation," Delaney says. "It was a place to channel a lot of curiosity." Moreover, he was able to interact with kids of all ages, as well as adults, who treated him as an equal. "The level of respect we got at The Game Loft was different than [at] school."
The Game Loft addresses another concern: the proliferation of video games. In an age when parents worry about the potentially isolating and addictive effects of computer and console-based games such as World of Warcraft and Halo, The Game Loft offers an antidote. No electronic games are allowed within its doors. Rather, kids play games
like D&D and Star Wars Miniatures face to face, with pencils and paper and plastic figurines, not with pixels and high-bandwidth Internet connections. A role-playing game is participatory, not passive. The kids don't absorb prefab plots from movies, books, or video games, but tell their own stories of their characters' exploits. Players around a
gaming table interact, completing quests and, yes, killing monsters who stand between them and their booty. In their imaginations, they are linked to humankind's narrativemaking past of heroic ballads and campfire tales of derring-do.
Each weekday at about 2 p.m., between 15 and 35 kids ages 6 to 18 (about one-quarter of them girls) break down the front door, pour up the stairs, and burst into The Game Loft's "Great Hall." The adjacent kitchen serves up hot food, sometimes the only nutritionally sound meal kids might get all day. They grab a brownie or bowl of chicken soup, separate into small groups (usually fewer than eight players) and head to the various rooms that host the game sessions. Once settled and fed, the kids quickly get down to the business of role-playing as elves and wizards, or plotting strategy as Jedi knights and military commanders.
But an unsupervised, free-for-all role-playing game can be just as cruel as a playground game of dodgeball. That's why game moderators like Tom Foster structure "intentional games" with outcomes that reinforce the center's principles such as fair play and cooperation.
In one room, called "The Savage Room" and decorated with maps and a suit of armor, Mr. Foster, who has been playing D&D since the 1970s, ran a multiweek, modified D&D game. He schooled his 12-to-15-year-old protégés in surviving the elaborate dungeon he'd designed and stocked with traps and monsters.
But when the adventuring party – "a group of misfits," as Foster affectionately called them – stepped on a tripwire, a cage opened that unleashed a bloodthirsty rhino.
Hands shot up, offering solutions. "I'm going to hide!" one girl shouted. "I've got an epic plan!" blurted another. "I want to jump on its back!" said another, whose character, inexplicably, took his clothes off and, via magic, turned invisible.
"Hold it, everyone! Focus," Foster said. "You've got a very large animal with three horns after you and you're arguing among yourselves." Eventually, they tricked the rhino into running into a vault and slammed the door. Success.
"Here, the idea is to get them from playing a game to solving problems," Foster later says. "To integrate."
Still, parents can be skeptical of the pedagogical goals. Some think their kids are just goofing off, says Kali Rocheleau, director of volunteers and membership. "But once we get them in the door, they have that 'aha' moment."
Sian Evans, whose two sons are Game Loft regulars, was one of those leery parents. She was no fan of video games, either, and wondered if fantasy games were too violent. But once she observed her sons in action, she noticed them begin to pass not only Pokémon cards back and forth across the gaming table, but also concepts.
"When you're playing D&D, you're talking about ideas," Ms. Evans says. "It's not games, it's life skills." She recalls a time that Taran, her 11-year-old, came home bubbling with enthusiasm about what had happened that day in the game: "Oh Mom, I got turned into a dwarf!"
"This is so special to him because he's active, he's part of the story," Evans says. "[Taran] would like to put a bunk bed in and live [at the Loft]."
The Game Loft's tools and settings aren't all fantasy. One custom-made game, 1968: Gone but Not Forgotten, re-creates life in a galaxy not so far, far away: Maine. "It's role-playing in an imaginary county, but touching on real history," says Patricia Estabrook.
"Our Maine history game is Dungeons & Dragons without the dungeons or the dragons," Ray Estabrook adds.
Games that let kids inhabit other selves from local history give them a stake in their own community. So do service projects that ask teens to take a break from battling orcs to give back. Townspeople see teens engaged in work like shoveling sidewalks for the elderly, not loitering downtown.
"It's important for youth to be involved in the community, not stuck behind some walled high school perimeter," Ray says.
For those at risk of dropping out of high school, The Game Loft can provide empowerment, accountability, and a way back in. Take Damion Saucier, 17, who felt oppressed by his school's educational system. "Me and school never clicked," Damion says. But at The Game Loft, he found "a big family," learned how to work with others, and also learned the necessity of obeying authority – sometimes. Now he's recommitted to school and volunteering as a game-session leader, teaching next-generation geeks. They look up to him. "You are like a god to them," he says. "It gives you a sense of helping these kids be social, and they're having fun."
The Game Loft has managed to turn the lingering "gaming is antisocial" stereotype on its head.
As for Max Delaney, just this March, after 11 years, he left his job at The Game Loft. The small-town kid moved to the faraway realm of Portland, Maine. He felt a little nervous, but also confident. After all, he knew how to role-play.
"We role-play in all situations in our life. It's unconscious," Delaney says. A job interview is really just role-playing, he notes, and games are a gateway to interaction. "We want to try to be someone else for just a little while, to experiment with it, to see who we can
be and what others are."
Like a character in a D&D game, who outfits himself before an adventure, then gains experience and grows in mastery, Delaney is well prepared for his next adventure – be it a job in social services, teaching, or wherever his quest may take him.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An
Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other
Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, which comes out in paperback in
September. Contact him through his website, www.ethangilsdorf.com
Facing Facebook
Facebook has become, for many, home sweet home on the Web. It has nearly blasted My Space and other social networking sites into obsolescence. When last checked, Facebook was after, Google, the world’s second most visited website.
But more than just market share, Facebook has captured mind share. It’s astounding how, in the mere six years since its founding in February 2004, Facebook has become enmeshed in our daily routines. Get up, make coffee, check Facebook. Time for bed, but not before updating your status one last time. More than half of its 400 million users browse Facebook website each day, a jaw dropping visitor return rate. The average user now spends almost an hour per day there, scrolling news feeds, sending virtual gifts like flowers, and playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. Every leisure hour we spend on Facebook is one hour we’re not doing what we used to do with our downtime: reading a book, cooking a decent meal, consuming other media like TV, going for a walk in the woods (or at least to the 7-Eleven). If downtime even exists anymore.
As David Kirkpatrick writes in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (Simon & Schuster, 372 pp., illustrated, $26), Facebook has led to ‘‘fundamentally new interpersonal and social effects.’’ That’s some understatement. Facebook has not only triggered semantic shifts like twisting the word “friend” into a verb and coining a new term, “unfriend.” (Personally, I think the friend rejection process should have been called “de-Face.”) It’s also redefined what we mean by friendship. As Kirkpatrick smartly notes, when Facebook was first dreamt up in a Harvard dorm room, it was envisioned as a tool to complement relationships with real world pals, not create ones with people you’d never met in the flesh. Now it’s used as much for self promotion and political activism — think of the Obama campaign’s mastery of the medium — as for networking and tracking down old flames. At last count I had 756 Facebook ‘‘friends,’’ and another 591 ‘‘fans’’ of my book. But how many of these friends or fans could I count on in a time of crisis? In cyberspace, no one can hear you cry (unless you’re Skyping).
The Facebook Effect is actually two books in one. One part is the exhaustively reported story of Facebook’s founding and meteoric rise to near ubiquity; the other is a thoughtful analysis of its impact. We first see Harvard roommates and fellow computer geeks Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes transform two early projects into Thefacebook.com. One was called Course Match, a program that encouraged students to enroll in classes based on who else had signed up; ‘‘[i]f a cute girl sat next to you in Topology, you could look up next semester’s Differential Geometry course to see if she had enrolled in that as well.’’ The other was called Facemash, which took pairs of photos from Harvard’s online dorm facebooks and asked users to choose the ‘‘hotter’’ person. Both were essentially designed for hooking up, not Zuckerberg’s later and more lofty goal of making the world a more open place.
The narrative charts a nearly clichéd story of naive but idealistic college kids renting a house in Palo Alto in the summer of 2004 and immersing themselves in Red Bull-fueled, all-night programming binges. They incorporate their little project, at this point still called “Thefacebook.com” (the “the” gets dropped in 2005). The site experiences staggering membership growth: 5 percent per month. Facebook expands from Harvard to include other colleges, then by the fall of 2006, the rest of the world. Word gets out. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo begin to drool at the incredible value of a community so willing to divulge its personal information. Being a senior editor at Fortune magazine, Kirkpatrick revels in recounting backroom negotiations with these tech companies and venture capitalists, each falling over the other to woo Facebook.
While the Machiavellian wheelings and dealings of Silicon Valley heavyweights might bore some readers, the interpersonal dirt shouldn’t. Kirkpatrick received full cooperation from Zuckerberg and many key players who sat for multiple interviews. We hear about personnel ousters, and lawsuits claiming Zuckerberg stole ideas from other social networking sites. While Kirkpatrick’s coziness with Facebook higher ups could have impaired his ability to be critical, we are thankfully given the occasional unflattering portrait of Zuckerberg. In one recreated scene, the newbie CEO is scolded by a colleague, ‘‘You’d better take CEO lessons, or this isn’t going to work out for you!’’
But far more interesting are the book’s efforts at social and behavioral commentary. Kirkpatrick raises the right questions, even if he doesn’t yet have all the answers. As the social network balloons --- Zuckerberg recently predicted he’d reach one billion worldwide users --- Kirkpatrick wonders if the site might make us not more global, but more tribal; not more individualistic but more conformist and vulnerable to marketing. The decentralization of information, relying on friends not institutions for news, seems like a positive democratic step. But in a world where, as The Facebook Effect observes, ‘‘everyone can be an editor, a content creator, a producer, and a distributor,’’ what is ‘‘news’’? Who are the gatekeepers? Users have already grumbled several times about Facebook’s disclosure of personal information to third parties. As recently as this May, Zuckerberg once again backpedaled for misusing user data, issuing more of an “oops” than an apology: “We just missed the mark,” he wrote. Facebook has since implemented new and clearer privacy settings.
If Facebook is warping our sense of privacy, at least it’s a community based on self-disclosure: You have to reveal the ‘‘real’’ you to join, and your identify is vetted by real friends. Most shenanigans found in anonymous online communities --- behaviors like flaming, griefing, and other anti-social quirks of online games and message boards ---aren’t tolerated. If someone becomes obnoxious, you can always defriend him. Not that there isn’t some degree of role-playing in all those clever status updates. For don't we all want to be seen as clever and ironic, witty and hip? To put our best online foot and face forward? Still, as Facebook increasingly melds with our selves, one can't help but question if it's become too easy to play the roles of voyeur, exhibitionist, and narcissist.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, which comes out in paperback in September. You can reach him and get more information at his website /.
‘Extra Lives’ asks: What’s in a game?
Must video games remain mere entertainment. Could they provide narratives that books, movies, and other vehicles for story delivery can’t? Might they even aspire to art?
Tom Bissell's new book "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" (Pantheon, 240 pp., $22.95) aims a tentative mortar shot at these targets. It comes at the right time. These are potent days for video gamers. The baby steps taken by Pong, Space Invaders, and Doom have become the thundering footfalls of Halo, Gears of War, and Mass Effect.
Production budgets for big games like Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft rival those of movies.The industry rakes in billions, turning formerly closeted code monkeys and hackers into minor, Lamborghini-driving celebrities. Popular game sequel release dates have become events unto themselves, inspiring fans to line up at midnight outside their local Game Stops.
The problem is, no one knows how to talk about gaming — these Xbox and PlayStation binges that nervous parents worry could turn their kids into hollow-faced, emotionally-stunted, Dorito-eating dorks.
I'm sort of joking. But it's true: folks worry about the long term effects of kids --- and adults --- who increasingly play these sorts of elaborate, visually-rich and hypnotically immersive games, and not old-school games. Monopoly anyone?
As with any mass movement accelerating into the passing lane of pop culture, gaming requires its own discourse. Yet, the language we use to discuss, evaluate, and dissect this new medium is largely monosyllabic: good, bad, like, no like.
Frustrated by the lack of serious video game criticism, Tom Bissell wrote his own geek-centric inquiry. In “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter,’’ Bissell sets out to establish his own aesthetics for the medium.
Bissell, author of highbrow books like “God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories’’ and “The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam,’’ makes two startling admissions. 1. He outs himself as a serious, addicted gamer. 2. He finds the pleasures of literature “leftover and familiar.’’ He’s bored with books. “I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars,’’ he writes.
His investigation is bedrocked upon personal experience, but “Extra Lives’’ mostly steers clear of memoir. We don’t learn much more about Bissell’s life, other than a few personal details (including a troublesome cocaine habit). But the author’s reflections infuse everything. He doesn’t tell a story; rather, he maps how his favorite games make him feel.
In his quest to elevate video game criticism, Bissell borrows terms from literary and film analysis. He grapples with ideas like “authored drama,’’ “formal constraints,’’ and “narrative progression.’’ Along the way, we also meet game developers at such megaliths as Epic Games, Bio Ware, and Ubisoft.
Thankfully, the book isn’t pure fanboy boosterism. It’s love/hate. Video games can be great, he says, but they can be “big, dumb, loud.’’ Some (like Bissell’s beloved Left 4 Dead) refuse to challenge their players; they merely “restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence — an innocence derived of not knowing anything.’’ He calls Call of Duty 4 “war-porn.’’
A master prose stylist, the erudite Bissell is frequently insightful, if only occasionally too clever. (He’s mined needlessly dark corners of his thesaurus for words like “saurian’’ and “dipsomaniacally.’’) “Extra Lives’’ can also be funny. Bissell mockingly laments that he’s “saved’’ so many fictional worlds that he’s “felt a resentful Republicanism creep into my game-playing mind: Can’t these [expletive] people take care of themselves?’’
The aesthetics-in-progress of “Extra Lives’’ reveal a proclivity for games such as Fable II, which present players with tricky moral choices and tempt them to be bad. What’s more, Bissell deplores games that don’t make him feel anything. He even wonders whether first-person shooters “are not violent enough.’’
By book’s end, we’re left with this question for game developers: Now what? The industry has mastered gee-whiz realism, tasty eye-candy, and uber-believable game play. Gamers could demand the deeper emotional pleasures supplied by novels and movies. Or they might not. As indie game developer Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) says, “We’re not really trying to have important things to say right now.’’
So don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, lock and load. We have plenty of zombies and aliens to blow away.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. More info at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
Not dead yet: Zombie movies are unalive and well
Not dead yet: Zombie movies are unalive and well
George Romero and Ethan GilsdorfGeorge Romero thinks the zombie genre is here to stay.
“I don’t think it will ever die,’’ said Romero, director of six zombie-themed films, including his latest, “Survival of the Dead,’’ which opens Friday. He was in Boston earlier this month to promote the film.
Of course, Romero is more than a little biased. Over the past 40-plus years, the director has brought us the landmark “Night of the Living Dead’’ (1968), “Dawn of the Dead’’ (1978), and “Day of the Dead’’ (1985), as well as “Creepshow’’ (1982). But ask the man why re-animated, flesh-starved corpses are stumbling and lumbering back into pop culture, hungry for our brains, and he draws a blank.
“Why zombie movies? In Budapest, 3,000 people dress up as zombies. What is that about? I don’t know,’’ said the gangly, avuncular, 70-year-old filmmaker who wears a gray ponytail and white beard. “I half expect a zombie to show up and hang out with the Count on ‘Sesame Street.’ ’’
Like other horror categories — vampire, werewolf, psycho-killer, demon — the zombie film once lay dormant in its grave. But the genre has made a significant comeback, and the uptick of zombie mania has benefited a host of filmmakers, authors, comic book artists, and video-game developers. Romero, who had to wait 20 years between making “Day’’ and 2005’s “Land of the Dead,’’ has churned out three zombie films in five years. (“Diary of the Dead’’ came out in 2007.)
Among the spate of zombie-themed books, there’s The New York Times bestseller “Zombie Survival Guide’’ and “World War Z,’’ and the recent “U.S. Army Zombie Combat Skills,’’ which teaches the techniques needed to take on armies of the undead. Naturally, the Jane Austen-zombie mash-up novel “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’’ also helped drive the resurgence, as have impromptu flash-mob zombie walks, and hit video games like Resident Evil (“Zombies are good targets for first-person shooters,’’ Romero noted).
Last year’s “Zombieland’’ was a hit. With “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’’ now in development as an A-list movie starring Natalie Portman, and with “E’gad, Zombies!,’’ a film short about 19th-century zombies premiering at Cannes this year (starring Ian McKellen, with plans to expand to feature length), perhaps the genre has finally come of age and gained mass respectability — albeit a tongue-through-cheek one. There’s even a new Ford Fiesta ad touting how the vehicle’s keyless door opener and push-button starter enable a hasty getaway from a zombie attack.
Romero finds the fascination both “ridiculous’’ and “unbelievable.’’ Too many zombies, even for Romero? Perhaps there’s a tinge of jealousy in his voice. After all, it was Romero who toiled for years in the indie movie trenches, struggled to get his projects financed, and more or less single-handedly reinvented the genre. He also tolerated remakes of his movies, like 2004’s “Dawn of the Dead,’’ which was made without his participation.
Romero deserves respect. After all, he codified the rules of the game. Namely, that to kill zombies, “You have to deactivate the brain: shoot it, stab it, stomp it, whatever you got — in the head,’’ said Romero’s working partner and “Survival of the Dead’’ producer Peter Grunwald. It was also Romero who rescued the undead from their quainter origins in such classics as 1932’s “White Zombie,’’ considered to be the first zombie movie. Bela Lugosi plays a voodoo priest who transforms a young woman into a zombie.
In those days, zombies were more like hypnotized puppets than flesh-eating ghouls. “The zombie was born out of Haitian zombie lore,’’ said Glenn Kay, author of “Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide,’’ in a telephone interview. “There was a huge element in the early movies of all these potions and powders, with a zombie master. It’s not so magical any more.’’
Later, in movies like “Plan 9 From Outer Space’’ (1959), zombies served as “muscle for the aliens,’’ Kay said; in “Invisible Invaders’’ (also released in 1959), they were alien occupiers of bodies of the recently deceased. But they had no personalities. “It was hard for filmmakers to figure out what to do with them.’’
That all changed in 1968 — a year of social upheaval on many fronts — with the black-and-white, bargain-basement “Night of the Living Dead.’’ Here radioactive contamination reanimates corpses, and Romero remade zombies — no longer mind-controlled dummies, but autonomous beings with a motivation to feast on flesh. That upped the genre’s dramatic ante. Since Romero, various filmmakers have offered zombie-like plots. “Re-Animator’’ (1985) is more like Frankenstein than Romero, but still features the walking dead. In “28 Days Later’’ (2002), a virus fills people with murderous rage. Fancy a zombie apocalypse comedy? See 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead.’’
The premise of “Survival of the Dead,’’ like all of Romero’s zombie films, pits a band of survivors against the undead. This time around, Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) and his small platoon (we first meet them in “Diary of the Dead’’) head to an island to escape the zombies, where they stumble into clan warfare between two Irish-American families (and more zombies). One, headed by O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), thinks the only good zombie is a dead zombie. The other, under Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), hopes his zombie beloved might be cured, so he keeps them alive and chained up. Guess which is the better idea?
This wholesale rise of zombies suggests a metaphorical interpretation. Do they represent our fear of death and disease, or work as a way to accept death (minus the flesh-eating parts)? Are the undead actually proxies for illegal immigrants or terrorists? Or are the undead making fun of our mindless, consumerist, sheep-like tendencies?
Perhaps we identify with zombies because they’re the monsters we most resemble. “We can imagine ourselves as them,’’ said Grunwald. “They’re not giant CG [computer-generated] beasts. They’re like us, like our family, or loved ones.’’ They are us.
As Sarge narrates early on in “Survival,’’ “They were easy enough to kill, except when they were your buddies.’’
Romero refuses to analyze. Actually, he insists his films aren’t about zombies. They’re about the chaos zombies create. In “Survival’’ you will find disgustingly cool new ways to kill a zombie, i.e., fill its head with fire-extinguisher foam, or shoot it with a flare gun then cavalierly light your cigarette off its flaming body. But the subtext of biting social commentary that Romero fans have come to expect is buried not far below the surface.
“All six of them have always been about people, how they screw up,’’ he said. “How they can’t pull together to address the problem. Or they address the problem stupidly. Or they attack the symptom rather than the disease.’’
“Lousy times make lousy people,’’ says the teenage protagonist of “Survival.’’ With its “Lord of the Flies’’ scenario, “Survival’’ is really a disaster movie about human nature and another chapter in Romero’s bleak — yet paradoxically goofy — worldview. It’s not for everyone.
“I think they [his movies] really are an acquired taste,’’ Romero said. “If you have the stamina to acquire the taste.’’
Or the stomach. Take Romero’s iPhone “App of the Dead,’’ launching later this month. You’ll be able to add zombie makeup to snapshots of your friends, then shoot them in the head.
“It’s anchovies, baby.’’
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.’’ He can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com. 
Does Justin Cronin's "The Passage" live up to the hype?
Where the wild things are
In Justin Cronin’s blockbuster hybrid novel, the thriller elements wrestle with the literary, while super vampires maul fleeing humans
Weighing in at 766 pages and 2 pounds 6 ounces, “The Passage’’ is designed to be big. Big plot, big themes, big sweep. And the author, Justin Cronin, landed himself a big advance. After a knock-down, drag-out bidding war, Ballantine paid about $3.75 million for the book plus two sequels in the pipeline. Director Ridley Scott’s production company ponied up $1.75 million for the film rights. “The Passage’’ has become one of those media machine-generated blockbusters, feeding upon the weight of everyone’s expectations. Like a small financial entity unto itself, it’s too big to fail.
Still, “The Passage’’ is a gamble. With this post-apocalyptic, doorstopper of a saga, the author enters a new universe. In his former life, the New England native wrote works of literary fiction, “Mary and O’Neil’’ and “The Summer Guest,’’ which won prizes like the Pen/Hemingway Award. They’re set on the planet Earth we know and love. No undead in sight.
“The Passage’’ is different. It began as a storytelling game with Cronin’s then 9-year-old daughter. She wanted to spin a yarn about “a girl who saves the world.’’ After he started writing, Cronin, an English professor at Rice University in Houston, sensed that, like the virus the plot hinges on, the project was changing him. He noted in one interview, “I knew by the time I’d finished this I would be a different person — and a different kind of writer.’’ He’d given birth to a monster.
And “The Passage’’ is a bastard beast, a literary-thriller hybrid both portentous and predictable. Think Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road’’ crossed with the movie “The Road Warrior,’’ with the psychological tonnage of John Fowles’s “The Magus,’’ and the “huh?’’ of “The Matrix.’’ Mix in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy of fellowships and quests and add Stephen King’s dark, virus-ridden vision in “The Stand.’’
Now comes the $5.5 million dollar question: Does Cronin pull it off?
First, know “The Passage’’ is no bedtime story. Suffice it to say, by the time we reach page 50, we’ve already been introduced to adultery, prostitution, and murder. The premise: A few, unspecified years in the future (where, thankfully, USA Today is still in print), a nasty virus unleashed in the Bolivian jungle gives its victims a kind of immortality. Naturally, this interests the US military, who could sure use this superpower in its endless fight against terrorists who strike at home and abroad.
So, a secret military project begins deep in the Colorado mountains. Those experiments go awry, and the 12 test subjects escape from their glass chambers — why does this always happen? — and begin their fearsome rampage across the nation. With every bite they spread the gift that keeps on giving. The victims become jacked-up killers themselves, glowing vampires on steroids known as “virals.’’
Before you know it, complex plotlines are bulldozed across the landscape and laid down like the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System — plotlines that are broad and clear and fast, and destined to run together. Cronin intercuts the stories of a death row inmate, a nun, a pair of FBI agents, and a desperate mother and her daughter named Amy. Familiar themes emerge: science and the military punished for their hubris; the man who turns on bureaucracy to do what’s right; the child prodigy whose secret powers might save us all. That’s just in part one. The story builds from there, following more than a dozen main characters and unfolding over decades.
Certainly Cronin has fun with his destroyed America, one in which Jenna Bush was governor of Texas, and, in an eerie parallel with today’s headlines, the oil industry is under federal protection. Later, some decades after the initial outbreak, we encounter a whole set of new characters, and they take us through the second half of “The Passage.’’ This ragtag colony survives in a Walden-like castle compound, fighting back the bloodthirsty devils. They also raid the ruined mall — REI, Footlocker, and the Gap — for supplies, stumble upon dusty relics like “Where the Wild Things Are’’ (get it?) and wonder whether anyone else has survived. “Grief was a place . . . where a person went alone,’’ Cronin writes. Life is “a series of mishaps and narrow escapes.’’ In these moments, “The Passage’’ surpasses genre fiction, and approaches existential meditation.
Cronin’s prose is thick and meaty and at times elegant. Texas is described as a “state-sized porkchop of misery’’; 9/11 is called “the money shot of the new millennium.’’ In another passage, Wolgast, the FBI agent with the heart of gold whose fate is tied to Amy’s, takes a nap, and enters “sleep’s antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories.’’ Indeed, much of “The Passage’’ takes place in the murky minds of its protagonists.
Cronin has a literary novelist’s eye for detail and local color, and an eagerness to create believable characters with feelings. However, this impulse collides with the necessities of the supernatural, sci-fi horror thriller. The collision is not always pretty.
For one thing, Cronin has a lot of ground to cover. That means passages of exposition, some of them lengthy and rammed down the throats of characters. An inventive mix of e-mails, diaries, and documents partially alleviates this need for our heroes to spout off too much. But just as often, the interior voice mumbo-jumbo — nightmares and telepathic messages — leaves the reader scratching her head.
The other trouble is emotional gravitas. Cronin’s roving narrator enters the heads of each character. They’re compelling folk, to be sure, desperate to hope, and afraid to love in the face of their bleak condition. But we’re asked to juggle the detailed back stories and desires of so many characters, it’s hard to know on whom to hang our heart strings. Thankfully, the connective tissue across space and time is Amy, the “Girl from Nowhere,’’ the one we meet on page one who we can guess has a role in the story’s conclusion.
Still, some readers deep into “The Passage’’ will be spellbound. They’ll want to know how it turns out. And they’ll also wonder who will play whom in the movie version. How the stunt people will stage the battles and chases. And how cool it will be for the set designers to build malls and casinos, then blow them up.
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms,’’ can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.