The Elfish Gene - Another attack on gamers

[Janx]

Hi U_K/Craig - I think '80s Coventry was quite a lot like '80s Belfast (minus the bombs - the IRA in Cov used to go over to Birmingham for their bombing); and the Nazi-obsessed gamer in Elfish Gene reminded me a lot of one or two of our old pals. Overall I think the book is a pretty good portrait of a section of British working-class youth in that era.

That's a good point to bring up. Americans have mostly had a pretty consistently safe childhood. All the bad stuff happened elsewhere (or the gang-infested slums).

There's other places in the world where dangerous stuff was going on right outside the door of otherwise normal people. That's gotta shape people.

 

[S'mon]

That's a good point to bring up. Americans have mostly had a pretty consistently safe childhood. All the bad stuff happened elsewhere (or the gang-infested slums).

There's other places in the world where dangerous stuff was going on right outside the door of otherwise normal people. That's gotta shape people.

I was going to say "Hey, Coventry's not that bad!"

Then I remembered back to my 2.5 years in Coventry (1998-2000)... *shudder* ...Like the time I looked out my window and saw a gang feral kids lighting grass fires and _holding a small child_ over one of them - we called the police, who refused to come, and the Fire Brigade, who did come and were roundly abused by the ferals.

 

[Beginning of the End]

You're absolutely entitled to your opinion but I have to say, I find it baffling.

Your thesis statements, taken from the first and last chapters of your book:

"Writing books is a waste of your life."
"I've tried to overcome the influence that my years writing books had on me."
"It's one thing to have the talent to be a dope; it's another to put it into practice. That's exactly what I was doing when I was writing books."
"If you're still writing books into your twenties and beyond then you're an addict."
"I was starting to write books again. 'Actually,' I said. 'I'm feeling rather ill. I think I'm going to have to go.' I got into the cool air of the street and made my way to my car. It was as if I was slightly disembodied as I moved. 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."

... Whoops. I seem to have "accidentally" replaced the words "playing D&D" with the words "writing a book".

Your 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".

To be clear: I find your anecdotes charming, resonant, and well-written. I find your own struggle to differentiate between delusion and reality to be quite harrowing (and great material for a memoir), and I can completely sympathize that -- for you -- D&D is a dangerous addiction that feeds into your inherent predilection for delusion.

But you're an alcoholic who wrote a book concluding that everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. And then you're baffled that wine connoisseurs aren't amused with the broad brush you're painting them with.

 

[Janx]

I was going to say "Hey, Coventry's not that bad!"

Then I remembered back to my 2.5 years in Coventry (1998-2000)... *shudder* ...Like the time I looked out my window and saw a gang feral kids lighting grass fires and _holding a small child_ over one of them - we called the police, who refused to come, and the Fire Brigade, who did come and were roundly abused by the ferals.

and not to say that all of America is nice and safe.

There's this recent documentary of a mayor in pennsylvania or somewhere talking to school kids and explaining to them that it isn't normal to know somebody who was shot, to have experienced crime, etc. There are some places that aren't safe for children to grow up.

But for most of us, we're not aware of those places.

Anyway, my point was, other places in the world have had a lot going on, and many of us americans haven't experienced that.

 

[EnochSeven]

Maybe I'll pick this back up and give it another try.

The first chapter left a very bad taste in my mouth. My impression was / is that you regret that you ever heard of DnD. That you missed out on a normal childhood. That somehow you were robbed of so many great things at that critical age because you were duped into playing a dumb game, a vapid waste of time.

Wow, didn't know this thread was still going until Jonny Nexus pointed it out to me.
First, thanks to all the people who have said such positive things about The Elfish Gene. I'm really glad there are so many people who 'get' the book.
Second, sorry to anyone who's been offended by it. That wasn't my intention.
To offer a little background, I wrote the first and last chapters at the same time - the very last things I wrote for the book. They were written after I'd had something of a depressing experience at a gaming night and, in retrospect, were harsher on gamers than they needed to be. I wouldn't substantially change anything if I could rewrite the book but I would perhaps make it clearer in chapter one that what I am writing about in The Elfish Gene isn't really D&D at all but masculinity. It's a very particular coming of age story, as much about how a very young boy is rejected by, eventually accepted by and finally rejects a group of slightly older boys as it is about slicing up goblins.
I should have moved forward that bit where I say that the only way D&D was to blame for the pressure cooker of sniping, back biting and personality assassination that characterised my youth was that it gave seven or eight boys an excuse to sit in a room together for their entire teenage years. There's nothing intrinsic about the game, beyond that, that had such a stunting effect on my social development. And, in the interests of scientific objectivity, it must be said we didn't have a control group to test against.
It seems to me, though, that football, rugby, fishing, martial arts and other hobbies have a way of churning out socially stunted gits too. In fact, as I say in the book, the whole social system in the seventies and eighties seemed designed to turn men into fools. As you'd know if you'd read any of my other books, 'men are fools' is pretty much a theme of my work. Like most hobbies and games D&D had its own brand of git but also had many redeeming features.
If you remove a tiny bit of chapter one and a slightly larger chunk of the final chapter you have a very fond memoir of D&D. Like I said, now I've attended a D&D con and started playing again my view is different to what it was when I'd just finished the book. It didn't help that, on the gaming evening I attended for research, one of the players was the spitting image of my old tormentor Chigger and seemed to have a few of his arrogant traits too. I thought 'oh my God, nothing's changed at all'.
This was bad luck, really as it seems to me now that many of the people playing the game today are slightly better adjusted than the general population. They're mostly too old to care about fashion, they cleave to something because they love it and for no other reason and, on the whole, they're pretty bright. I hope that, in the next edition of the book, I'll have the chance to say that.
Anyway, I did finally get drawn back in to fantasy. You can take the boy out of Mordor but you can't take Mordor out of the boy. I've written a fantasy novel called Wolfsangel under the pen name MD Lachlan which is out May 2010, published by Gollancz. It's had very nice things said about it so far by Joe Abercrombie, who needs no introduction Joe Abercrombie - News
and Adam Roberts who, apart from being a kick-bottom author, is also SFF critic for The Guardian (UK national newspaper) . His comments on the book are here PUNKADIDDLE: M D Lachlan, Wolfsangel (2010)
The books about a werewolf and it's set in - I hope - a historically accurate Viking age.
I'm designing an RPG to come out at the same time as the game but, I'm quite sure, it won't be ready by then as I'm currently writing the sequel to the novel.
My own new blog is at M D Lachlan ».

 

[S'mon]

and not to say that all of America is nice and safe.

There's this recent documentary of a mayor in pennsylvania or somewhere talking to school kids and explaining to them that it isn't normal to know somebody who was shot, to have experienced crime, etc. There are some places that aren't safe for children to grow up.

But for most of us, we're not aware of those places.

Anyway, my point was, other places in the world have had a lot going on, and many of us americans haven't experienced that.

My boy is far more likely to get shot in London, where I live now, than he would have been were we living in Coventry. Gang violence per se is much worse in London (and not separated out into the 'bad' neighbourhoods like you have in the US). But there's a kind of bleakness about Cov you don't see here so much.