I read Of Dice and Men when it was new. I think it hit differently, because back then there weren't that many book speaking about D&D and being a gamer. Jon Peterson's Playing At the World had only come out the year before. The Elfish Gene had come out in 2007, but there was a certain sourness, a sense of nose-holding and shame about that one.
I remember being struck by how David Ewalt's experience of getting back into the hobby in the wake of the Fellowship of the Ring movie mirrored my own.
I personally found Ewalt's book to be almost like a primer for non-gamers, as if he wrote it trying to explain "what is this strange pastime, and why do so many people seem drawn to it?" While he makes it clear that he is one of those people, there's a certain distance to his tone, which makes it seem like he's
engaging with the material rather than being
drawn into it.
By contrast, I found Ethan Gilsdorf's
Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks to be a much more relatable take on the same thing. Like Ewalt, he's exploring the rise of geekdom and trying to understand it better, but he presents it in a much more personal manner, being a lapsed geek himself. Moreover, he doesn't shy away about the circumstances which drove him to gaming as a boy, which were intensely personal, and made for a rather bittersweet conclusion.
Barrowcliffe's
The Elfish Gene stands apart from both of those, being a condemnation of gaming rather than a celebration of it. To the extent that it was a twenty-first century condemnation (that was couched in personal terms, rather than religious or part of a larger "culture war") strikes me as notable, since when his book was published in 2008, "geek chic" was in full swing. Yet he's forthright in presenting D&D as being (at the very least) a major contributing factor to why he and his friends spent much of their youth being "wankers," with no redemptive state at the end beyond being better for having left the game behind.
I personally look askance on Barrowcliffe's charges of D&D being the reason he and the other young men he knew spent their boyhoods being socially maladjusted, if for no other reason than he waffles on D&D's culpability. While he frequently blames the game for inculcating and exacerbating bad habits, he at times attributes these to masculinity itself, and at other times to (what I think is the more correct reason) he and his friends all being incredibly bored, with no larger cultural/societal goings-on into which they could channel their interest, attention, and energy. (At one point he does note that the Cold War was going on, but "that was simply nothing on an international scale.")
Having said all that, I've come to find little overall value in all three books, simply because they're all either primers to gaming (which I don't need) or personal memoirs of people who had no involvement with gaming beyond simply having played it in their youth (which I'm not interested in). Notwithstanding Ewalt's brief interview with Lorraine Williams, there's very little in the way of insights (beyond surface-level takes of people whose gaming habits have lapsed to the point of being outsiders) or history. One way or another, they all left me with nothing more than what I'd started with in terms of understanding my hobby
as a hobby.
In that sense, I'd recommend Flint Dille's
The Gamesmaster instead. Leaving aside its lack of any sort of table of contents, it's a much more insightful take into various aspects of D&D's development (albeit largely restricted to peripheral things like the comic books and the failed attempts to make a Hollywood film in the 80s). It helps that Dille also has a much stronger personal voice, one which is incredibly evocative in the tapestry he weaves.
some definitely more worth your time than others
