Bennett Lovett-Graff
Enter, If Ye Dare
Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
Ethan Gilsdorf
Lyons Press, 2009
$24.95
If we’ve learned anything from Sigmund Freud and J.K. Rowling, it’s that we members of the species homo sapiens sapiens exhibit a strong fantasy life. From the family romance to wingardium leviosa—frame it however you like—our predilection to imagine ourselves as something other than what we are is as old as the first storyteller regaling listeners around a campfire of a thrilling hunt or noble deed done with great sacrifice, indeed, of anything that takes us out of ourselves and places us elsewhere.
Ethan Gilsdorf’s Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is a culturally specific meditation on this all-too-human fact of life. [Full disclosure: the acquiring editor for Lyons Press, Keith Wallman, is a subscriber to New Haven Review.] Gilsdorf’s starting point is personal and, at times, painfully confessional, prompting a firsthand tour of the Anglo-American obsession with medieval fantasy and faerie. That obsession ranges from beer-bellied and bearded role play gamers who gather in Geneva, Wisconsin, to relive the pre-corporate glory days of Dungeons & Dragons to middle-aged housewives whacking orcs and ogres in the virtual realms of World of Warcraft; from middle-class couples who don wings and tunics on weekends to swing Styrofoam swords and fling confetti-filled fireballs at one another to “Tolkien tourists” who have descended en masse on Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson’s New Zealand to walk the grassy plains of Rohan and sniff the cindery ash of Mordor.
Gilsdorf survey, however, is more than an act of journalism. It’s an inner odyssey that receives its first push with the devastating stroke that transforms his mother from a bright, ebullient woman, for whom the world was her middle-class oyster, into the “Monster”: a shambling, chain-smoking, emotionally explosive terror whose son finds solace in a regularly scheduled Dungeons & Dragons game with high school friends. This, at least, is the personal motivations behind Gilsdorf’s re-entry into geekdom. Like so many others—myself included—when Gilsdorf left for college, he had put away childish things, supplanting the joys of casting sleep spells and slaying giants for more mundane adult pursuits: grades, sex, money, work, family. In Fantasy Freaks, Gilsdorf uses the opportunity supplied by authorship and a book contract to revisit this phase of his life and indulge himself. But this indulgence is hardly a shameless one since Gilsdorf is clearly unsettled by this ostensibly voluntary return to his teenage roots.
Mostly it’s a question of image. Anxieties about how he appears to others resonate throughout. This no doubt explains his not infrequent mentions of the normality of his respective guides through the subcultures of Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, live action role playing, and DragonCon. This is complemented by his own boldly stated yearning for the adult things he still does not have at the time of writing—a long-term relationship, marriage, children. The underlying story of cultural anxiety combines elements of projection (“What’s so weird about pretending I’m a half-elf warrior? The guy who plays the dwarf wizard is an assistant VP of finance at the local bank!”) with reaffirmations of normal urges (“OK, so I’m dressed in a funny costume at this DragonCon, but everyone’s doing it and maybe I’ll meet a girl and have real rather than role play sex”). With respect to the first, Gilsdorf is no different from every other guy or gal who live, in one way or another, their own Clark Kent-Superman double lives; as for the second, fantasy play can serve as a conduit to culturally normative goals, such as networking for love or money. And, to be honest, who can argue with either of these? Four guys huddling over funny-shaped dice and elaborate rulebooks, which may end in a shared beer or job lead, is no stranger than watching four guys huddling in a green field over a dimpled white ball that rests on a little piece of wood, which they will spend some three to five hours swatting with one of ten differently shaped, club-footed poles.
Gilsdorf does make several pop psychology efforts to explain the penchant of a certain class of Americans (and Englishmen and Australians and Frenchmen, etc.) for these types of recreations. Much of this pop psy 101 stuff comes from his own intuition. Nor do I think him that far off the mark. These various forms of role play, whether table-top, digital, or “live action,” do reflect our collective need to escape the dullness of our daily reality, supply ourselves with the illusion of control over the chaos of modern life, feed that never absent desire for child-like, consequence-free play, and give release to our pent-up stores of aggression. It is all of these, and more. Indeed, if I had but one criticism to make, it would have been a fond wish for Gilsdorf to have shed some of the habits of personal journalism and donned more academic vestments. (He certainly is capable, as a former Harvard graduate.) In brief, I and, I suspect, any of his readers would have liked to have seen more of the academic literature—assuming there is any—on these various behaviors. Otherwise, Fantasy Freaks is an eye-opening romp through what continues to strike me as a culturally specific juncture in our collective psychology.
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