http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mp7Ikko8SI

Feast your eyes on this.  Thanks to Cariad for pointing it out. A great video. The best thing about it is that the guys in the film are clearly serious gamers. They had original White Box D&D in the background and knew exactly what they were talking about. I also recognised the map on the wall and was trying to think what it was. I know that map so well and it’s been driving me mad trying to place it.

The combination of crappy wallpaper with equally crappy replica swords was chillingly accurate too. I have such a sword. Oh, go on, I have such wallpaper too.

The one thing I’d argue with is that, when the half-naked Elf Princess appears, the player asks to have sex with her. In my experience, he’d kill her, as he’d be embarrassed and angry to even admit that sex existed. Perhaps that’d be younger kids, though.

Good to see that we can laugh at ourselves. You have to love it to laugh at it properly. I hope people can see this in The Elfish Gene. I know some gamers have thought The Elfish Gene is anti-D&D. It  wasn’t intended to be so. It’s about obsession, and I suppose it’s anti-obsession, but I have very good memories of the game. I just wish I’d played it a bit less. I never saw the sun when I was growing up. OK, neither did anyone else in Britain in the 1970s, unless they were out at 12.43 on 26th June 1978, but I would have missed it even if it had been there. (1976, we cooked, I know)

I know some people have said that I portray all gamers as geeks. Not so, just me and the ones I knew.  I am a geek, was a geek, and a geek shall be until the the Weeping Waste meets the Sighing Desert for a scrap in the car park one night.

It’s in the same spirit as this video, I hope. You have to love it to laugh at it properly. Outsiders are always wide of the mark. Woody Allen gets laughs out of neurotic Jewish guys in relationship trouble. It doesn’t mean he hates neurotic Jewish guys having relationships.  I also doubt he’d be so successful writing comedy about a Canadian lumberjack. There, I’ve just compared myself to Woody Allen. Another stake through the heart of the vampire of self-deprecation.

Fantasy novel finished, going out to publishers now. I am nervous. Very nervous.

While I’m on the subject of laughing at yourself – a big thanks to John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame for providing a blurb for The Elfish Gene. For those of you who don’t know Dork Tower, check it out on

http://www.dorktower.com/

Remember, frog in bottom of well think sky as big as bucket.

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Hey hey hey, I got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. This is great stuff, as it’s read by everyone in the book industry.

I was really pleased with this, as it’s seen as an achievement by us bookists to get a star. Also, hopefully my trumpeting of this review will go someway to undermining my reputation for self-deprecation, nay loathing. I’m great, there, I’ve said it. Well, fairly great. Great-ish. Not bad if you like that sort of thing. Let’s just say I’m OK.

*The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons & Growing Up Strange Mark Barrowcliffe. Soho, $25 (288p) ISBN 978-1-56947-522-5
As a 12-year-old in England in 1976, Barrowcliffe (Lucky Dog) made a fateful choice: he started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Role-playing games were just beginning their rise, and Barrowcliffe, along with 20 million other socially maladapted boys, spent his adolescence in dining rooms and basements as a druid, warrior or magician, throwing oddly shaped dice and slaying monsters. While D&D allowed Barrowcliffe to escape his mundane, much-bullied existence in an all-boys school, it also threw him into an equally cruel nerdiverse of Nazi wannabes, boys with nicknames like Rat and Chigger, and his polymath, Falstaffian best friend who once ate a still-frozen chicken pie on a bet. Barrowcliffe, whose own schoolboy nickname was “Spaz,” wonderfully captures the insensitivity, insecurity and selfishness of the adolescent male. His eye for the oddities of 1970s British life is equally astute. At times, Barrowcliffe’s relentlessly self-deprecating humor descends into a tedium of self-loathing. The book also loses some of its focus toward the end when D&D gives way to heavy metal clubs and tolerant girlfriends. However, these are minor imperfections when measured against the quality of the author’s vision. Barrowcliffe renders all the comedy and sorrow of early manhood, when boys flee the wretchedness of their real status for a taste of power in imaginary domains. (Nov.)

I got another decent review in Kirkus. This is nearly as much of a boost as getting the star in Publisher’s Weekly, just because Kirkus is known for being rather scathing. Its review of David Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, for instance, was succinct. ‘It isn’t’. Here is the review.

A reformed geek reflects on an adolescence spent slaying mythical creatures, much to the detriment of his social development.

Growing up in Coventry, England, during the mid-1970s, Barrowcliffe (Infidelity for First-Time Fathers, 2002, etc.) was obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons. When other lads were discovering the subtle charms of the fairer sex, “Spaz,” as he was (only somewhat) affectionately known to his fellow basement-dwelling denizens, was immersed in the recently released role-playing phenomenon that had made its way across the Atlantic and swept up the author and other social misfits in its wake. D&D, with its mystical worlds of sword-wielding warriors, magic spells and deadly creatures, enabled the author and his cohorts to escape from their distressingly mundane lives into a world in which they had the power to control their destinies—a welcome departure from reality, where they were outcasts at school and easy targets for bullies. For some—including the author—however, the game quickly progressed from welcome diversion to all-consuming obsession. As the game gained popularity, religious groups accused it of fueling interest in the occult and satanic rituals, but the main problem for the author was the extent to which it stunted his social growth and, until the spell was broken, precluded the chance to experience a “normal” life. Barrowcliffe’s retrospective self-awareness is by turns poignant and amusing, though the level of detail he provides about the fantasy games and worlds of his youth may deter readers unfamiliar with the terminology and concepts they involve. Still, as fantasy movies dominate the box office, the author offers a timely, appropriate memoir of addiction recovery.

Not as captivating as the games it discusses, but worth a few hours holed up in the basement.

So all promising so far.

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