Growing Up Strange
posted in Frenzied Daddy |I finished reading The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange recently. It was surprisingly applicable to my younger days.
Especially when Mark talked about the feeling you get, the high you get, vanquishing monsters or overcoming other encounters in gaming. You get a feeling of camaraderie with your fellow players, and if the GM’s not a total control freak, you get the great feeling of playing in a game. You find yourself looking forward to the next “hit,” to the next game, and any time you’re not playing is wasted. It’s like a drug; you find yourself isolated, striking up conversations about orcs and liches while you wait for the bus (and pretend not to notice the people sidling away from you.) I loved Dungeons and Dragons, Champions, pretty much anything I could get my hands on that would give me that feeling; I’m not too picky.
The SCA is similar. True story: I once asked a fellow SCAdian (as I was a newbie) if I would be sort of “granted latin” because my “character” would know it, and I didn’t want to have to learn it. If people would just believe that I knew it because it was (to use a metaphore) on my character sheet. And similarily with traipsing around in the Eugene woods looking for herbs and plants. Yeah, I laugh now.
I, also, believed myself to have inherent abilities with weaponry and whatever else, and if my practice at sword-and-board wasn’t going as well as I’d have liked, well obviously I was inherently better with a two handed sword or a polearm. Yeah, Mark talks about a lot of stuff I saw in myself. It’s probably a good thing for him that he didn’t find the SCA (but he had friends involved with the Closed Knot, which is apparently British for SCA).
His point about “a youth filled with Dungeons and Dragons does not train you for the boredom inherent in the system of birth-work-death” also rang a bell. I couldn’t imagine myself sitting at a desk answering the telephone helping people with their credit card woes. I couldn’t imagine working out actuarial tables. However, my work does give me the feeling of accomplishment (however brief), similarily flavored to the Dungeons and Dragons hit. It’s good that I’m in the career that I’m in.
