Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks

Former Dungeons and Dragons geek turned travel writer finds himself getting pulled back into ‘the life' after the Lord of the Rings films are released, and decided to chronicle the state of modern geekdom.

It's interesting, from an anthropological perspective - Gilsdorf has a bit of an insider's perspective, but it's one that he fights against. He spends half the book trying to convince himself he's above the people who play MMOs, or who LARP, or attend conventions, but eventually he realizes that he is those people, to an extent, and that those people are actually pretty cool in their own ways. He's writing for a muggle audience, so he doesn't go into those subjects in too much detail, but it's a nice overview of disparate yet connected communities.

While doing this Gilsdorf also relates his chronicle/investigation to his personal life - how he first started getting interested in D&D when his mom got sick, and how he started getting back into ‘the life' as he started approaching his 40th birthday.

One of the things I found appealing about this story was that I went through a similar personal history as Gilsdorf - I experienced nowhere near the same amount of personal tragedy, and was more a comic reader and CCG player than a D&D person, but I did grow up feeling like an outsider, and turned to sci-fi and fantasy as a result, only to drift away from it in my teen years before being pulled back in after the Lord of the Rings films were released. So I felt a connection to the author and his ‘quest' as a result.

Expected this book to be a study of role-playing subcultures, but it turned out to be more about a person's journey to reconcile his D&D-playing past and being an adult. I liked the way the book explored various subcultures of fantasy role-play, from LARPers to WoW players. Also interesting was his visit to Middle Earth aka NZ. As a memoir, this book works.