Why am I passionate about this?
In the 1980s I was bullied for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Kids like to bully each other, but this was different: The bullies felt they had been given a moral license to pick on D&D players because pastors, talk-show hosts, and politicians were all claiming it was a Satanic, anti-Christian game. Those claims were my first inkling that adults did not know what they are talking about. After getting a PhD in the sociology of religion, I was finally able analyze and articulate why religious authorities felt threatened by a simple game of imagination.
Joseph's book list on the history of fantasy role-playing games
Why did Joseph love this book?
Barrowcliffe is a humorist, but reading his autobiographical account of playing D&D in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, you realize humor is a way of coping with tragedy.
This book contains fascinating descriptions of the early history of D&D outside of the United States. Barrowcliffe is also adept at articulating what exactly is so compelling and fascinating about D&D. Most importantly, this book portrays the brutal culture of toxic masculinity that often existed around this game in its first decades.
Gen Z players may be shocked by Barrowcliffe’s account of how players treated one another.
1 author picked The Elfish Gene as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 16, and 17.
Coventry, 1976. For a brief, blazing summer, twelve-year-old Mark Barrowcliffe had the chance to be normal.
He blew it.
While other teenagers concentrated on being coolly rebellious, Mark - like twenty million other boys in the `70s and '80s - chose to spend his entire adolescence in fart-filled bedrooms pretending to be a wizard or a warrior, an evil priest or a dwarf. Armed only with pen, paper and some funny-shaped dice, this lost generation gave themselves up to the craze of fantasy role-playing games, stopped chatting up girls and started killing dragons.
Extremely funny, not a little sad and…