Revisiting My Nerd Past

An event happened this week that sparked me to revisit my past nerdiness. Not to be confused with my current nerdiness which is quite healthy, and strong, thank you.

This week, ubernerd E. Gary Gygax passed away. The man who either single-handedly or in partnership created the first Role Playing Game, Dungeons and Dragons. In that moment, millions of fellow die rolling geeks cried out in pain.

There are plenty of eulogies available on the internet. Probably the best is the one conjusred by Tycho at Penny Arcade:

"Gygax always struck me as a tremendously sinister name: no mortal name, this. This was the sort of name one earned in the service of horned devils and more primordial shapes of evil, a boon for the loyal servant, placed like a black crown on the bowed head.

The first time I ever played Dungeons & Dragons, I was six years old - books with great red demons on the cover that dared us to claim their riches, subtitled by this alien name Gygax. My mother was furious when she found my uncles had exposed me to those subterranean burrows, spilling over with rubies, and tourmalines, and the wealth of old kings even songs no longer remember. As a young man, I began hiding the books I bought inside my bed, which had a vast hollow space I had hidden in as a child. These books were soon discovered, and blamed for everything from recent colds to the dissolution of my parents' marriage. I took the wrong lesson, I'm afraid: I didn't learn to fear them. What I learned was that books, some books, were swollen with power - and this power projected into the physical realm. Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes.

I owe a tremendous debt to his legacy. I couldn't even calculate how deep."

Indeed. And buried in the quote is a link to the eulogy by Gabe, Tycho's partner - a more visual sort of eulogy. One which also demonstrates another aspect of us nerds and geeks - high praise and immortality by us involves affectionate humor. Normal people might consider it offensive, but to us that is the equivalent to a 21-gun salute at sunset or the missing man formation. Gygax will live on as a frequent guest and conjuration in Roleplaying games, computer games, jokes and other wistful remembrances. This is how we do immortality.

But it had an odd personal effect on me. I never knew Gygax beyond the name on the books. I never even saw his picture until I read of his death. But he had a profound affect on my life and the lives of many others.

Like many other former D&D nerds, now father-nerds in our 30s, 40s or more, I went digging in my garage attic for a dusty box of..stuff. The dust and faint mildew smell of decades filled my nostrils as I lifted the lid off the cardboard box that contained a sizable portion of my adolescence. This box of stuff is my high school yearbook. The paperback pamphlet-sized books of the original D&D set. The abused and taped spines of my Advanced D&D books. The notebooks of articles, dungeon maps and character sheets. My Seagram's bag of dice was missing, indicating there may be another box. Still, I can easily feel the oddly shaped plastic in my hand again. Rolling a fireball, dodging a trap. The dice that were missing from all of our other family games are in that bag: Monopoly and Sorry sessions, when my family wanted to play, involved me going and getting the right number of dice from my bag.

I remember the introduction. Seeing some guys at school playing this game and how strange it seemed. I remember sitting down with them and looking over one of the small paper books, only to have it snatched away again when a rule needed to be consulted. I remember walking to the hobby store in the dark cold of an Alaskan winter in Anchorage, twenty dollars wadded in my pocket to get the box and some dice. I remember the awe at the sheer possibilities of this game. The first time I played and another guy described kicking over a table to take cover from an orc with a crossbow, then the Dungeon Master looking at me for my action and me just gaping back at him - "You can do that?"

Yeah we, my friends and I, were the freaks, mutants, nerds and outcasts in school. But here we were something else. It wasn't just that we could be knights, thieves, dwarves, elves and mages. It was that we had control and infinite possibilities. Here was something we could do that was ours. Sitting at the table, playing our game, we couldn't be ridiculed because we were awkward. We couldn't be laughed at because we weren't cool. It was just us. And for the first time we had something that they didnt want, nor could they touch. We had our own code. We had our own jokes. We had our own thing.

Not to say they didn't try to take it from us. I remember the scandals of the 80s. I remember the kid disappearing. I remember the kid who killed himself. I remember the preachers, adults, pontificates and our parents wringing their hands. I remember the claims of "cult" and "demon worship". I can't count the number of times I was punished by not being allowed to play. I remember a friend getting kicked out of his home because of it. I remember huge arguments with parents. After honing our skills arguing over rules and actions in D&D, adults never had a chance.

So we worshipped Gygax, the grand wizard. But not because of who he was or what he did. Not in the normal sense of celebrity worship. Unlike rock stars, athletes and the like, we didn't receive what he gave us on high and passively consume it. We didn't idly watch what he did, like a football game or an MTV video. We took what he gave and used it. he didnt give us something to swallow, he gave us tools to create our own universes.

And now here I am, the father of a young boy. A boy who, in all likelihood, will face the same social challenges I did. But now I understand and hopefully I can help him find a thing that he enjoys and is good at enough that he too has a shelter from the slings and arrows of adolescent life.