Photo Courtesy of Ethan Gilsdorf

Ethan Gilsdorf, author of "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks"

When I'd last seen Ethan Gilsdorf, he was packing up his Brattleboro apartment and about to set off to live in Paris and become a poet.

He, a mutual friend, and I were heading out to breakfast with our wives and girlfriends, and I remember wondering what he and I had in common. What would there be that the uber-serious author and I could talk about?

A decade later, last week, over an omelet at Jake's in Northampton, I found out. In addition to being a poet, Ethan Gilsdorf was also a closet game geek.

Away in France, Gilsdorf had turned to journalism. He gave up poetry in exchange for an audience, and in addition to an occasional op-ed piece published in the Valley Advocate, he has regularly appeared in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Boston Globe. He hadn't expected to become a reporter, but found it suited him.

Gilsdorf had played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in high school, and he had become a fanatic. Upon entering Hampshire College, though, he made a conscious decision to give up fantasy gaming and focus on adult pursuits such as women and hangovers.

But after the Fellowship of the Ring was released, this international reporter wasn't just following the behind-the-scenes rumor mill and eagerly awaiting the next movie. He was starting to collect the toys. He was embarrassed and delighted by the Frodo and Sam figurines, and he was starting to feel unhinged.

"I became inexplicably, bizarrely sucked into [the Rings movies] in a way that was somewhat disturbing to me," he said, "because I thought it was a world I'd put behind me." During a visit home, Stateside, he discovered a blue cooler full of his old role-playing gear and began to wonder what it was he had been running from.

"That was a real soul-searching moment, and it came at a time in my life when I was seeing a woman who was very interested in having children," he said. "And she immediately noted my hesitation about that, and as a newly minted 40-year-old, I realized I had not really explored that question either. And why was I still sort of feeling like a man-boy, instead of a man, at this stage in my life? And I equated that sense of unease with the game Dungeons and Dragons.

"I realized I'd quit not because I didn't like the game, but because I wanted to be someone else. I didn't want to be a geek anymore."

He knew games had developed since he had played, and he'd heard rumors of many different role-playing communities across America and the globe. Somehow, apparently, others had managed to keep a balance between gaming, fantasy and their adult lives. He decided to investigate how they'd done it and write a book about it.

Over the next 18 months, he traveled back and forth across America, as well as to England, France and New Zealand. In a quest for his own sense of equilibrium, he interviewed players and assumed a role in their games. In the guise of a monk, he played a Live Action Role-playing game (LARP) with knights, thieves and druids at a rented summer camp down in Georgia. At Gen Con, he rolled dice at a table with friends and colleagues of the recently deceased D&D creator, Gary Gygax. He traveled to France, to the site of a castle being built (very slowly) using traditional methods in Burgundy. He attended Dragon*Con (hobnobbing with screen Hobbit Sean Astin and David Prowse, the original man behind the Darth Vader mask). He camped out at the Society for Creative Anachronism's annual Pennsic War as a medieval man in a purple tunic.

If this wasn't enough, he also visited the library where Tolkien's original, hand-written manuscript is kept (you guessed it: Marquette University in Milwaukee), and with white gloves on, he was permitted to handle the tomes, poring over them like Gandalf in Moria, reading of Balin's fate.

Advocate: Lots of people who have read and loved Tolkien will never play role-playing games. Tolkien certainly didn't consider himself a "gamer." Why do you think the two are so interrelated?

Gilsdorf: Tolkien's innovation was not only that he wrote a book that struck a chord, but that he didn't just tell a story, but he told all the back stories, too, of every character and race. Giving them languages and genealogies—that weird kind of attention to detail and minutiae—is the same kind of mind that gets into D&D and its crazy rules. It's all about charts and causes and effects and indexing dice rolls.

To me, the thing that was so important about D&D wasn't just the play, but debating the rules and sometimes rewriting ones that didn't work for us.

[Nodding.] A lot of people who get hooked in to these games often find themselves wanting to add on to their adopted fantasy realm, or build their own. In a way, the games encourage people to make worlds of their own. Even though there's heaps of rules in D&D, there are situations where you still need to improvise. It was empowering to realize I could decide for myself.

There was something kind of liberating in knowing that once you got the basic idea [of role-playing games], you could go off and do your own thing. Even more, on my part, there was a desire to really explore and create a back story for my characters. I wanted to know what my character's coat of arms looked like, I wanted him to have a special logo, or way he wrote his name. I wanted to have a certain kind of house, so I went around gathering treasure to build a house. It was exciting how infinite the possibilities were.

I agree. I enjoyed debating the rules, but some of my friends got fixated on being accurate. I felt, after I'd gotten over being intimidated by the size and scope of the D&D rules, I realized I could pick and choose. Sometimes when I was leading the game as a Dungeon Master, I didn't care what the dice said. I could make things more interesting by deciding what happened myself. Some of my friends would have been outraged if they knew that. How people approached the rules really said a lot about them.

Absolutely. Yes, there were definitely people who were "rules masters." They call it Min-maxing. Especially in these online games, players find ways to accumulate the right things (they even buy services from other gold farmers, and that sort of thing) so they can have the most powerful character, one that can do the most with the least amount of effort. They're more interested in exploiting the game system for advantage than they are in playing it.

The people I played with in high school all had their own different philosophies. Some of us were more dreamers: we wanted the game to be immersive and as perfect as Lord of the Rings was to us. But others, yes, they were very obsessed with the rules. Sometimes we'd spend half an hour arguing—people would get angry, go away and then come back—but I think that's natural. Particularly for teenage boys.

One of the other themes I write about in the book was the situation with my mom when I was a teen. [She had a brain aneurism, which she survived, but in a much-transformed and debilitated state.] My home life was pretty topsy-turvy and unreliable, and what was happening was the kind of thing that would be hard for anyone to process.

But you know, people talk about these books and games as being escapist. They say they're only enjoyed by people who can't deal with the real world, and they're used to tune out and blow off stress. While I do think for some that can be the case, I also think games teach us things. In my case, for someone who wanted to be a bit less passive and more confident, I feel like the things I did in the game world were training me how to be a bit more adventuresome in my real life.

I think everyone needs to have a group they belong to, people they like that they hang out with, and D&D provided that for us. It was less about what we did, but that we were doing it together. I think it's what drives people who watch sports or play poker or even follow a sports team obsessively. It's the same impulse, whether you're sitting at a campfire in medieval Iceland or at your kitchen table in 1982 with your geek buddies and a pile of dice: a desire to hang out, laugh and tell stories.

Many of the people you interview in the book felt there was more to the games they played than just having fun.

Yes. Another theme I explored was heroism. It was fascinating to me to find so many war veterans who were gamers. Here was a group of people who have seen real battle. You might think that people who have been involved in actual combat situations might not be interested in playing a war game or any kind of game that simulated violence.

I wrote about this one guy I met, Chris Jones, down in Georgia. He was in the LARPing chapter, carrying a big foam-rubber sword over his shoulder, engaging in play combat and battles. I asked him if, while in Afghanistan, he'd had any friends die in combat, and he said, "Yes, and some are still dying." But he says his gamer friends back home mostly understand that what they're doing in the woods on the weekend is play. He gets kind of irked, actually, when fellow players try to say what they're doing is anything like war.

What I found interesting, though, was that he could talk to me about events playing knights with rubber swords at great length, with tons of exciting detail, but when I asked him about his time overseas, he had a harder time talking about it.

Some of these games have really helped people find either a side of their personality or an alter ego that they've always wanted to express, but can't.

There's a chapter in the book where I go to a Society for Creative Anachronism event and there's this guy, Sir Gareth. He was a sort of lost soul and disenchanted with a lot of traditional institutions in our country. He didn't find a sense of belonging with organized religion or in his community, but through SCA, he could become a knight—someone who is better than themselves in many ways, and they aspire to be that person. Sir Gareth can't help but have that code of conduct spill over into his real world, and he talks about how, if he finds himself in a difficult situation, he actually thinks to himself, "What would Sir Gareth do?"