Helium Party Balloons

I recently had a conversation with a man who scoffed at gaming and fantasy.

The guy was a sports fan. So was I. But we didn’t see eye to eye.

“That isn’t reality,” he said of my years reading J.R.R. Tolkien, playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, and my other interests in so-called “escapist” hobbies.

Fantasy and gaming are pointless, he said. Useless. What’s the point in playing them? Waste of time.

But he’s wrong.

[Ed. Note: See below for info on two upcoming public events with GeekDad blogger Ethan Gilsdorf]

As I’ve written in a recent article for Salon.com (“How Dungeons & Dragons Changed My Life”), my days playing (and still playing) D&D and other games, or my obsession with Lord of the Rings, are no more or less “real” or “unreal” than anything else I’m engaged in. My days of game-playing adventure and storytelling were crucial, formative experiences that were as real and memorable as any heroic feats on the baseball diamond or football field (from which, as a geek, I was excluded, of course).

In a fantasy role-playing game, you conquer orcs, grow in power and save the day. How is that any different from beating the Yankees or the Red Sox and winning the divisional championship?

Once an event has passed into memory, it’s the feeling of accomplishment, reward, mutual achievement, and victory that lingers. Why or how I feel these feelings is irrelevant. The triggering event no longer matters. What remains is how that memory resonates.

Whether playing a game on the field of battle or a tabletop map — be it football, soccer, D&D, World of Warcraft, or even beating your foe with a foam rubber sword as part of a live-action role-playing game — it’s the lessons that stay with us. How to strategize. Think on your feet. Swing a sword like Aragorn. Solve a problem. Use your imagination. Work together like the Fellowship on their quest to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. Find fellowship. Be part of something bigger than yourself.

So, please, Mr. Reality Man, don’t tell me reading a good fantasy novel is any less inspiring and any less fulfilling that watching baseball on TV. Or that role-playing ought to be less heroic than cheering your team on to victory. (Don’t even get me started on the fact that American sports culture really is institutionalized role-playing and war games on a massive scale.)

I love the Red Sox as much as the next guy. But if anything, I feel more prepared to meet the challenges of today because I can play out all the possible scenarios and can identify with others, be they friend or foe.

Even if my mortal enemy wears pin-striped uniforms.

Ethan Gilsdorf has two events this week in the Midwest where he’ll discuss his book Fantasy Freaks & Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms:

• South Bend, Indiana: Wed April 13, 7pm, University of Notre Dame, DeBartolo Hall, Room 138, lecture/slide show “HOBBITS, HEROES, GAMERS, GEEKS: WHAT EXPLAINS THE RISE OF FANTASY, GAMING & ROLE-PLAYING SUBCULTURES?”
• Chicago: Thurs April 14, 6pm, DePaul University. Loop Campus B&N Bookstore (1 East Jackson Blvd): speaking on his findings investigating fantasy and gaming subcultures.

More info: http://www.ethangilsdorf.com/

It’s not as though Tron (1982) invented virtual reality or cyberspace — the idea of humans entering into an immersive computer generated environment was around way before Flynn and his cohorts ran the grid in their light cycles. Philip K. Dick had something like it in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep with the Empathy Machine and even Doctor Who had VR in the 1976 episode “The Deadly Assassin,” where the good Doctor enters the Time Lords’ ultimate computer — called the Matrix (look it up) — to do battle in a virtual world controlled by his arch-nemesis The Master.

What Tron did was bring the idea of virtual reality much closer to the popular conscience, making the thought of going into the computer seem plausible. Tron was initially only mildly successful, but — unlike Disney’s previous attempt at sci-fi, The Black Hole — quickly developed a cult following. There’s no way of telling exactly the effect the movie had on the the burgeoning cyberpunk literary movement that blossomed in the 1980s, but there can be little doubt that everyone in the sci-fi sub-genre saw the movie or at least played the video games based on it.

With yesterday’s release of the sequel Tron: Legacy on a variety of digital media, we also finally get the original movie back, absent from our shelves for many years. The rumor goes that Disney didn’t want to re-release it in advance of the sequel because they were worried kids would be turned off by the primitive special effects of the original and it would hurt Legacy at the box-office. Whatever. I know my son (who saw the sequel with me) and I can’t wait to see both of them (yes, I liked Tron: Legacy, despite its shortcomings).

Tron may not have invented virtual reality, but I remember being thrilled as a young teen in the early 1980s by the concept of being digital that it presented. It was those ideas of becoming one with the machine that I sought out in the books I read after that.

For your consideration — five of the top cyberpunk books that feature virtual reality. Tron may or may not have inspired the authors to write them, but I know the movie inspired me to read them.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

Style of VR: Jack your skull straight into cyberspace.

First book of The Sprawl Trilogy (3 novels and one book of short stories), Neuromancer is possibly the most important work in the Cyberpunk cannon. Based in an eroded American future, it is the story of Case — a burned out cyberjockey, and Molly, a bad-ass cybernetically enhanced bodyguard/assassin/courier as they disinterestedly try to save the world from a megalomaniacal AI computer in cyberspace. The computer wins. But that’s actually a good thing.

Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams (1986)

Style of VR: Better driving through plugging your eyes directly into the vehicle.

Imagine a world where the whole Red State/Blue State thing is not just a political division in North America, but the governmental break down. Yes, Walter Jon Williams shows us a future where there is no US any more, and everywhere is a no fly zone. To run supplies (and bootleg) across the “heartland,” smugglers resort to jacking straight into their vehicles and becoming one with their cars.

Ghost in The Shell by Masamune Shirow (1989)

Style of VR: Everyone is just a node in the net now.

[Read the rest of Jason Cranford Teague’s excellent article, published on Wednesday, and please leave any comments you may have on the original.]

A message to the fine folks at Google: You don’t have to greenlight every idea for a doodle that comes along. Birthdays of famous figures from history we can get behind — we’ve been known to dabble in that a bit ourselves — but celebrating the invention of the term “ice cream sundae?” What?

I could kind of understand if they were celebrating the anniversary of the invention of the sundae itself, but they’re not, because nobody knows when that was. There’s some dispute over when and where the term was invented (though there is general agreement that at first it was “sunday” instead), but Ithaca, New York, has the only claim with any sort of documented evidence, in the form of the first known printed mention of the term, in an 1892 newspaper ad.

[Read the rest of Matt Blum’s excellent and ever-so-slightly controversial article, published on Sunday, and please leave any comments you may have on the original.]