Nerd nation: the thin line between World of Warcraft and Fantasy Football.

• Author: Singal, Jesse
• Position: Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms - Book review

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms

by Ethan Gilsdorf

The Lyons Press, 336 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When Ethan Gilsdorf was eleven years old, his mother suffered an aneurysm that left her with various cognitive and physical disabilities, along with a much-altered personality. She became the "Momster" and the "Kitchen Dragon" to Gilsdorf and his siblings, and to escape he turned to Dungeons and Dragons, a popular role-playing game in which players use oddly shaped dice, their imaginations, and an ever-growing, arcane set of rules to engage in an endless variety of fantasy adventures.

The hobby didn't last past high school. But a few years ago, just north of forty and wondering whether his unmarried, childless state pointed to arrested development of some sort, Gilsdorf--a Boston-based teacher and journalist--decided to reimmerse himself in the fantasy world to figure out why it meant so much to so many, and why he had never been able to fully let it go. The result is Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Garners, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, part travelogue, part self-conscious autobiographical character study, and part journalistic examination of the fantasy culture.

Since Gilsdorf hung up his dungeon master's cloak, that culture has changed dramatically, in ways his book both does and doesn't acknowledge. Role-playing computer franchises like Diablo and Ultima Online, which a decade ago were popular with a much smaller, nerdier subset of the population, have gone online and mainstream. World of Warcraft, set in a danger-fraught land called Azeroth, was launched in 2004 and now has more than 11 million monthly subscribers. Diehard fantasy enthusiasts have conventions like Dragon*Con and engage in live-action role playing, or "LARPing"--think of a bunch of people dressing up in the woods and going on Tolkienesque "quests"--and there is, of course, the Harry Potter juggernaut. Billions of dollars trade hands every year on account of people's desire to visit imaginary realms.

In an attempt to better understand all this, Gilsdorf hits the road. His travels take him across the United States, to France and Britain, and to New Zealand. He checks out the former haunts of J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford, tours some of the sites where the blockbuster Lord of the Rings film adaptation trilogy was...