What Our Brains Do When We Play Wordle
A Q&A with Holly Taylor, Tufts University professor of psychology and mechanical engineering, about why that darned word game is so popular: "What Our Brains Do When We Play Wordle"
Best games against social isolation
I was asked by the Boston Globe to recommend my favorite games --- board and card games, charades-type games, and role-playing games --- to play in person with your quarantine crew or online via video conference. In the story, I recommend Cards against Humanity, Dungeons & Dragons, and Pandemic.
Here are some of my picks that didn't make it into the story:
Here's the full story.
Can a 53-year-old nerd with bad-hand eye coordination excel at esports?
Can a 53-year-old nerd with bad-hand eye coordination excel at esports? My essay explores that and the whole college esports scene.
https://expmag.com/2020/01/forget-football-video-games-are-the-next-big-college-sport/
You can't escape escape rooms
What is an escape room? I found out reporting on this story for the Boston Globe.
Let's get virtual... virtual ...
In which I try out a virtual reality exercise bike, become a pegasus, lasso some bandits, and come in second as a dog driving a Formula One racing car. Plus, I burn some calories. My story for the Boston Globe.
With Boda Borg, Reality Gaming Comes to Boston
Is Boston ready for the "Maze of Craziness"? I explore the reality-gaming center Boda Borg Boston for The Boston Globe.
Boda Borg Boston is a place where completing “quests” isn’t the only challenge.
One is explaining what goes on there. Recently, a reporter was given a sneak peek of the new facility, which opens its doors Saturday in the building that once housed Sparks department store, a downtown Malden landmark. To bring this “reality gaming” center to the Boston area, Ellis spent close to $4 million renovating the 30,000-square-foot space. Inside, there’s a sleek reception area, a taco restaurant that seats 150, and space upstairs for corporate retreats and birthday parties. But downstairs is the heart of Boda Borg, what Ellis calls “the maze of craziness”: a warren of black-painted hallways leading to 16 real-time,live-action puzzles, or what the company calls “quests.” They await teams of three to five players, who must figure each one out.
Boda Borg is no Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game, nor is it a haunted house with ghouls. Still, guests should bring a sense of adventure and be prepared for befuddlement. Being stumped by any quest on the first attempt — or 21st — is expected.
New game Obduction in works from makers who brought us Myst and Riven
Remember Myst? That amazing, groundbreaking, mind-bending game that mystified you back in the 1990s? Then came Riven in 1997. The two were the best-selling computer games of the 20th century. Then, not much of interest from brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, the team who founded the game company Cyan and dreamed up these two revolutionary, open-ended adventure puzzle games. But there's a new game in the works from the brothers Miller, called Obduction.
Remember Myst? That amazing, groundbreaking, mind-bending game that mystified you back in the 1990s? Then came Riven in 1997. The two were the best-selling computer games of the 20th century.
Then, not much of interest from brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, the team who founded the game company Cyan and dreamed up these two revolutionary, open-ended adventure puzzle games which, compared to the lightning-fast reload speed of a Call of Duty, plodded along at the pace of a hibernating snail.
Those games plopped you onto a proto-steampunk island where, well, it wasn’t exactly clear what your goal was. But it was a fascinating ride. You wandered around, looking at every map and book, and being lured in by the preternatural quiet and creepy ambience soundtrack. What was a clue? What was a puzzle? What was a red herring?
As Myst celebrates its 20th anniversary, there’s some new activity. A new game from Cyan. One in the spirit of the first two, and one that just might provide the same tricksy thrills and head-scratching puzzles of Myst and Riven.
As I write for GeekDad, there's a new game in the works called Obduction. Check out the rest of the post here.
The Original D&D Gets a New Deluxe Edition
by Ethan Gilsdorf
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) may be approaching its 40th birthday next year, and rapidly losing younger players to the irresistible eye-candy of digital gaming. But in one particular sector, the role-playing game business is still booming: Older gamers like me.
I grew up playing D&D, religiously, back in the Reagan Administration. My original "Monster Manual," "Dungeon Master Guide" and sack of polyhedral dice are still precious to me. Lucky for me, I hung onto my trove of rule books that were still covered with a layer of Cheetos dust. Other old-school games weren't so lucky. ("Thanks, Mom, for giving my stuff to Goodwill when I went off to college!") Now all grown up, and sometimes with children of their own, these gamers miss that place that face-to-face dice-rolling and storytelling experience played in their lives.
But fear not, old-school roleplaying games (RPGs) are back, one reissue at a time.
Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company that owns the D&D brand, has embarked on a new campaign in the past year to recapture older gamers whose magic-users and paladins slayed many an orc and beholder and pillaged many a graph-paper-charted land. All year longWotC has been reprinting new editions of ancient tomes from the heyday of tabletop role-playing games. On November 19, the granddaddy of them all arrives: a deluxe edition of The White Box, the original D&D set (aka OD&D) first published by Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR, Inc, back in 1974. (In a Wired.com exclusive, a new photo of the final product prototype is pictured here.)
The White Box "was the very first roleplaying game, introducing concepts that have persisted throughout later editions," said Liz Schuh, director of publishing and licensing for D&D. "Many of our players have strong emotional connections to our classic products."
They better. This new White Box retails for $149.99.
All this nostalgia comes as D&D hits "middle age." In 2014, D&D, the first-ever commercially-available role-playing game, turns 40. Next year also brings (barring any delays) the release of the game's next iteration, D&D Next.
Is all this product retread a crass commercial move on the part of WotC, or a genuine desire to re-connect gamers in their forties, fifties and even sixties to their beloved dungeon-crawls pasts?
Whatever the interpretation, this is some powerful Spell of Nostalgia that WotC is casting. Go ahead, resist. Roll a saving throw versus
The campaign began last year, with new limited-editions of the 1st Edition rulebooks: the beloved AD&D "Monster Manual" (1977), "Player's Handbook" (1978), and "Dungeon Master’s Guide" (1979). Then, in January, WotC launched dndclassics.com, a site allowing oldbies to download in PDF format hundreds of forgotten and out-of-print gaming products, from the legendary 1978 module D3: Vault of the Drow to a 1981 edition of the D&D Basic Rulebook. Also released earlier this year: two volumes of compilations of classic adventures including one called "Dungeons of Dread" that features favorites like "Tomb of Horrors" and "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks." Second edition core rulebook "Premium" reprints came out in in May. Of course, official D&D merch --- from T-shirts, belts and iPhone cases --- is also being hawked. All of these products are replicated down to the last "to hit" chart and goofy drawing of kobolds, and gelatinous cubes (just testing you: gelatinous cubes are invisible).
That "White Box" facsimile set includes the original three OD&D booklets (Men & Magic; Monsters & Treasure; Underworld & Wilderness Adventures) plus the four supplements (Greyhawk; Blackmoor; Eldritch Wizardry; Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes); a packet of "reference sheets"; and 10 funky-looking (but not historically accurate) dice. In a nod to the OD&D's original brown wood-grain cardboard box, it's all housed in a fancy engraved wooden case. The booklets' interior art looks the same, but the box's cover modern fantasy art (see photo) might annoy purists.
Original "white box" sets are rare, and can sell for $500 or more on eBay. With the reprints, anyone can own a piece of D&D history. Sort of.
Game designer James M. Ward, a veteran TSR employee who wrote the games Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha, and co-authored the core rulebook Deities & Demigods, took a more skeptical view towards WotC's decision to release items from the game's golden age. "Just think of the profit for releasing something they didn’t have to pay for or edit," Ward said. "It’s a move to make lots of money considering consumers are really liking the idea of old style material."
From the tabletop resurgence that’s been happening over the past few years, it’s clear that older gamers miss the dice-rolling and face-to-face interaction of an analog dungeon crawl. Even the the original TSR brand had been rebooted (not by Gygax's heirs or Wotc) and has released a publication, aptly named Gygax Magazine, in the spirit of the old Dragon and White Dwarf magazines. GenCon, Pax and Pax East prove there's an audience for non-digital entertainment. Older school-style RPGs such Pathfinder, from rival company Paizo Publishing, routinely outsells the last version of the D&D, the much-maligned 4th edition, released in 2008.
This "Old School Renaissance" is a welcome resurgence for people like Tim Kask, the first employee TSR ever hired and former editor of "Dragon" magazine. Kask and other older gamers maintain that newer iterations of D&D stripped out all the fun. "The game got so tabulated and charted that people forgot to ask questions," he said. "I think what has been ruled to death is that sense of wonderment, of not exactly knowing what is around the next corner."
So it makes sense that WotC also hopes some of the gamer will find their way back to a purer form of D*&D -- namely, the storytelling and mystery. "When you lose that, roleplaying," Kask said, D&D "becomes just killing at the zoo.”
If Wizards of the Coast wants to take old gamers like me on a journey down memory lane -- or back into memory's dungeon -- I can't complain. Maybe I'll never play that fancy White Box edition. In fact. I'm pretty wedded to my AD&D rule set from the 1980. But just to hold these new/old tomes, and flip through them, and roll the dice again ... Ahhh. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, D&D's co-creators, may be dead, but their legacy of Doritos-eating, dice-rolling and bantering around some basement table lives on. Hopefully, with these D&D reissues, enough younger players will also find their way to that experience.
So even if your original DM's Guide got tossed back in the Reagan Administration, you can game again, and play whatever version of D&D you like.
"From my way of thinking," James M. Ward said, "nothing was lost."
Sculptor for Gygax Memorial Named
Gary Gygax at Gen Con 2007 [photo: Alan De Smet, via Wikimedia Common]Hello from Gen Con, in Indianapolis, the gaming convention where I’ve been hanging this week. I’ve spent some time with the Gygax family and following their effort to raise money here on behalf of the Gygax Memorial Fund, which aims to raise serious dough for a monument. This just in:
“The Gygax Memorial Fund is thrilled to announce that Stefan Pokorny has volunteered to sculpt the memorial in Lake Geneva. Stefan is well known to gamers as the founder and chief sculptor of Dwarven Forge, and also a classically trained sculptor whose bronzes and busts can be seen in the New York Public Library and fine art galleries.”
Folks at the Gygax Memorial said that: “As a lifelong fan of Gary’s, helping to create this memorial is a dream come true for Stefan, and the Gygax Memorial has always wanted to the sculptor be a gamer who looked forward to spending time with Gary at Gen Con each year. The stories Gail, Luke, and Stefan shared over dinner last night were a testimonial to how much Gary’s memory means to people and the way that the vision of his memorial is bringing people together.”
Luke is Gygax’s son. Gail is Gary’s wife.
Glad that things are moving forward. Long live Gary!
On His Birthday (Today), You Can Help the Memory of Gary Gygax Last Forever
[Originally appeared on wired.com's GeekDad]
Logo for the Gygax Memorial Fund. Also the Gygax family heraldry, this shield was used by the knight on the cover of the AD&D DM's Guide and was the coat of arms of the city-state Fax in the campaign setting of Greyhawk.Today (July 27) is the birthday of Gary Gygax, who would have been 73 this year had he not passed from this earth in 2008 to dance forever on the astral plane, which (according to the DM’s Guide) is a realm of thought and memory, and also the place the gods go when they die or have been forgotten.
Gygax, D&D’s co-founder, is gone, but certainly not forgotten. One way he’s being immortalized is in bronze and stone. Previously I wrote for GeekDad about the Gygax Memorial Fund and the increasing likelihood that a monument in his honor will be built in Gary’s hometown of Lake Geneva, WI. The city has granted parkland for the memorial, and the fund has incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit.
Now the next step is to raise money, and the hope is for much of the dough to be croudfunded, with this year’s Gen Con and Gary’s birthday as the impetus.
D&D die-hard and occasional Geek Dad contributor Tavis Allisontells me that at this year’s Gen Con (Aug. 4-7), the fundraising for the monument begins in earnest. Gen Con, you see, was Gary’s baby.
Over at the booth for ye Old School Renaissance Group (booth #1541), a collective of publishers and fans working to carry the torch of Dungeons & Dragons the way Gygax and co-creator Dave Arneson imagined it, Mr. Allison says Gary’s widow, Gail Gygax, will be “talking about conversations she had with her husband before his death about how he wanted to be remembered, the resulting vision for the statue, and the goals of the Memorial Fund.”
And I can’t imagine anyone who stops by to drop some spare change in the bucket will be refused.
This illustration by Erol Otus is the cover of a new book Cheers, Gary a collection of Gary's correspondence with his fans. The image is Gary, as the wizard seen on the front of the original D&D box set.To encourage you to give, Tavis says that cool donor rewards include T-shirts with the Gygax Memorial logo, and a book calledCheers, Gary “which selects the best of his correspondence with fans at the EN World Q&A threads.” Editor Paul Hughes will be signing books, which have an Erol Otus illustration on the front cover depicting Gary as the wizard seen on the front of the original D&D box set.
The big goal? Raise $500,000 via Kickstarter. Allison thinks it’s doable, with your help, of course.
“I think there is real potential for the Fund to achieve the $500K goal for this campaign through crowdfunding alone. This would be the most ambitious Kickstarter goal in history, but it’s not unprecedented and if Gary doesn’t have ten times the dedication than Robocop does I’ll eat my dice bag,” Tavis says.
To help continue the Fund’s momentum, and in recognition of everything Gary meant to gamers everywhere, Allison asks for your assistance in getting the word out about these efforts. Even if you can’t make it to Gen Con, please pay tribute to Gary’s birthday and the role D&D played in your life by posting news to your blogs, social networks, and communities that the Gygax Memorial Fund will be at Gen Con booth number #1541, and that folks can donate in memory of Gary at Gen Con, or directly on the website,http://www.gygaxmemorialfund.com/.
See you in the dungeon.
Gygax memorial makes progress
Gary Gygax the way the folks at "Futurama" drew his cartoon versionLake Geneva, Wisconsin, was always a mythical land of enchantment to me, a kid raised far away on the east coast who spent much — OK, way too much — of his allowance on Dungeons & Dragons gear.
While the mailing address — TSR Hobbies, Inc., POB 756, Lake Geneva WI 53147, U.S.A. — felt like an imaginary realm, I knew it was also a real land where that mysterious co-creator and co-godfather of D&D lived and worked: Gary Gygax.
When my local hobby shop didn’t have a module or rule book on their shelves, I’d mail in my order form directly to the source in Lake Geneva (with my check, of course, that covered the price plus “shipping and handling”). The elves and orcs who toiled there would fill my order, and in a few weeks I’d get a package in my mailbox. And the next crucial adventure could continue.
Ever since Gygax passed away in 2008, his widow Gail Gygax and others have spearheaded an effort to honor him and his contribution to gaming lore with a public monument in Lake Geneva. The Gygax Memorial Fund website just announced that goal is one step closer:
The Gygax Memorial Fund has reached a huge milestone. We have been granted land for the memorial site at Donian Park. Donian Park is a four acre open space site which encompasses a wetland and the 100 year recurrence interval floodplain along the White River in downtown Lake Geneva.
On the website for the Gygax Memorial Fund, there’s a link to donate, if you are so inclined. There’s also a forum to share your testimonials of how Gary and D&D changed your life for the better.
Long live Gary!
Classic Video Game Competition Returns to Funspot
If you’re a 30- or 40-something geek like me, you probably played video games as a kid. Not on the personal computer, which in the 70s and 80s was only in its infancy. I mean the big, hulking, stand-up video arcade machines. The ones that ate your allowance (or cafeteria milk money): Pong, Space Invaders, Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Joust, Centipede, Tron, Dragon’s Lair, and my personal favorite, Robotron 2084.
As I wrote about last summer after visiting the American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire, these games have had a powerful effect on an entire generation. And now that generation is all grown up. Like with a lot of childhood or adolescent hobbies looked back on with the 20-20 hindsight of adulthood, these old school arcade games can generate a powerful wave of nostalgia.
To sate this desire, the annual International Classic Videogame Tournament returns to the American Classic Arcade Museum (ACAM) this weekend (Thursday, June 2 through Sunday, June 5). ACAM is the “first 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and displaying vintage coin-operated amusements” (so sez the website). If you saw the documentary King of Kong, ACAM is the familiar site of the Donkey Kong showdown. If you were at PAX East in Boston, you probably saw the traveling collection of video games they brought down from New Hampshire for all of us to play. Wicked fun.
In the tourney, players will compete in a variety of arcade games. To maintain a fair and balanced playing field, ACAM says, the game titles won’t be announced until the first day of the event. The only exception will be the first ever “World Championships of Galaga®,” to celebrate Galaga’s 30th anniversary.
What’s cool is, unlike other museums, at ACAM you can touch the displays. Some 300+ games are available for play. Best of all, the place is a time capsule. Classic 80s music is pumped into arcade, and there isn’t a song or a game, any newer than 1987.
And if you support the preservation of these classic games, please donate to ACAM.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, his travel memoir investigation into fantasy and gaming subcultures the Huffington Post called “part personal odyssey, part medieval mid-life crisis, and part wide-ranging survey of all things freaky and geeky,” National Public Radio described as “Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road” and Wired.com proclaimed, “For anyone who has ever spent time within imaginary realms, the book will speak volumes.” Follow Ethan’s adventures at http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com
Sucker Punch misses
Sucker Punch
What happens when you mix Heavy Metal (that episodic, 1981 sex, rock and violence fantasy movie) with teenage boy fantasies of girls in mini-skirts kicking ass with automatic weapons and samurai swords, and a treacle-infused revenge and sacrifice plot about escape from mental institutions?
You get the chaotic, seething, psycho-nonsense that is Sucker Punch.
The premise had some promise. In the unnamed 1960s, the doll-faced Babydoll, played by Emily Browning (The Uninvited), accidentally shoots and wounds her evil, molesting step father. No problem; she acts in self-defense. But a stray bullet also offs her little sister. Ooops. Off Babydoll goes to Victorian, thunderstorm-swept Lennox House for the Mentally Insane, hilariously located in Brattleboro, Vermont (where I once lived). Here, dozens of other girls have been incarcerated, and like Babydoll, her compatriots inexplicably have hot-sounding pseudonyms perfectly suited for our Age of Madonna and Days of Lady Gaga. There’s the not-so-sweet Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish of Bright Star), the chummy Rocket (Jena Malone from Into the Wild), and two others with microscopic roles, the non-blonde Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens, who appeared in the High School Musical films) and the near-invisible Amber (Jamie Chung of Sorority Row), They’re all possibly insane or, like Babydoll, just abandoned by wicked step-parents.
The big, scary Lennox House is full of nut house clichés, from rusty doors, peeling paint and white tile, to the oblivious orderlies, the lecherous cook (who of course is obese), and the doctor (Jon Hamm of “Mad Men”) who administers the lobotomies. A megalomaniac lech heads up the institution (Oscar Isaac from Robin Hood). There’s one understanding psychiatrist, Madam Gorski (Carla Gugino from Watchmen), whose play-therapy shtick equates imagination with freedom. “That world you control,” she says with her Slavic accent. “That play can be as real as any pain.”
Lovers of games and genre “escapism” already get the point of fantasy: We enter these realms when, sometimes, real life’s crap bears down too hard on us. High expectations also weigh on director Zack Snyder, whose past movies Watchmen and 300 mostly pleased his fanboy and fangirl audiences. (A recent profile in the New York Times Magazine plumbs Snyder’s sudden surplus of geek cred). Clearly, he loves his graphic novels and his Dungeons & Dragons, and for Sucker Punch, he unfurls that well-trodden path of a quest for something—honor, courage, freedom—by an ordinary-person-with-extraordinary-and-hidden-gifts.
But here, more so than his other outings, Snyder is preaching, even pandering, to the converted, with wild and disappointing results.
First, you have to swallow this: More than half of the movie takes place in BabyDoll’s mind. Supposedly, to keep her sane in the loony bin, our Snow White begins to have fantasies of being a hooker trapped inside a Moulin Rouge-like whore house run by the creepy pimp (Isaac again; everyone plays at least two roles in the film). Apparently, in the girl’s mind, being a whore is a step-up. But Babydoll inserts another fantasy layer inside the first (I know, but stay with me here): a quest to obtain five items—a map, fire, a knife, a key and a fifth thing TBA. If she succeeds, she can escape the institution and bring her friends with her. This second fantasy she can only access when she revs up her erotic dance routine for the voyeuristic men. (Cleverly, Snyder never lets the audience see her sexy moves.)
When BabyDoll embarks on quest Part One, a solo adventure set in feudal Japan, she meets an unnamed “Wise Man,” the veteran actor Scott Glenn, who’s been wonderful in movies ranging from The Right Stuff, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs and The Bourne Ultimatum. Here, his grizzled, grandfatherly Wise Man character is Master Po/Yoda to Babydoll’s Grasshopper/Luke. “What are you looking for?” he asks, before handing over some serious firepower. “A way out,” replies the stoic Babydoll, who doesn’t break a smile all movie. Emily Browning’s wide, inviting, snow-white face, punctuated by two giant eyes, is an anime artist’s wet dream.
After defeating a trio of troll-like, giant armored samurai, Babydoll invites her ragtag galpals to join her on the next installment of heroic derring-do. Like in the Rupert Holmes song, she wants them to “Come with me and escape.” And they do: first to the zombie-infested trenches of World War I, then into a WW II–medieval castle-siege mash-up scenario, and finally on a bomb-defusing mission on some craggy rock next to what looks like Saturn. Luckily, for the viewer, the babes march off into battle, often in slow-motion, dressed like “slovenly trulls” and “brazen strumpets” from Babydoll’s Prostitutes & Pimps role-playing game. (Check the “Random Harlot Table” from your Dungeon Master’s Guide for details). This set-up permits the young ladies to wear fishnet stocking and high heels as they fight undead German infantrymen and shiny robots from the future. The Wise Man reappears in each fantasy episode as quest-giver, instructing the gals where they’ll find the particular item on their wish list. He also offers advice like “Don’t ever write a check with your mouth that you can’t cash with your ass.”
In shooting his asylum/brothel scenes, Snyder composes his shots with a painstakingly, almost achingly overthought attention. But at least these shots are mostly quiet. Once the fantasy ass-kicking begins, the bloody camera can’t stay still, sweeping, pivoting, dipping, swooping, all the while shooting with jerky, “Hey, aren’t we missing a few frames of film here?” look-and –feel that’s all the vogue these days. Adding to the head-throbs are the blaring remixes of classics like Eurhythmics’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and “I Want It All,” and Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” Each fight episode feels like a video game level sponsored by a record label. Advil, anyone?
Meanwhile, the production design and digital landscapes have been steeped—OK, soaked—in a sea of sepia. Some of it is stunning. We see some cool cross-pollination of genres. Those big samurai dudes wield “naginatas” (a pole arm with curved blade on the end, much like a European glaive) but also primitive machine guns. In that siege scene, the ruined castle is swarming with orcs and foot soldiers in plate mail; into this mess the gals air drop from a bomber plane, then kill a sleeping dragon. Back in WW I, there’s zeppelins but also zombies and an anime-inspired, jet pack-powered bipedal armored fighting machine emblazoned with a pink bunny. That’s piloted by Amber, who handles all the flying duties. At one point, when Wise Guy barks at the ladies, “They’re using steampower and clockwork!” I half expected a subtitle to pop up: “Hey Steampunk Fans: We get it!” followed by, in smaller type, “[Hey Newbies: Steampunk is a genre the uses anachronistic technology or futuristic inventions as Victorians like Jules Venre might have envisioned ...]”
That first action scene, where Babydoll faces the giants with glowing red eyes (they glow, therefore they are evil), has its pleasures. But here’s where the major flaw of Sucker Punch is revealed. There’s nothing at stake. We know each mission is a fight of fantasy. The girls are imbued with awesome superpowers—with their blades they deflect bullets from nasty German undead; they leap, slow-mo, over the crude weapon blows dealt by Japanese trolls; they are thrown across temples and train cars and tossed through stone walls; they are pummeled by shiny robots. Nary a scratch on their milky cheeks. The audience figures out these gals are impervious. So where’s the danger? Babydoll has as many lives as a video game avatar. Only towards the end do we see real death, but the moment is laughable.
Sucker Punch aims to work on the level of universal heroic fantasy epic, but it barely functions as pulp. The Sweet 16 set may get off on the “grrrrrl power” theme, and not a few boys will dig the upskirt action shots mixed with oodles of cartoon violence. But the cocktail of comic book clichés is too sour to swallow. Strong female heroines are welcome, but their impact as role models is diluted when we see their exploits are simply fantasies nested within further fantasies, like level 60 Russian Night Elf dolls.
So what are we left with? Men are horrible, predatory pervs? That they “silence” a young woman and her “voice” via real or imaginary lobotomies? That, as the film’s PR material touts, the only resort is her “dream world” which “provides the ultimate escape from her darker reality.” Or that we should thrilled by the ambiguity of it all, because the filmmakers say, “her incredible adventures blur the lines between what’s real and what is imaginary.” Sucker Punch, meet Jacob’s Ladder, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Psycho and about a hundred other movies with imaginary characters or unreliable (or insane) protagonists and narrators.
Yes, a lobotomy would be the ultimate bummer. But so is that “What chains us? Who holds the key?” voice-over doggerel right before the credits roll. “You get out there and live for all of us,” are Babydoll’s final words before her own grim ending begins.
I think even teenage girls will have more fun playing a couple hours of World of Warcraft, Halo or Portal.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, his travel memoir investigation into fantasy and gaming subcultures that the Huffington Post calls “part personal odyssey, part medieval mid-life crisis, and part wide-ranging survey of all things freaky and geeky." National Public Radio described the book as "Lord of the Rings meets Jack Kerouac’s On the Road" and Wired.com proclaimed, “For anyone who has ever spent time within imaginary realms, the book will speak volumes.” Follow Ethan's adventures at http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.
Geek love
Geek love
Can a gaming and fantasy fanatic find romance outside his realm?
By Ethan Gilsdorf
[originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine]
In a famous scene in the 1982 movie Diner, Eddie (played by Steve Guttenberg) makes his wife-to-be pass a football trivia quiz before he’ll agree to marry her. Me, I’m a fantasy and gaming geek, not a sports freak. I may not know how many yards Tom Brady has passed for this season, or the Red Sox bullpen’s average ERA last season, but I can name all nine members of the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, and I can tell you that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.
This has caused some problems in my dating life. Not that I’ve pulled a litmus-test stunt on prospective mates, like: Do you prefer DC Comics or Marvel? Can you name the houses at Hogwarts? Rather, it’s me who’s felt tested. Should I admit I once played Dungeons & Dragons religiously? That I was president of my high school AV Club? Revealing my dweebishness hasn’t always produced the best results. “Huh . . . interesting,” more than one lady has said on a first date during my epic quest for damsels, one that has taken me from Star Wars cantina-like dive bars to the heartless land of Mordor.com, er, Match.com. “I never knew Chewbacca was from the planet Kah . . . how do you say it?”
“Kashyyyk,” I muttered, sipping my ale and deciding I’d not sing my hobbit drinking song – not until at least the third date.
Because these utterances have at times been deal breakers, I’ve often mulled whether couples can bridge the differences. Can partners hail from opposite ends of the hipster-to-geek continuum or the nerd-jock divide? Need they share the same geekery to make love work? As a decorated veteran of the Dating Wars, I’m here to report the answer is mixed.
One woman I was obsessed with seemed cool with the idea of watching The Fellowship of the Ring with me. In bed. We barely made it out of the Shire. When I proposed a marathon, 12-disc extended edition viewing of the trilogy (including the “making of” videos), with Middle-earth themed food, she de-friended me. I went out with another woman whose online profile declared, “I’m a sci-fi geek.” We met up at a sports bar, where my “Han shot first” reference met a blank stare and my Monty Python jokes fell flat. It seemed her professed geekiness was only skin deep.
I once met a couple who found a solution, though. Both through-and-through geeks, they resided, surprisingly, in opposing Dorklands. He collected Star Trek action figures and built reproduction props from movies and TV shows likeBattlestar Galactica. She baked medieval period bread, wore bodices, and kept a pseudo-Middle English blog. Still, the marriage worked. Maybe the solution to a successful relationship is not so much mutual participation in tunic-sewing and wizard rock as it is mutual respect for each other’s kooky infatuations. Yes, even that Captain Kirk command chair that dominates the den.
At least geeks today aren’t as ostracized as I was back in the Reagan administration. Boys and girls of all ages get down with Wii. Plus, as it turns out, hipsters, sports nuts, and fashionistas are really geeks in disguise. Dwarf-bearded men smitten with fixed-gear bicycles have appropriated nerdy glasses. Ex-jocks play fantasy baseball. In fact, a collection of action figures has a lot in common with a shoe fetish – the main difference being it’s OK to take your Manolo Blahniks out of the box. Whereas Voltron stays in his plastic bubble, forever. Plus, D&D players, adept at role-playing, make great lovers. Wizard, barbarian, or naughty secretary – what’s the difference?
As for the woman I’m currently seeing, she didn’t have to pass an Elvish exam. She’s no geek. She’s a former jock who set a couple of track records back in the day. Her passion is art and graphic design, not graphic battles with orcs or zombies. But she’s cool with my playing Risk with the boys. And she’s seen me in my tunic. Recently, she agreed to accompany me on a journey to my geek-friendly ancestral home. Before I had a chance to ask, she offered, “Hey, I’d love to watch the trilogy with your family. What can I bring?”
Before I could suggest “Boba Fett feta dip” or “a nice hobbity ale,” I realized she hadn’t specified which trilogy, Star Warsor Lord of the Rings. But I figured she’d be game for both.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning, travel memoir/pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms (now in paperback). Follow his adventures at http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com.
Geek poetry contest winners!
The results are in!
We sponsored a geek poetry contest with GeekMom.com and here are the winning poems.
Readers of Geek Mom were asked to submit a poem in any form of their choosing (haiku, rap, free verse, Klingon sonnet) on any geeky topic: Tolkien, Star Wars, Star Trek, gelatinous cubes, World of Warcraft war chants, hobbit drinking songs, odes to Harry Potter, ballads to honor Gary Gygax.
Sample winning haiku:
Samwise and Frodo:
You think they’re about to kiss,
But they never do.
--Natalie Jones
Poems that somehow managed to work in the name "Ethan Gilsdorf" (which, according to legend, is either Elvish or Elvis) were hard to resist. Winners got autographed copies of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms.
Hope you enjoy! The rest of the bards' fabulous winning works can be read here.
You can also read the other non-winning but nonetheless worthy entries here
Geek pride comes to Providence
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WRNI) - For role players, gamers and sci-fi fans alike, the term geek doesn't have the same sting it used to. In fact, many are now embracing that very term. You can include authors Ethan Gilsdorf and Tony Pacitti on that list. They'll both be panelists tonight in Providence for R2-D20, and Evening of Sci-Fi Fandom and Fantasy Gaming Geekery. WRNI's Elisabeth Harrison spoke to the two authors about the event.