Geek Before Chic

It seems that you can't throw a 20-sided die these days without hitting some pop-culture, nerd-positive reference in modern entertainment. Hit TV shows, both here in America and in Europe, are now featuring nerds prominently as lead characters. Shows such as The Big Bang Theory and the IT Crowd have proven that audiences are ready for geek culture to take a front seat in the entertainment industry.

Looking at the success of such movies as the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy and Marvel’s The Avengers it is obvious to see that comic book superheroes have become acceptable to a much larger audience than their comic books counter-parts. Even the Grandfather of all nerd games, Dungeons & Dragons, has been featured in popular TV shows such as Community, The IT Crowd, Futurama, That 70’s Show, Eureka, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and several episodes of The Big Bang Theory. Children-friendly entertainment like Dexter's Laboratory, Shrek III, You Can’t Do That On TV, Duck Dodgers, and Spongebob Squarepants seem to be prepping our kids to be the next-generation of little 20-Sided Warriors. Popular celebrities are even "coming out of the dungeon" so-to-speak and publically admitted to enjoying and playing Dungeons & Dragons. You may recognize some of these celebrities; professional basketball player Tim Duncan and pro wrestler Hulk Hogun, actors Stephen Colbert, Robin Williams, Johnny Knoxville, Ewen MacGregor, William Shattner, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Dame Judi Dench, and Vin Diesel. Even singer/actress Jennifer Lopez.

That wasn't always the case.

You know those scenes in Glee where the “nerdy” glee club kids keep getting slushies thrown in their faces?

Yeeahhhhhh…

Those were the equivalent of a “good day” back in the dark days before geek was chic.

I know because I’m a nerd and I survived growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s. It really was the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand it was the dawn of the nerd revolution and the height of nerd-bullying. On the other hand this revolution gave our bullies all that much more fuel.

Growing up during the 70’s and 80’s in New York City was definitely a trip. Hell, in 1983 the Doomsday Clock reached 3 minutes to midnight (If nothing else you may know what this is if you read the groundbreaking graphic novel, Watchmen). The cold war and the concept of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) was a hard reality. The gas crisis caused cars to line up for blocks in order to get whatever gas they could into their vehicles. Fights between car-owners broke out under the sweltering summer sun not only because of line-cutters, but also because people were siphoning gas out of other cars. I’m not even going to get into the Vietnam War and its ramifications in this blog. Movies like The Warriors featured NYC street gangs, some of which were based on real life New York gangs (The Turnbull ACs were loosely based on the Fordham Baldies and The Warriors were a Hollywoodized version of Coney Island’s The Homicides – who in real life gave the filming crew trouble for having another gang’s colors on their turf). Eventhough we didn’t know it at the time, my friends and I were growing up in some dangerous times. Hell, we grew up when the very first kid on a milk carton notice appeared (Etan Patz, btw). And that was just the background of our lives.

As I quoted above, it really was the best of times…

What affected us on a personnel level were more important things:

We remember the first time anyone saw a brown (or black) box hooked up to a relative or friend’s television and that would allow us to play games on the TV. On the TV! “Pong” showed the world that the age of “computer games” was in our very homes. No longer were computers so big they took up huge rooms and basically only did calculations at lightening speed. More powerful systems soon appeared on the market that could play multiple games, and then systems like the Atari released home computer games to the public and it seemed we could buy an infinite number of games to play on our TV with multiple friends!

We remember the brilliant decision the three major American TV networks made to turn Saturday mornings into a smorgasbord of all-morning long cartoon cavalcade of awesomeness (which was really nothing more than advertising to sell toys to kids. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle).

We remember Star Wars! The movie that proved to producers that a sci-fi movie could actually be a summer blockbuster (in fact after Jaws, Star Wars is considered the second ever summer blockbuster). It also helped more than a few confused kids to realize that they were really nerds at heart.

And some of us remember the birth of the most interesting game ever created. A game with no game board or boundaries. It could be played with as many players as the gaming group felt comfortable with (the more the merrier actually) and it honed ones imagination all while making kids read more and do more math.

Yes, the grandfather of all nerd games. Dungeons & Dragons.

Yes, in hindsight, we were living through the birth of the Golden Age of Nerdom. We just didn’t know it then.

Unfortunately it was also the worst of times for nerds:

Remember earlier when I referenced the slushie throwing as a good day?

I wasn’t exaggerating. Usually it was fists, not slushies. I even remember water balloons filled with Nair hair removal being lobbed by the dozens at kids by our bullies back then. Rock throwing was also popular, also snowballs left in the freezer and thrown in the summer.

No, it wasn’t all physical abuse. That was usually the main artillery of the “older kids”. There was a fair amount of verbal and psychological abuse heaped on us as well. Most of that came from the adults; neighbors, teachers, and for some, even adult relatives.

There were a few sparks of hope. The movie “Revenge of the Nerds” was counted as a victory for us even if it really did nothing to help our standing in society, especially with the bullies.

If you wore a Star Trek or Star Wars shirt you were essentially wearing a target. If you knew or worse yet, quoted literary geniuses like Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Malory, Julies Vern, H.G. Wells, Michael Moorcock, or Karl Edward Wagner you might get your teeth broken.

And worst of all, was if you played Dungeons & Dragons.

What a lot of people don’t know is how much deeper the collective thinking was against D&D. It ran deeper than any other nerd-related activity ever has.

The reason for this is simple. Fanaticism.

Comic books, video games and even heavy metal never hit a nerve like one simple, imagination-driven game. Religions despised it because it simulated the worship of “pagan gods” while at the same time excluding the “One God” of Judeo-Christian-Muslim believes from its gaming system. And if the game did include “Him” I’m quite sure it would still have been met with hatred because the game would have trivialized “Him” to nothing but a system of points and percentages.

Many parents hated the game because they refused to try to understand their child’s interests. The media loved to play up anti-game angles in the news because it sold. Politicians, when they bothered to weigh in on the subject at all, usually pointed to the religions institutions and media and nodded in agreement. Organizations banned together to conduct very public book burnings of D&D titles (I mean we know where that led to in 1930s Germany and that ended off oh-so-well).

Several of the factors that came together in the early 1980s to cause this ergot-like madness can be examined. This may be just a small drop in the number of reasons but still worth a look at:

On August 15th, 1979 James Dallas Egbert III, a 16 year old child prodigy studying computer science at Michigan State University disappeared from campus. None of the students or faculty knew where he was. They only found a suicide note in his dorm room. He had hid in the university’s steam tunnels and consumed Quaaludes in an attempt to end his life. He passed out, but didn’t die. He woke up and contacted a friend who let James hide out at his place. A police investigation into the disappearance quickly went underway but little was discovered to help find James. Eventually his parents hired a private investigator named William Dear to find their son. Although Mr. Dear knew absolutely nothing about role-playing games or the fantasy genre, much less the fans, he gave his expert opinion to the press. He told them that the boy suffered from depression, homosexuality, and drug abuse and that his hobby, Dungeons & Dragons, was directly responsible for James’ conditions, disappearance, and possible suicide.

What do you think the press did with this information?

They reported it as fact.

That’s their job.

Of course it could be argued that someone should have been on top of fact-checking, but hey, why bother. This story would sell. And that it did.

What followed was that James tried a second attempt on his life while hiding out in New Orleans. This time he consumed a cyanide compound. Again, he survived. He then moved to Morgan City, Louisiana and worked as an oil field laborer. It was soon after this James decided to contact William Dear and give himself up to the private investigator. According to Mr. Dear, upon meeting James the boy begged that the P.I. not reveal the truth about his story. Dear agreed and brought James to his uncle, Dr. Marvin Gross on September 13th, 1979.

On August 16th, 1980 James Dallas Egbert III died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In 1984 William Dear revealed James’ story to the world in his novel The Dungeon Master.

However, before Dear wrote his novel another one, based on the accounts as given by Dear to the media was published.

In 1981 Rona Jaffe’s novel, Mazes and Monsters, was released to the public. This book portrayed the student Robbie Wheeling as schizophrenic with deep neurotic needs. He was obsessed with his RPG, Mazes and Monsters. During the course of the story his mind snaps and he believes he IS his character, the cleric Pardieu. He plans on jumping from the Two Towers (the Twin Towers) and casting a spell that will allow him to join the Great Hall. After being rescued he spends the rest of his life being taken care of at his parents estate, his mind eternally trapped in the personae of the cleric Pardieu.

In 1982 this novel was turned into an American TV movie of the same name, Mazes and Monsters, starring Tom Hanks.

The same year as the TV movie hit the small screens an organization called B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) was founded by Patricia Pulling after her son, Irving, committed suicide. The organization promoted the idiotic idea that D&D turned people into homosexuals, pedophiles, rapists, murders, Satanists, and that it drove people mad.

She blamed her school’s principal and tried suing on the ground that the school willingly allowed and encouraged her son to play Dungeons & Dragons.

She lost.

Latter she tried suing the game’s publishing company, TSR.

She lost.

Patricia Pulling's one person advocacy group closed in 1997 with her death.

In 1984 a small publication called Dark Dungeons by Jack Chick was published and distributed. The pamphlet portrayed Dungeons & Dragons as a direct gateway into Wicca and Satanism.

William Schnoebelen, a self-proclaimed ex-Wiccan magician and reformed Satanic high-priest, worked for Chick Publication. The articles he wrote claimed to let the public in on a secret… D&D was a front to get kids into deviant sexual lifestyles and it was their entry into Satanism. He went as far as to claim that the creators of D&D had gone directly to him to find out how to lace their game everything needed to brainwash children into the worship of Satan.

It is easy to see how these incidents, mixed with public ignorance of what D&D really was, badly reported news stories, and the use of religion, inducing fear tactics, led the general public into an unreasonable hatred for a simple game (OK, maybe D&D –especially 1st edition- isn’t exactly simple, but you know what I mean).

We early grognards stood tall and proud, even in the darkest of times. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t fun. But if D&D teaches us anything it’s that if we work together as a team we can prevail against any threat, no matter how evil and powerful.

We will triumph.

- BIG Johnny G!