Everyone is a nerd if you look close enough. The sports nut during his Sunday ritual of turning on the big game will usually involve some form of superstitious formula for turning the TV on, or which snacks he eats. The beauty queen has a precise idea of how she has to keep up on the latest trends and decides the ways of going about keeping up on those said trends. Some forms of nerdiness are somewhat more tangible. I am a gamer. Not just any gamer, either, I am a tabletop gamer, which is one of the more despicable and unforgivable kind in society it would seem. It would be a lie to say that I am not a little bit resentful of the disdain the community that I live in shows towards the hobby that I participate in, yet still I continue to play. There are a number of reasons why, but the thing that constantly amazes me is that how humanity is so pre-disposed to judging something like gaming as a condemning sin when in reality it can be something wonderful.
My earliest memories of gaming come at a time in my life that everyone looks back on with a sense of dread, and perhaps a little bit of nausea: Junior High. I met a friend during that awkward stage of my life, the transition from childhood to post-childhood-pre-teenager-I-don’t-know-what-the-heck-I’m-supposed-to-be stage. In our conversation of constantly cracking voices that ranged from basement deep drops to window shattering spikes, he first told me about the game Dungeons and Dragons. Here was something that made sense to me in those tumultuous years, I could play as one of the heroes that I had read about in my books, seen in my favorite movies. I was accepted in this world, unlike the harsh social setting of the cruelty that only children are pre-disposed to showing one another in such a fearful time of growth. Dungeons and Dragons became a playground for my imagination from that day on, and this carried me throughout my adolescent years. The adventures that I experienced as a mighty warrior delving into caves, slaying dragons, saving villages, towns, and even the world on several occasions, these defined my personality in the real world as well. I became a paladin in the real world, striving to be that hero that I was in the game. While, thankfully, I was able to separate the events of the game from those in real life, my choices in the game were reflected in my real life situations. My character was a defender of all things good and lovely, so I strove to be worthy of that character in many instances, I wanted to actually be that hero. People began to know me as an honest, integral, and generally good person, and I reveled in the fact that I was a modern-day equivalent of the hero that I wanted to be. Yet oddly enough, when people would learn of my hobby, their noses would unconsciously wrinkle and they would talk to me in short, quick sentences so that they could quickly run off, as the idea of being around someone so nerdy would usually fill them with discomfort. So it was that I learned to hide my hobby from the world.
Since then, I have been what you call a closet nerd. Someone who plays the game in quiet locations, with a close-knit set of friends. People never learn of my hobby until they reach a rather high level of trust. It seems that we as a people are afraid of anything that even remotely requires us to use our imaginations. We call hobbies like this frivolous, tiresome, childish, and even a little bit scary, perhaps because we don’t understand them. People like to stay with things that are comfortable, which is perhaps what drove me to hide my hobby, telling people about it made me uncomfortable because of the reactions that it invoked. I have loved gaming, and over the years my characters and roles that I have taken on as a nerd in my hobby have come to reflect the person that I am. My incorruptible, paragon of good character has become a much more jaded and complicated person. The twists of my life are mirrored in my character’s views on his world and how he deals with the problems that are facing it. It is interesting to look at the evolution of my characters over the years and see where I have come. I still have all the character sheets and story outlines from all of my campaigns, and I can show you which characters I was playing at different times of my life, the types of characters can really show you the emotions and difficulties I was experiencing at those moments. People are afraid of anything that requires that deep of an emotional connection with anything, which is perhaps why they feel this deep worry whenever I tell them that I am a “DnDer”. Who knows, but it isn’t stopping me from my hobby.
As I look over even these past few years, I’ve seen the way my characters have changed. My current character is a dark, brooding figure that has lost a lot of faith in humanity. He struggles to have faith in the grand design of the world and holds out for something better, but he’s been jaded by his experiences. He is a far-cry from the knight in shining armor that I played during my high-school years that had a firm faith in humanity and that the world had meaning to it, that he was destined for great things. Perhaps someday I’ll return to playing that character, but for now, I keep my hobby secret, and continue on waiting for the next level, the next encounter, and hoping that my faith in humanity will someday be restored just a little bit more.
