When I was 13 my friend Martin and I would spend our lunchtimes looking for someone – anyone – to join our Dungeons & Dragons game. It was a hurling-mad school in east Cork: not quite the beating heart of the geek universe. Still, we would receive a tip-off about a guy in one of the other classes spotted with a certificate of nerddom: a second-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. We hunted high, we hunted low, yet he escaped our detection.
There were also reported sightings of a chap the year below us with a copy of Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Not quite a slam-dunk but a promising indicator he might be on the nerd spectrum. Day after day we searched in vain. But, much like Frodo clambering up the side of Mount Doom, we refused to give up.
In those days being a geek was a lonely vocation. Nobody knew who Tolkien was – ask for Lord of the Rings for your birthday and there was a decent chance your baffled parents might walk in the door with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies instead. Dr Spock, the international baby expert, was better known than Mr Spock, Starfleet science officer. (Like many children, I confused the two and wondered why my mother was taking parenting tips from an emotionally constipated Vulcan.) HR Pufnstuf was a far bigger deal than HP Lovecraft, a horror writer as obscure in death as he had been in life.
Mention a D&D monster such as the Ettin and people would glare at you as though you had two heads
Even if you could get your hands on one of nerd culture’s sacred texts – the soon-to-be-iconic Dungeons & Dragons Red Box basic set, say, or a copy of White Dwarf magazine – your lonely quest had merely started. Next came the difficult bit: assembling a group of friends who shared your interest in 20-sided dice and Rust Monsters. This was when tabletop gaming meant a warped copy of Buckaroo with half the pieces missing or your grandparent’s faded Ludo set, the six-sided dice so time-worn they were almost spherical. Mention a D&D monster such as the Ettin and people would glare at you as though you had two heads.
It’s fair to say things have changed. The mainstreaming of geek hobbies has been ongoing for decades. But if you grew up when being a nerd was a byword for social exclusion, there is still a pleasant novelty to attending an event such as the recent Comic-Con Dublin and being reminded that you’re not alone. That nowadays there is a whole world of people dialled to the same frequently. Take it from someone who was there in the bad days: to be among kindred spirits never gets old.
Dublin Comic Con, which sold out its 20,0000 capacity last weekend, is a broad church. Everyone tends to associate these events with cosplayers: enthusiasts who put huge effort into their Chainsaw Man or Sailor Moon costumes. There are also manga fans, such as my daughter, who couldn’t get enough of the Demon Slayer merch at Convention Centre Dublin last week. And then there are us veteran geeks, our minds ritually blown by the bounty of games, comics and bespoke dice.
The internet has been the driving force in the explosion of nerddom. But that isn’t to say that geek culture didn’t thrive before the world was online – or that conventions weren’t a thing back in the day. I vividly remember a convention in Dublin in the 1990s where everyone attending from my university participated in a virtual assassin game.
You were given, on the bus to Dublin, the name of someone you had to “kill”. The rule was you had to virtually bump them off with an item of fruit, which was up to you to secure. There was a hierarchy: a banana trumped an apple, a kiwi fruit beat a banana, and so on. Which is how, on the final day of the con, one of the group ended up chasing another around the hall with a freshly procured pineapple. His victim fled – but you can only outrun a man with knobbly herbaceous perennial for so long. In the end, victory went to the aggressor. And they say people didn’t have fun before social media.
I feel duty-bound to point out that Dungeons & Dragons is only one among many role-playing games – and by no means the best; merely the most successful
Still, weaponised pineapples aside, online culture has played a crucial part in bringing these communities together. Even if you live in a small town you don’t have to feel as if you’re the only person in the world who knows the difference between Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder – or that there is something strange about spending the entirety of your weekend playing Baldur’s Gate 3. Technology has allowed geekdom to flourish.
It has got to the point where being a nerd isn’t even a punchline any more. It’s not yet 20 years since the Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd made a joke of the idea that its characters played D&D. Then came Stranger Things, where Dungeons & Dragons was front and centre of 1980s nostalgia. Gen Z embraced D&D propelling the game to annual revenues of more than $1 billion. (It is here I feel duty-bound to point out that Dungeons & Dragons is only one among many role-playing games – and by no means the best; merely the most successful.)
Technology has helped in other ways. The gaming buddies I found at school – it turns out there was a guy with a Player’s Handbook, plus one with a Batman comic – still assemble each week to roll our D20s and check our armour class. Only nowadays we do so virtually. We’re older, and busier. Life has bashed us around a bit. But we still love to chuck die, slay goblins and cast fireball spells. The difference is that today we don’t feel like we’re the only ones.
