The Nerds' Secret

I am not sure if this above PostSecret post is pathetic or touching. I lean to the latter.

I too played D&D in high school, college, graduate school, and still do, but the D & D party that formed my senior year and stretched through college had some of my favorite characters and moments—our medieval characters traveling through portals to hell or Manhattan, our wizard ripping apart time-and-space, at least twice, our Barbarian warrior beheading almost everyone she met, our assassin becoming a Princess in Hell only to be redeemed as a holy cleric, our Drow thief, an outcast, becoming a Baroness and a Pirate Queen, and me, assassin-turned-guildmaster-back-stabbing a dragon & killing him . . . while we were in flight . . . several hundred feet in the air—these were some of the best gaming campaigns for their camaraderie, creativity, and their weird parallels with and their escapes from the Real World.

Perhaps the narratives and worlds were not as complex as they later became; that fact doesn't change the social magic of senior year when the Cosmic Game Master of Unknown Forces (looking probably much like John Hughes) brought me together, over dice, with three who became my high school best friends: two sorority girls, one brainy (the Cleric & Drow), one a social jock (the Barbarian), and Genius Holden Caulfield-in-the-closet (our Wizard).

Now I am only close with one of my gaming friends from high school. The Drow-and-Cleric is now a college professor, like me, and has become my More-than-Sister.

The others? I don't know where they are. Holden, the Wizard, lives somewhere in California, a brilliant free-lance writer and a Buddhist priest, and Helen, the Barbarian, is dead.

However, I imagine them both as they were in our minds, in-game: Holden, gray robes blowing in the wind, spell book in hand, and Helen, barbarian ax glinting in the fires of hell, besting those demons that killed her in the Real World.

And me? I still sometimes think like an assassin in committee meetings, while my More-than-Sister certainly continues to support and heal those around her, as her cleric would.

So seeing this PostSecret card tonight, I am reminded that in high school we may have defied the gaming-nerd stereotypes by outside social camouflaging, but we were more kindred to those with thick glasses and short pants than we would’ve admitted. We shared the nerds’ secret: In-game we could be who we were on the inside, and who we wanted to be on the outside.

Now how is that really different from what most thoughtful people want?