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I'm a geek. Like so many others who grew up in the mid-eighties, playing role-playing games with sheets of loose-leaf paper and dice by their side, I am a geek. Each Saturday, I spent hours with my circle of geek friends and played as a character on an epic quest to earn fame and fortune all while trying to save the world from some innate evil. We are geeks.

The game was Dungeons and Dragons and at the time, it was the greatest creation a group of fifteen year olds could behold. A group of five teenage boys formed a clique and created a strong bond over a game played with your heart and your mind. We had excellent character names, trapper keepers full of different alter-egos, each suited for a different adventure. Whether role-playing a male or female character, the fun was becoming someone else for a few hours and drifting off in the immersion on our own minds. There were no limits imposed, no geographical boundaries to keep us from exploring anywhere our brains would allow us to go. When a choice needed to be made, or an evil being posed a threat in the D&D world, we always had our trusty dice. Each player with their own colored set purchased at the comic book store.

The people who never played simply looked down at us. They called us everything, nerds, geeks, losers. At the time it was hurtful and debilitating to have to deal with that in school, yet looking back its funny how we relish those days. When you're a teen going through the growing pains of popularity and the doldrums of the high school halls, you need a release. This was our release. None of us were truly athletic, and we didn't hang out in the parking lot smoking and drinking, and none of us had girlfriends so we did what we did and that was role-playing the glorious fantasy world of Dungeons and Dragons. It was our release from these cruel hurtful words, and the cruel hurtful world. It was our way of secretly getting back at them, by implementing the untimely demise of characters based on the people whom treated us like the outsiders we had become.

Looking back now, it all meant nothing. The silly names we were called, the types of harmless insults tossed at us, all a chuckle in the back of my mind. I'm proud to have been a geek at the age of sixteen, and I'm proud to be a geek now almost twenty years later. Having become an adult and learning through the years that people's views of me mean very, very little, the stigma of being a Dungeons and Dragons nerd has dropped off in my eyes. Of course, the kids playing today have to deal with the same views and the abundance of ignorance that we dealt with.

The games they play might have changed, and D&D is now pretty much dead in the world of pen and paper games, but it lives very much in the electronic age. The games like Everquest, World of Warcraft and Age of Conan all harken back to the same basic principles of creating a character, growing with that character and completing an epic quest to earn fame and fortune all while trying to save the world from some innate evil. I hope they get to look back one day and feel the way I feel.

We are all geeks, and we should all be proud.

Learn more about this author, Robert Pace.
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