A review by gengelcox
Baldur's Gate II by Matt Bell

funny informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

This is the best Boss Fight book yet—at least, the best written, although I learned a lot about the game, which I had not played, as well. The pleasure here is to be found in Bell’s wonderful exegesis of his childhood and coming-of-age as a writer, in prose that is often surprising and even lyrical at times. This is not faint praise (see my reviews of other books in the Boss Fight or 33 1/3 series). Your mileage may vary: it may be that Bell’s experience and struggles with coming to terms with his geek childhood and his adult aspirations simply hit home with me, as I’ve debated these same issues with myself over the past three decades.

I have to use some examples to illustrate how good this book is. At one point, Bell reflects on his childhood: “By my senior year of high school, I knew I was sheltered, restricted, kept safe, a kid of chaotic good alignment not because I had chosen to be good but because I hadn’t been given much room to be bad.” I understood this completely. I wrote a story a few years ago called “One of the Band” where I explored the same concept, except in my case I used music and alcohol as the jumping off point for exploring danger. He explains how his love for D&D video games filled his days, giving him an escape and letting him explore being dark and dangerous safely, but in retrospect he now realizes it was a very limited experience. “What does it mean to look back on your life and realize it must have been worse than you thought? What is the opposite of nostalgia, where in hindsight objects and events can only diminish?”

Unlike his brother, who shared his childhood forays into fantasy, Bell put that aside as he went to college, focusing instead on trying to write what was expected of an English and Creative Writing professor, the fantasy of realism. At one point, a conversation with his friend, Matthew Simmons, turned to the subject of D&D, as Matthew had met an editor at Wizards of the Coast, who owned the rights at the time, and who had invited Matthew to pitch a book. Matthew proposed they collaborate, resulting in a successful pitch and advance for The Last Garrison. In order to better understand the current D&D environment, Bell joins a campaign run by his brother who games with his wife and another family member.  In the family D&D campaign, Bell’s wife has to drop him off at his brother’s as well as pick him up at the end of the session, one night showing up before they had finished, to her chagrin: 

I looked up occasionally to see my wife watching aghast from across the room. On the way home, I burned with embarrassment whenever she looked over at me, an increasingly bemused expression on her face. She’d seen too much and we both knew it. Finally, she joked, “You know this is going to make you unfuckable for a few weeks, right?” And so in many ways playing D&D as an adult wasn’t different than playing it as a teenager. 

Bell also uses the advance money to pay for a workshop with Gordon Lish, the famed editor who chopped away at Raymond Carver’s work. “It felt like a fateful bit of luck that the financial cost of Lish’s class was exactly the same as my advance from Wizards of the Coast. And so my advance made it possible for me to attend without too much financial burden, most likely making me the only person ever to pay for one of Lish’s classes with money earned writing about elves..” The experience forced him to confront his anxiety about his past and what he wanted from the future: 

Another wound I continue to carry is the deep shame I sometimes feel about who I was and what I was interested in when I was a child, as a teenager, as an adult: how the fantasy novels and the role-playing and the video games don’t match cleanly to the image I’ve tried to cultivate as a ‘serious’ man, as a writer of fiction, a professor, and an editor….This book you’re holding is one way for me to say, This is who I was. It is also, in almost every important way, still who I am.”

There’s much more here including an exploration of what it means to see yourself through a game avatar, the difficult choices forced upon you to meet game goals, and how even games like those by BioWare, which try to explore moral choices, still fail because everything is still regulated by numbers and random dice rolls. The fact that our imaginations can make these characters live and breath—in both video games and books—is a testament to our empathy, and one of best aspects of humanity.