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I met Ethan when he decided to write up an article about Second Skin for the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Ever the gracious reporter he did a fantastic review, and told me all about his then nascent project called “Escape Artists”. It was a book that would have elements about virtual worlds, geeks, gamers, and all sorts of nerd culture. 1/2 travel diary and 1/2 pop culture investigation eventually the concept became the book “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks”.
After playing Dungeons & Dragons religiously in the 1970s and 1980s, Ethan Gilsdorf went on to become a poet, teacher, critic and journalist. In the U.S. and in Paris, he’s worked as a freelance correspondent, guidebook writer, and film, book and restaurant reviewer. He publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Christian Science Monitor, and has been published in dozen of other magazines and newspapers worldwide, including National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Australia Financial Review, USA Today and the Washington Post. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, his blog “Geek Pride” is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com, and he also blogs for Boston.com’s Globetrotting, Tor.com and TheOneRing.net.
Welcome Ethan, we’re proud to have you join our ranks and blog for Popten. Also join Ethan, Victor, Sean Stalzer (Guildmaster of the Syndicate), and myself later this month at PAX East (March 26-28th) for a panel called “MMO gamer behavior 101”. We’ll be talking about why people love WoW and other MMOs. What exactly is it about these games that explains their massive appeal? And how do individual player and guilds behave online, and why might their behavior differ online versus the real world?
