Super Nerd Sundays Presents: What's In A Subculture?

My computer has been doing some crazy shit for reasons unknown lately. It could be that my Windows installation was corrupted, or that my power supply burned out partially during a heat wave and is now mis-delivering power to all of my sub-systems. Most likely the latter, actually, but I won’t know until Mushkin sends me the replacement they so kindly agreed to send me.

So right now I’m without a current generation computer. Which means, because of my relative poverty, I’m without a competitive platform on which to play games. I don’t have an X-Box Live subscription at present (I’d need to spend $50 and lay some extra cable, something I have zero desire to do) and my old computer is great for porn and occasionally playing The Path, but I shudder to think what it would do if I used Demigod on it. Probably brick as well.

Anyhow, living without a PC for these last six hours has given me a lot of time to think. Normally this process is abstracted by virtual violence, but without the healthy drip-drip of the IV of video games in to my arm I’ve been forced to confront these thoughts directly, thoughts of just what it means to be a “nerd” in contemporary culture.

There seems to be a large divide about just which word is appropriate for you as a person, mostly centered outside of the subculture itself. People within the subculture see Nerd as the appropriately acquired term, as displayed proudly in such cultural movements as nerdcore hip hop and the proud declaration by many people the internet over that they are huge fucking nerds and proud of it, thank you very much.

But if you wander outside out culture “geek” seems to become appropriate to some people, despite its less elegant etymological roots. The OED shows that nerd emerged from Seussian non-sense, the perfect place for many in our rarified subculture to find roots, while geek was derived from the old English geck, meaning fool, which has since its acquisition been used to apply to everyone from the retarded to circus freaks before coming to rest on pursuers of knowledge. Of course, only a nerd would ever find this distinction and, more importantly, care, so it’s easy to understand why people would use the incorrect term.

But I digress.

Being a nerd has changed a lot since I was a kid. It’s no longer a topic of somewhat secret shame. Maybe that comes from growing older, but here in the real world I can see that smart people, on occasion, run shit. Not all of the time. I briefly spent a stint at the entry level in the world of high finance and let me assure you, intelligence is a currency there of slightly lower value than the ruble. But for the most part our culture has slowly come to value the ability of individuals to parse and manage bits and pieces off esoteric information, even outside of academia.

Enter nerdhood, which seems to exist entirely in opposition to academic structure. Currency in nerdhood is based on a seemingly ephemeral quality of “nerd cred,” generated through a combination of knowledge, creativity and proximity to people with those qualities. Granted, when I say it out loud, it doesn’t sound too opposed to academia, and academic credentials are a great way to get started in nerdhood (Dr. Bruce Geryk, anyone?) but unlike academia’s publish or perish environment, currency in nerdhood seems to depend on creating a quality body of work or approach to the world, rather than a continuous and developing one.

Erik Wolpaw could stick on his ass for five years and still be revered as one of our people. His creative contributions are just that important. It’s a community of artists with an academic mindset, then, that we seem to have established.

But that doesn’t really sum up who we are or what we are. It doesn’t really back that title, because we’re a community of slackers and dropouts. Our luminaries are all great examples of this. Tom Chick went to Harvard Divinity School and gave up the cloth. Jerry Holkins never graduated from college, Mike Krahuliak and Scott Kurtz never attended. And all too often we hear the success stories of the bedroom coders for whom school was never the focus, the people who abandoned conventional means to strike out on their own.

There are examples to the contrary, but they’re few and far between. The aforementioned Dr. Geryk is a good one, along with Ken Levine. Stephen Spielberg might even be on his way in to our trinity, but he’ll have to try a lot harder. The man seems to get games, according to the interviews I’ve seen (Tom Chick’s piece with him surrounding Boom Blox is a nice eye opener, and Spielberg’s take on Call of Duty 4 is certainly worth mulling over), but his creativity seems to focused on the commercially viable rather than the unnervingly honest.

And that’s where the divide between nerdhood and general culture seems to emerge: we don’t know when to shut up. Most people take steps to avoid offending the majority of human beings. Certainly not everyone, but most people who are interested in presenting a cogent viewpoint are concerned with alienating the people they’re trying to sway. If they produce a work of art they want it to resonate with as many people as possible. Not so much with games.

Our creative visionaries are a little bit introverted for the most part, if not outright caustic at times. Watch Dave Jaffe on Bonus Round if you want a great example of this. That man says fuck like it’s his job, and at one point calls Michael Patcher a prick. But his creative contributions and his stock in the nerd community are both undeniable. Jaffe is a smart motherfucker and he makes things true to his heart and his experiences as a person. He’s just kind of a dick.

The same way that Tim Schaeffer is an inveterate weirdo, the way that Wil Wright is kind of a douchebag or that Dennis Dyack is a huge tool. These people, and their creative contributions to our culture, are undeniable. But in any ordinary community they’d be fringe players, not established names. But there they are, offending people left and right. And we watch it, tolerate it, even like it in our own way, because they’re our people. They’re smart and they don’t give a fuck about their quirks. Their quirks are inextricable from their creations. To paraphrase what is perhaps the only good line of dialogue in Assassin’s Creed: who they are and what they do are bound too closely together.

And that’s us and our culture in a nutshell. We are functioning social dysfunctionals; smart funny people without an agenda who just like doing our thing. We’re the product of a world gone mad, and we’re the sanest people in it because we’ve learned to stop concerning ourselves with the opinions of others as generalities and look at them in specific terms. Some of us have, at least, the people who seem to use the term nerd to refer to themselves and tout it as a positive element of their character.

And when you come down to it that’s the sort of person I’m talking about here. Not the football obsessive who sees fantasy sports as a totally normal social endeavor, wholly separate from D&D. Not the dipshit who knows that ska is coming back soon. Not the overweight Asian kid who spends all his time playing Tekken and has no idea why women don’t find his 15 hit combo chains more engaging.

I’m talking about the chemistry professors who see the world in terms of thermodynamics and action movies. I’m talking about the people who turns Settlers of Catan into a drinking game. I’m talking about the people who puzzle over the correct font in which to set their poem. These are the people who will pony up to being nerds, who totally understand why society at large has no regard or need for them and who don’t give a shit.

Because nerds have started to grow up as a cultural group. We’ve got our own tree house, and it’s bigger than yours (one room in it is the size of Sweden, actually). We’ve got our own paper route, and it’s bringing in way more money than yours (in fact it’s treading water during a recession where blue chip stocks have been tanking left and right). We’ve got our own crushes and celebrities and people we love to hate.

We’ve even got our own god. His name is Shigeru Miyamoto and if you don’t love him you are a heretic by the standards of any nerd.

So basically what I’m saying is that nerdhood is defined by embracing what makes you you, and moreover giving in to the passion you feel for these things. So join our swelling ranks, cool kids. Give in to your love for French etymology, your painstaking pursuit of perfect cake batter. Quit showering for a weekend to finish building that computer, and skip a night of sleep to finish that Gibson novel.

We’ll be here to salute you and accept you, warts and all. The only rule is that you can’t think you’re cool. Otherwise none of us could get in here.