Nerds and Gaming

[Trunkage]

I'm trying to remember stuff that I had to research for a sociology class. I got to do a lecture on this a while later so it was at least deemed resaonable by an academic. It's no longer something I look at (for well over a decade.)

During the AIDS epidemic, there was a was desire to prove your healthiness to a potential partner. Remember that AIDS is a wasting disease so unhealthily would be scrawny (not overweight like today). Hence we had the hypermasculine phase that Arnie is well known for. It's where some people got the idea that women were looking for mascular men as a good partner (even though it was actually men looking for a partner) and which is generally held as not true (there definitely can be too many muscles for most women.)

Any effeminate man was deemed gay (hence some gay men really embracing that stereotype and over emphasising their 'feminine' side, Queer Eye style to distance themselves from hetero.) Nerds got caught up in this, not being 'real men' and all (I.e. Hypermasculine.) But they were eventually able to distance themselves from gay men, even if they still had that stigma. Mainly becuase people realised that hetero men could get aids too. So anyone not looking healthy was a threat. So you spending time away from the gym is seen as sickly. One aspect is the video games, which other people have explained.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Fun fact: first documented use of the word 'nerd' was in Dr. Seuss' 1950 book If I Ran The Zoo, where it was the name of an imaginary creature.

I think I heard that somewhere. I also heard that "geek" used to mean something completely different.

True, "geek" used to refer to a performer in a "geek show", which is an act in a travelling carnival or circus where some poor sod chased around live chickens in the center ring, ending with him biting the chickens' heads off and swallowing them. It was usually the opening act for a freak show.

"Nerd" also used to mean something different back in the early 50s. It was a synonym for a "square", i.e. a conventional, conservative person.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

When exactly was that? For reference I was born in 1981 so I was around during the 80's.

Then you were around for it, the year you were born a usual home PC cost about $1,000 to $1500, the equivalent to roughly $4000 today, if you wanted a kitted out IBM home computer in 1981 you would pay over $3000, over $8500 today adjusted for inflation in American dollars. Just a few years before you were born, the domain of PC games was computers that only computer labs on college campuses could afford, so mainly they were played by computer sciences majors playing chess one move at a time over the earliest prototypes of what would become the internet.

The early to mid 80's were an era where you had to know how to load and install from Pre-DOS and eventually commands on DOS systems, and sometimes the games were literally code written out in computer magazines that you manually entered in to the system, you basically programmed your own game based on pictures and diagrams. Where if you wanted a disk you couldn't buy one from a store, you literally had to mail a physical letter in to a magazine you were subscribed to.

The stereotype was not because of people that weren't even 10 years old when the 80's ended, it was because of adults that were playing video games back then, it was considered a very niche hobby, you had your arcade breakthroughs, Asteroid, Pac-Man etc., they were popular but those were technological curiosities you played in a bar and sunk some quarters in to every once in a while, not something you did as a regular hobby, a very niche interest in technology is generally what got adults the nerd label back then.

Home consoles were generally sold in toy magazines and catalogues, squarely targeted at kids, if you were an adult buying a home console in the 80's and it wasn't for your kids, other adults would look at it like a 30 year old collecting Pokemon cards today, usually not bad or wrong, but a bit odd and something most adults would have thought they would grow out of.

That's where it comes from, nerd is generally a term that started out referring to someone with a niche technical interest and usually involved some technical skill, so the nerd label got attached to video games
What Hollywood exaggerated was the level of hostility society had towards "nerds", and pop culture then attached the label to kids that played games in to the 90's despite the fact that the level of technical knowledge required to play games dropped drastically as time went on.

Spoiler: this is the kind of thing you did to play computer games in the 80's

So what I'm getting from this is that a lot of it is a Hollywood misconception, which is hardly a surprise since Hollywood or the Entertainment media in general doesn't understand gaming culture or technology to this day.
Of course that doesn't explain why that misconception has been embraced by so many people.

 

[Avnger]

When exactly was that? For reference I was born in 1981 so I was around during the 80's.

Spoiler: long but good post

Then you were around for it, the year you were born a usual home PC cost about $1,000 to $1500, the equivalent to roughly $4000 today, if you wanted a kitted out IBM home computer in 1981 you would pay over $3000, over $8500 today adjusted for inflation in American dollars. Just a few years before you were born, the domain of PC games was computers that only computer labs on college campuses could afford, so mainly they were played by computer sciences majors playing chess one move at a time over the earliest prototypes of what would become the internet.

The early to mid 80's were an era where you had to know how to load and install from Pre-DOS and eventually commands on DOS systems, and sometimes the games were literally code written out in computer magazines that you manually entered in to the system, you basically programmed your own game based on pictures and diagrams. Where if you wanted a disk you couldn't buy one from a store, you literally had to mail a physical letter in to a magazine you were subscribed to.

The stereotype was not because of people that weren't even 10 years old when the 80's ended, it was because of adults that were playing video games back then, it was considered a very niche hobby, you had your arcade breakthroughs, Asteroid, Pac-Man etc., they were popular but those were technological curiosities you played in a bar and sunk some quarters in to every once in a while, not something you did as a regular hobby, a very niche interest in technology is generally what got adults the nerd label back then.

Home consoles were generally sold in toy magazines and catalogues, squarely targeted at kids, if you were an adult buying a home console in the 80's and it wasn't for your kids, other adults would look at it like a 30 year old collecting Pokemon cards today, usually not bad or wrong, but a bit odd and something most adults would have thought they would grow out of.

That's where it comes from, nerd is generally a term that started out referring to someone with a niche technical interest and usually involved some technical skill, so the nerd label got attached to video games
What Hollywood exaggerated was the level of hostility society had towards "nerds", and pop culture then attached the label to kids that played games in to the 90's despite the fact that the level of technical knowledge required to play games dropped drastically as time went on.

Spoiler: this is the kind of thing you did to play computer games in the 80's

So what I'm getting from this is that a lot of it is a Hollywood misconception, which is hardly a surprise since Hollywood or the Entertainment media in general doesn't understand gaming culture or technology to this day.
Of course that doesn't explain why that misconception has been embraced by so many people.

This idea of videogames being for nerds only is really only embraced by a small number of people. It seems larger because all of us here are so immersed in the hobby.

There's really only one reason why it has been embraced by those people though: it provides an us vs them grouping. People within gaming have embraced it because it allows an "us vs the world" narrative they can hide within and exclude others from. People outside of gaming have embraced it because it gives a group of people that can be easily dismissed or looked down on.