The Big Picture: With Great Power

[NeedsaBetterName22]

Or, you know, we could accept the fact that entertainment choices don't necessarily coordinate with personal, social, economic or philosophical viewpoints, and abandon the idea of a 'geek culture' for what it truly is: a pathetic attempt at exclusivity driven by entertainment choice, an obsolete cultural backlash starting in the 80s driven by pseudo-intellectualism and superiority complexes (symptoms that Bob himself has, his rather condescending attacks on those that say, like Transformers films). Ultimately the very concept of a 'gamer' or 'geek' culture is inherently exclusive and driven by the belief that geeks are 'special'.

Honestly, why you'd shackle yourself to such a limiting cultural identity as 'geek' is beyond me. You're an individual for god's sake, your entertainment choices do not grant you some kind of arbitrary responsibility towards a nebulous and mushy concept like 'geek culture', nor does it make you somehow responsible for promoting social progressivism within a certain group.

TLR version: Fuck trying fix 'geek culture', it's an inherent promoter of arbitrary exclusivity, whether it be more traditional forms like sexism or racism, or the general intellectual superiority complex many self-described 'geeks' have.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

I'd say Bob is partially right, in that there's still a few people around who are convinced you can't call yourself a "geek" if you haven't been persecuted or marginalized. I always thought that perception was wrong. In the world we live in now, gadget fetishism and being hooked on some cult Sci-Fi TV show from Great Britain are qualifiers enough, and there's about hundreds more you could find out there. The "persecuted nerdy kid" imagery needs to go away - and not just for folks like us. I'm always peeved by kids' TV shows that use that trope to establish that the protagonist is a sympathetic underdog, for instance. Yes, underdogs still do exist, but I've gone through my entire high school and college years without being subjected to anything that even vaguely resembles a bully or a stereotypical jock.

As for us needing to change and become a force for good - aren't we already? I mean, divisive opinions can't be consistently avoided, and like it or not, racism, sexism and homophobia are going to keep permeating online gaming services. At this point, though, this has nothing to do with us anymore. Peer pressure is what's causing thirteen year-old kids or adults lacking some form of mental stimulation to think that calling some stranger a ****** or a "noob", even, is socially acceptable. IdrA, for instance, isn't so much a staple of the Starcraft community, in that you'll find hundreds of idiots who feel the need to trash-talk their way through any game whatsoever. They don't need to, of course - but psychological warfare has been more or less institutionalized into gaming culture. Otherwise we wouldn't have needed to cope with idiots like Aris Baktarians stinking up the fighting game scene.

"We" will keep maturing. "We" will be a force for good, yes - but Bob's a bit naive if he assumes we have the ability to take the bad seeds, give 'em a Carebear Stare and wash all that stupid bigotry and those exclusionary politics away. There's always going to be someone who's going to claim they have the ability to roost on a moral high ground right above us - because it's mostly unavoidable.

The long and short of it is pretty clear: just don't be this guy.
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[Dangit2019]

This isn't a 'geek culture problem'. This is a people problem.

This.

Bob, you know the supposedly larger-than-normal amount of nerds acting racist, sexist, or homophobic? Has the thought ever occurred to you that a lot of people in general like that and that this goes way beyond a made-up subset of Western culture?

 

[LittleRedCircles]

I would say that everybody in the world needs to see this, especially nerds, but I worry that the very thing that has led us to have this reaction in the first place would prevent many of the people Bob is calling out here from actually adhering to the idea in any significant way.

That said, I like to think of "trendy groups" like this one as having a life cycle not dissimilar to a person: we have progressed from the infantile "we just wanna have fun and play with our friends" to the childish "I don't understand why nobody likes me, I just like the stuff I like and now I'm lonely and sad" to, now, a rebellious teenage "these assholes were mean to me before so now I'm going to make everybody's life miserable because I CAN." Eventually, we as a geek culture will make it to adulthood and hopefully (cross your fingers), our "life experience" which is made up of the culture's entire history will allow us to grow into mature, responsible adults with a real handle on how to behave and how not to behave in order for things to be the way Bob opines here.

But as it stands, as much as I agree with all of his points (especially the thing about who the primary demographic making up geek culture has traditionally been), this entire video sort of feels like a parent lecturing a teenager about his or her potential and how he or she is not meeting it. True, but falling on deaf ears - at least for a few more proverbial years.

 

[Lilani]

Bob, you had me until the whole plight of the white heterosexual male geek.

Can someone please explain how/why so many self-identifying geeks think they're a special case or hold onto harassment or bullying for more than 10 minutes after being done with school?

Did you finish the video? Because what Bob eventually said about that was that geeks shouldn't hold onto that hatred after they grow up. That it's wrong for anyone to take the pain from their past and push it onto others. Yes bullying has happened and will continue to happen, but it should never lead to the exclusion or bullying of others.

 

[loudestmute]

One of the common themes of dissenting opinion to this video is effect vs. desire. I.e., "We never wanted to be mainstream culture, so that means we should be fighting against mainstream culture now that they took all our favorite things."

While I can understand why people could get angry at seeing some contemporary forms of nerd culture blatantly missing the point, I see no reason why we're openly hostile towards our dominance of popular media. We should be rejoicing that more people are interested in our favorite things. We should be grateful that we're no longer isolated islands amidst the streams of the internet.

Instead, we are drawing battle lines and acting as if the counterculture elements imposed on us are sacred to our enjoyment of the vidja games and summer action movies.

We spend so much of our time writing and saying such spiteful comments to anyone who would dare to be curious about our likes, our problems, our world, that we forgot what it was that brought us here in the first place.

A friend letting us in.

Maybe it was a kid on your street who was overjoyed to share their latest spoils from the comic book shop. Maybe a chess club in your teens where someone invited you to a game of DnD afterwards. Maybe in college you had a roommate who left you a seat on the couch anytime they brought home a new horror movie.

However you got here, I can pretty well guarantee you didn't spontaneously become a nerd. We let you in here. We've always had an open door policy. And we'll never have a reason to change that.

 

[Monsterfurby]

No. NO. NO. Defining yourself as part of "X culture" has NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING. It doesn't matter which group is in charge or which one belongs to. The very fact that some people feel the need to define themselves as part of a broader societal group IS THE PROBLEM. Geek/nerd culture can't be a better mainstream because it is a client-side phenomenon - it is a crutch to give certain people who are not confident enough to define themselves as themselves through association with a group.

GEEKDOM/NERDDOM ARE NOT IDEOLOGICAL, POLITICAL OR EVEN CULTURAL MOVEMENTS!

Look, I see where you are coming from, and from the perspective of a white US-American born in the early 80s, that might hold true. But from my perspective (if you want to go into the demographics here: German, born in 1988), this kind of view should not be perpetuated.

Admittedly, the observations concerning the changing mainsteam are absolutely right.

For all intents and purposes, I would be a Nerd/Geek. I do LARP. I play pen and paper RPGs. I play PC and console games most of my free time. Yet, I refuse to classify myself as such. All kinds of "persecution" I have suffered during my childhood by bullies is owed to my own personality and behavior, not because I belong to some ominous social class or culture of "geek/nerd" denomination. I work as a manager in a marketing department, for crying out loud, and never even so much as thought of hiding my hobbies in a job interview. I have LARP in my CV, and all that's elicited so far were very interested questions and a couple of "hey, a friend of mine does that too"s. I know half a dozen LARPing lawyers, local politicians and mid-level managers. And it's not just me - I know plenty of people who might fit this odd definition of "geek/nerd" but have never had a problem with that in adulthood.

Final conclusion: Geek/nerd-dom is a creation of our childhoods to account for the discrepancy between our parents telling us that we are "just right" and others telling us we were weak. But that had nothing to do with some sort of cultural membership, but with ourselves. We didn't want to see it, but there were plenty of jocks around who played RPGs and the likes as well. Since we hate to take responsibility, we try to make ourselves part of some greater persecuted group, and THAT IS DANGEROUS!

 

[Aardvaarkman]

What the dickens are you talking about?

Whilst yes, Metallica and Black Sabbath are widely appreciated outside of the metal community, they're the two biggest metal bands in history, which does not equate to metal or even a subgenre being accepted. When did I say what could and couldn't be metal either? You seem to have completely misunderstood what I was saying.

Well, you obviously didn't express yourself well, because you spoke of popular metal not being considered "metal" by the "real" metal culture. But now you say they are metal. Which means that metal has been accepted by the mainstream.

So, which is it?

 

[Combustion Kevin]

A persecuted bunch of people attain "power" and choose not to persecute others themselves.

That would be a first in human history Bob...

chaos theory says, it is not only possible...
it is inevitable.

 

[CrazyGirl17]

Well said, Bob.

First half of the video- Woo! Go geek culture!

Second half- While the notion of getting everyone to drop their prejudices is a good thought... I don't think it'll be that easy.

 

[NeedsaBetterName22]

No. NO. NO. Defining yourself as part of "X culture" has NEVER SOLVED ANYTHING. It doesn't matter which group is in charge or which one belongs to. The very fact that some people feel the need to define themselves as part of a broader societal group IS THE PROBLEM. Geek/nerd culture can't be a better mainstream because it is a client-side phenomenon - it is a crutch to give certain people who are not confident enough to define themselves as themselves through association with a group.

GEEKDOM/NERDDOM ARE NOT IDEOLOGICAL, POLITICAL OR EVEN CULTURAL MOVEMENTS!

Look, I see where you are coming from, and from the perspective of a white US-American born in the early 80s, that might hold true. But from my perspective (if you want to go into the demographics here: German, born in 1988), this kind of view should not be perpetuated.

Admittedly, the observations concerning the changing mainsteam are absolutely right.

For all intents and purposes, I would be a Nerd/Geek. I do LARP. I play pen and paper RPGs. I play PC and console games most of my free time. Yet, I refuse to classify myself as such. All kinds of "persecution" I have suffered during my childhood by bullies is owed to my own personality and behavior, not because I belong to some ominous social class or culture of "geek/nerd" denomination. I work as a manager in a marketing department, for crying out loud, and never even so much as thought of hiding my hobbies in a job interview. I have LARP in my CV, and all that's elicited so far were very interested questions and a couple of "hey, a friend of mine does that too"s. I know half a dozen LARPing lawyers, local politicians and mid-level managers. And it's not just me - I know plenty of people who might fit this odd definition of "geek/nerd" but have never had a problem with that in adulthood.

Final conclusion: Geek/nerd-dom is a creation of our childhoods to account for the discrepancy between our parents telling us that we are "just right" and others telling us we were weak. But that had nothing to do with some sort of cultural membership, but with ourselves. We didn't want to see it, but there were plenty of jocks around who played RPGs and the likes as well. Since we hate to take responsibility, we try to make ourselves part of some greater persecuted group, and THAT IS DANGEROUS!

Are you saying that the promotion of groups as a unit of study inherently breeds systems of exclusivity? If so then holy shit someone else gets it.

 

[erbkaiser]

This video was going so well for five minutes and I found myself agreeing with it... and then you use Sarkeesian to illustrate a point.
Rabid feminist man-haters are at least as much a part of the problem of sexism as the abhorrent examples you gave earlier, if not more so. In fact the likes of that woman have completely co-opted the ideal of equality between the sexes to the point where I instantly mistrust any woman labeling herself a 'feminist'.

 

[punipunipyo]

Agreed, Agreed, and Agreed... except for that "one lady who made hella money for her kick starter project" who didn't deliver much except looking at things narrow, and bending the context for her own argument... she were NOT from the game culture, she pretends to be... it's a lie, and we all paid for it to be made... her analysis are shallow and filled with female supremacy all over them, talking as if men are all self imposing- insecure- women fearing- sex fiends... Hell yeah I am offended by her speeches, hell... you should hear her talking about Bayonetta, and compare to your overthink episode...

I respect people who take time overthink things, but in her case, she feeds off other female-superiorisist, moms, anti gaming communities... to De-humanizing gaming as a "male sweating, guns blazing, boob shaking, fap fest", to me, that's sick, like Hitler calling Jews Rats, and rallying up haters everywhere, gathering funding on their crusade out to put people down.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Can someone please explain how/why so many self-identifying geeks think they're a special case or hold onto harassment or bullying for more than 10 minutes after being done with school?

Because harassment and bullying often has long-lasting effects, that can affect people for the rest of their lives. It also isn't confined to school. Harassment and bullying is also common in the workplace, and outside the workplace into adult years. The victims of bullying are often at a great disadvantage for employment and other social benefits, because of the personal problems it causes.

There are even plenty of documented cases of bullying and harassment in places like retirement homes and hospitals, where the participants are in the 60+ age range.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

A persecuted bunch of people attain "power" and choose not to persecute others themselves.

That would be a first in human history Bob...

chaos theory says, it is not only possible...
it is inevitable.

I seriously doubt this one will be it. Also almost anything is possible if given an indefinite time frame. I don't think we will be around long enough...

 

[Skeleon]

It's kind of interesting to me because of the parallels seen in the Atheist community, what with the whole feminism-issue and Atheism+ splitting groups apart. In a way, that's not surprising: Not only will Atheism correlate a lot with Geek culture because of certain overlaps (primarily white, male, heterosexual people who tend to be tech-savvy or at least -interested), there's also a lack of mainstream acceptance from others in some places and despite that there's a lack of acceptance towards others among us as well, like women, minorities etc.. I guess that's always a risk with tribalism. You can always find out-groups. And while we'd like to think of ourselves as better than, often we do revert to the same awful behaviours once we are in power, even if just within our localized group/environment.

 

[Axolotl]

Although the white knighting of anita never stops and has nothing to do with geeks acting like a wounded knee when someone critizes us. Its one of those flawed arguments, logical fallacies that both jim and bob holds, ie, that the only people critical of other peoples criticism towards geek culture are always the "trolls" and the "haters"
when in reality its actual intellectual people pointing out the logical fallacies and flawed arguments of said criticism towards geek culture which is very often the case.

Please show us what on earth you're talking about, because I'd love to see these "actual intellectual people" who feel the need to comment on something like tropes vs women. Because I really doubt it.

 

[Combustion Kevin]

A persecuted bunch of people attain "power" and choose not to persecute others themselves.

That would be a first in human history Bob...

chaos theory says, it is not only possible...
it is inevitable.

I seriously doubt this one will be it. Also almost anything is possible if given an indefinite time frame. I don't think we will be around long enough...

that's so pessimistic. ^^

think of it this way: are you an accepting and reasonable human being?
yes.
then keep at it.

are your friends too?
yes.
then things are already looking alright.

 

[NeedsaBetterName22]

What the fuck did I just watch?

Is America seriously THAT different from the UK?

Were films like Revenge of the Nerds actually based on real life?

Because over here, you could play Warhammer and Rugby. Get good grades in school and have a good social life.

It was never a one or the other deal, there was no segregation. You just had people that got on and people that didn't. My group of friends had everything from keen sport fanatics to people who Maths enthusiasts. And we all got on fine.

There was no marginalisation based on cliques that to be honest, barely existed past the first year of secondary school.

I just can't relate to this sort of thing. I was never considered an outcast because I liked comics or computers. No one was, even amongst people who didn't share the interests.

Playing board games didn't somehow stop me from playing Sports.

Methinks there might be a little projection occurring in that particular part of the piece. Hell, I grew up in a rural redneck town in Canada, played D&D and Magic in the lunchroom after school with football players. Introversion is often seen by others as marginalization as well, even if it's the individual's choice to do so. Of course when one is crafting arbitrary cultural identities one often pulls from one's experiences. Marginalization for entertainment choices is a driving force of identity for the 'geek culture'; too bad its based on individual experience.