Good Morning Friends, this is going to be a bit of a weird post but it was spurred in my head by watching a long-form video essay last night, or more so listening to it… while I played a game. First off I feel like I need to begin with a number of disclaimers. This is a blog post from my specific perspective, which is inspired by watching a video from a wildly different perspective. My thoughts come from the place of being a white male gamer born in 1976, which creates specific biases and experiences. If you were not white and not male, you’re experience potentially felt different. The last thing I am trying to do here is sugarcoat an oppressive system or apply a coat of rose-tinted varnish.
Over the years though I have struggled a bit with the terms Geek and Gamer because as time has passed those terms mean far less than they once did as far as describing a particular experience. I am not saying this is a bad thing, and in truth, it is a very good thing because today geeks and gamers have way more opportunities and varied experiences than they ever did before. However it feels different and given that the video above comes from the perspective of someone on the cusp of the millennial and zoomer boundary, and mine comes from a decidedly “Gen X” background I still found the similar but different experiences interesting.
I think one of the pivotal defining aspects of growing up a geek in the 80s and 90s was how rare it was to find a geek property. Lady Hawke for example was effectively a romance movie, but given at the time it was so rare to have access to anything even vaguely fantasy-related… I am pretty certain that geeks of a specific age have watched this film more than once. I think the same is true for a lot of geek adjacent media that came out over the years, which lead to a sort of shared culture and experience brought on by scarcity. I remember being somewhat excited about the completely awful made-for-TV David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie… because it was Nick Fury… in a movie, something that I never thought I would actually see. My teen mind could not fathom ever getting the Marvel mega-franchise that has taken place over the last few decades.
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There is a reason why geeks of a certain age revere certain franchises in the way that they do… because we had to exist on fumes for decades. I know I personally watched a ton of low-budget Horror films because they were exploring the sorts of themes I was interested in, which eldritch horrors coming to life to wreak havoc on the populace. The stuff of science fiction was pushed to sources of low repute, and I gobbled it up in desperation. Every so often we would get thrown a bone in the form of a movie like “The Crow” that drew its roots to comic books or otherwise geek media, but those were truly few and far between. This tapestry of desperation had led most of us to watch a lot of the same things and have a similar shared media landscape. If you lived in a small town like I did, it was escalated by the fact that media was hard to come by, which lead folks to dub off bootleg copies and spread them around among their friends.
The same was true on the video game side of this equation. Gamers of a certain age likely remember playing the gold box series of D&D games from SSI, or the completely nonsensically awful Nintendo Entertainment System ports of those games. I ravenously consumed Ultima, Final Fantasy, Drakkhen, and pretty much anything roleplaying adjacent I could get my hands on. I did not get access to a computer until 1991, but when I did I went through a whole renaissance of discovery of games I missed along the way. I remember the release of Wolfenstein 3D and it completely blew my mind, and when Doom came out… it was an almost life-changing experience.
I mean for decades we would have moments where geek and gamer culture would flirt with the mainstream, but never quite break through. The turning point for me was really when Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition was released and the entire D20 system. Living through this was weird because suddenly you saw gigantic kiosks of reasonably priced books everywhere. Prior to the launch of this system, you had to go to either a comic book store or a dedicated game store to get your pen and paper fix, but now in the middle of Barnes and Noble were aisles of prime real estate selling copies of the three core books for $15-20 each instead of the previous $40-50 each. Having survived the Satanic Panic, and the era of having to hide your roleplaying game books from parents… I was completely flabbergasted seeing these things not only in public but prominently advertised.
The video I linked above specifically pointed to The Guild as the origin of the rise of geek culture, but for me by the time that happened the ball had already been rolling. For the first time in my life, I felt truly seen as a geek and gamer. However, it also diluted the potency of what those things meant. For most of my life reading comics, playing video games, reading fantasy novels, and obsessing about science fiction branded me a member of an underclass. I don’t have quite as many harrowing stories of abuse at the hands of peers as some members of my generation do, but I did develop a hearty dislike towards the jock supermen that ran the defacto social structure. Suffice to say though that it was really fucking weird to see the things we practiced in the dark for fear of safety, being drug out into the light for all to see.
However, it also set up this weird dichotomy where if everyone was a geek and interested in geeky things… was anyone really a geek? There had almost developed a tribal language shared among geek culture as a sign that you were “among friends” and could loosen up and talk shop, and the signals started to get a bit confused. In the 90s if you saw someone wearing a Vampire the Masquerade T-Shirt, you knew without a doubt that you had found a member of your tribe. If they had a D&D players handbook or a copy of Shadowrun tucked in their book bag… then you might have just met a brand new lifelong best friend. The shared social fabric was so strong in part because there was so little material for us to consume. Now that geek culture was blowing up… the shared narrative also disappeared and what geek meant to each person was wildly different.
It was admittedly a bit of an adjustment when I realized that this shared experience that I had and that my friends had… was not as “shared” as I thought it was. That this culture that I found safety in, was openly harmful to so many. As Geek culture became mainstream, it to some extent failed to realize that it was becoming mainstream. I know for me personally, growing up feeling like the underdog… made it really hard to reconcile that I was no longer the underdog and in fact held way more power than I ever realized I held. Some folks never got that memo or had that realization and started to weaponize this “sense of oppression” into an exceptionally toxic culture of gatekeeping. It was a ball rolling down the hill gaining momentum and reaching its horrific crescendo with GamerGate.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped “feeling seen” and started “feeling exploited”. It is weird how Funko Pops for me is the focal point of this shift. When they first came into existence I thought they were pretty cool. As a kid, I wanted nothing more than He-Man, GI Joe, and Star Wars to all be on the same scale and be interchangeable so that all of the geek properties that I loved could exist in the same universe. Funko did this and created a ubiquitous look and feel… and happened to gather up all of these properties that I loved. Then over time combined with the deluge of so many figures every single year… I noticed how mass-produced everything felt.
The video specifically calls out Loot Crate, but it is even more than that. Walmart has an entire aisle now with nothing but merchandise tailored towards geek properties. I remember my jaw dropping and hitting the floor the first time when I saw a Dungeons and Dragons boxed set in Target. “Geek” is now the new “Sports” memorabilia and you can get a triforce branded on any item you can imagine. Our passion for these properties we grew up with, and that were the source of deep emotional bonding moments… are now being churned out and mass produced. The industrial machine does what it always does and finds a way to market its products to every generation. We are in the era of video games and geekery, and as a result, everything is applied with a coat of nostalgia to sell to that specific sensibility.
The wake-up call though is this foundational identity that I have carried with me into my soon-to-be late forties… isn’t really a thing. I’ve branded myself a gamer and a geek, and I find myself increasingly questioning what those two titles even mean right now. At a point in the past, they did have specific meanings associated with it but are no longer quite the cultural monolith that I thought them to be. Every gamer and every geek now has wildly different experiences associated with those words. The truth is… I don’t want to rebel against that notion but instead, embrace it. It is maybe time for those labels to die. If everyone is a gamer and everyone is a geek, then no one is really either and we are just people doing the things we love. There should be more people happy to share the things that they love in life. Hopefully, in time the toxicity will also fade and we can be okay with just liking the things we like, and not caring what others think about them.
So, this is a topic close to my heart as a genre-specialist librarian. I have talked a lot over the last decade (at least) about the death of genre as a thing and how important that is. I could write an entire essay here on the subject but I won’t. I just want to say that I agree that we are in a time of access and with access comes the breaking down of borders and classifications. It happens all the time in different areas and it is starting to come to fruition for “geek” culture. We librarians have watched this happen for a long time in science-fiction, horror, and other “niche” genres as they become more open to variety and width of subject matter and with the rise of metadata the need for such genres is quickly vanishing and I think it is the same with “geek” and “gamer”. There are other special clubs now that will mean the same thing to people when they turn 40 in 20 years.
Maybe it’s because I’m a few years younger and/or maybe it’s because this was different here – but I don’t remember experiencing any of this, really. In the mid- to late 90s TT RPGs were an absolute niche, but in my circle it was pretty widespread and there was no outside badmouthing that I can remember (except my dad not being enthusiastic).
I mean, I’m pretty glad I didn’t really experience what you described (for the past), but so I guess I’m not really fussed about what’s happening now, but yeah, it’s a bit of a weird feeling to be on the mainstream side…
Maybe it was different in the US but in the UK I never felt there was much solidarity between the various fandoms. I was primarily a comics fan and secondarily an SF fan and those two fandoms held each other in something close to mutual contempt. About the only thing they agred on was that roleplayers were the absolute worst.
Even within fandoms there were numerous cliques with little time for each other. The eighties saw a surge in independent comics and the people writing, drawing, publishing and buying those kept themselves very separate from the Marvel and DC fans (Not that those two were always on speaking terms…). Then there was a whole separate fandom dedicated to British Comics, most of whom were generally shunned.
I never really heard the term “Geek” as it’s now used until after I started online gaming. Probably not until well into the noughties. I don’t remember anyone using it either affectionally or pejoratively in the 70s, 80s or 90s. In fact, I don’t recall any specific terms of identity or abuse other than “fan” and “fandom”, both of which could be applied either way.
I think you strike an important point on the head. What Bel talks about here was a very specific time and place, especially prevalent in the bible belt of the U.S. During this same period of time other countries were already past the whole thing. Much of this stemmed from two big cultural things that happened in the US I think: Satanic Panic and the battle over Rock Music.
This kind of created these two groups of “gamers/geeks” and “metalheads” that then started creating even more cliques. I know that my brother didn’t see this type of thing in 70s either. Sure there were cliques but nothing quite so “dangerous” as they became in the 80s and 90s. Bel and I grew up in the same town and I think the experience of trying to get MTV onto the local cable service was very similar and something a wider group of people might understand. I think, luckily or unluckily, that the metal heads and stoners were just not as bullied as geeks were, maybe because they were more outwardly “scary?” I don’t know.
Whatever it was, for a decidedly large group of kids in middle america there was a lot of this “tribe seeking” that went on, and it was always a bit precarious and obfuscated, especially within the RPG community.
So do true. And thanks for the Bab 5 photo. Gave me a smile. I’m turning 60 at the end of the year. I’ve been around video gaming from its infancy. My dad worked for RCA if any can remember that company. He liked electronics, so of course he got wind of this new thing coming called Pong, and then we got our Atari 2600, “with the difficulty switches”. Lol. I use to drive my sister nuts playing tanks. I found one spot where you could ricochet to the spot she was at and would always win. I had the handheld games, more Atari cartridges than I care to think about that are long gone. It didn’t matter if you were a boy or girl, having a console just meant everyone would want to come to your house if the weather was bad. I never really went beyond Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Play Station 1&2. It started getting too costly. You have to keep in mind, when I started working full time I was only making $5.50 an hour. So dropping the kind of cash games cost back then was a big decision. For a time I got into the miniatures gaming. Games Workshop got a lot of my income, then there were the collectible card games, and Wizards of the coast. Occasionally we would play some D&D but getting older, working full time, you start finding it hard to spend the time needed for those epic games. I remember having 3 sheets of plywood set up in the basement making an 8 foot x 12 foot table so we could play huge Battletech campaigns, that lead to 5-10,000 point Warhammer battles. We would play 8 hours on a Saturday then come back the next week to continue. The local geek store had its denizens, but we never cared if you were a guy or a girl. You liked playing games, and that automatically made you all right and cool. I really don’t think that I noticed any real moments where women were singled out until in played Warcraft. Then it was common to see the comment “girls don’t play video games”. I do recall the whole gamergate thing, but from where I was on Twitter, I was an outlier, it was incomprehensible to me. I do see that the people that play now are a lot different than I am. They have different priorities, want more things from the games, and want them to reflect the real world. And that’s strange to me. But maybe that’s because I’m an old white dude. Anyway. Sorry to ramble, just a trip down memory Lane for me.