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.

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.