Geeking Out and Speaking Out
It’s Speak Out With Your Geek Out week! I have some thoughts.
First, awesome! All for it. Something close to ten years ago now, I read a really good piece about presenting your roleplaying hobby to non-gamers without fear, guilt or shame and the various socially dysfunctional behaviors that go with those emotions. That is, normalizing it as an enthusiasm. The post was by, yes, Ron Edwards, and appeared on, yes, the Forge. It did me an enormous amount of good over the years, so when I play the word association game with “Ron Edwards” I think of that piece well before I think of B**** D*****.
The core of Ron’s treatment was that he (had learned to?) discuss gaming with people the exact same way he discussed his martial arts studies. If you study martial arts, you don’t assume people are going to look down on you for it. You aren’t afraid to be known as a martial arts student, so you’re not unconsciously adopting appeasement behaviors or preemptive disdain before you even start speaking. You know martial arts is interesting, and you think other people will have some degree of openness or not to hearing about it, but you also don’t assume they want to know every goddam thing about it. (“Let me tell you about my kata . . . “)
This would be a much better post if I took the time to find that link, huh?
Anyway. I have managed to adopt this as my way of being a gamer in the world. I’ve found it has helped my life. I can’t, in good conscience, promise it will do the same for you – we should talk about that – but it might.
What this means in practical terms:
- I don’t go out of my way to work roleplaying games into random conversations
- But I don’t avoid the subject or talk around them either
- In a mixed group – with at least one other gamer and non-gamers – I won’t leave the gamer to twist in the wind if talk turns to gaming
- I don’t take any crap about it
- I don’t assume any crap I get is other than “the usual crap”
Let’s unpack that a bit:
Not avoiding the subject but not going out of the way to insert it. If someone asks if I can make an improv rehearsal on my gaming night, I say, “Can’t. It’s my gaming night.” If someone at work asks what I did over the weekend and I gamed, I say, along with whatever else I may have done, “I gamed.” If they want more details, I’ll explain that it was this roleplaying game or that minicon. If they want still more details, I do my best. If they don’t want more details, I let it rest. I don’t necessarily want to hear about their golf games either.
Not letting other gamers “twist in the wind.” Very occasionally, I’ll be in a social situation where someone else outs themselves as a gamer or gets outed in a group of mostly non-gamers. And sometimes, because we all have histories, that person will be expressing some shade of fear, guilt or shame. I will always, always, add a “cool, me too” early in the conversation. I’ve seen occasional confessions by someone who let another gamer struggle in a social situation to avoid getting “the geek stink” on themselves. I will be a lot of crummy things and commit my share of shameful acts, but I won’t be that guy.
“Not taking crap” vs. “It’s just the usual crap.” I’m a middle-aged white man who has, in the words of the classic Monster.com commercial, “clawed my way up to middle management.” My SES and industry do not lack for other middle-aged, or younger, white men, and men generally. And men give each other shit. I have lived my life with more than my share of masculine anxiety, but at some point I noticed that, dudes will needle you about whatever. I have caught myself doing this myself. (I’ve worked really hard to do less of it, with mixed success.)
Point being, on those surprisingly rare occasions when some – dammit, I have struggled to avoid using this word all post and it’s too much work! – mundane* decides to bust my chops a little bit, I remind myself that this is not necessarily some unique affliction gaming brings on. The same guy could as easily be dogging me about almost anything.
It’s not that “it doesn’t mean anything.” Male-male jibing is a cultural practice pregnant with meaning. (Ha ha! See what I did there?) But central to its meaning is several different tests. And the way you pass those tests is by neither knuckling under nor going nuclear. The simple statement, “I have a lot of fun gaming,” spoken like I imagine Ron Edwards would speak it, has handled every such situation that has actually come up.
Should it fail, I will karate-chop them like I imagine Ron Edwards would karate-chop them.
Things this way of life has taught me.
Number One With A Bullet – Nobody has any idea what “roleplaying games” are! This is an underrated reason why people aren’t going to make fun of you for playing RPGs. Even after they find out you play them, they don’t know what you do.
Here, by the way, is where I fail at perfect adherence to the above principles. I’ve always accepted that the easiest way to explain “what that is” once we’ve gotten that far in the conversation is to remind them that D&D exists. Most people have heard of D&D, though you’d be surprised how many people haven’t. But owing to various circumstances, I don’t really play D&D myself. I’ve been in three sessions of some version of D&D in the last six years or so. So I feel compelled to then add that “While D&D is the most famous RPG, I personally . . . ” – and at this point, I have my choice of unbecoming ways to over-explain.
The hipster option – ” . . . play more obscure RPGs. You probably haven’t heard of them.”
The snooty option – ” . . . play games with more focus on story/character/numinositousness.”
The TMI option – ” . . . play games primarily in other genres like [enumerated list with N items] because the hobby has games that cover practically any genre you could imagine including 19th-Century novels and I should probably have stuck a period in there somewhere, shouldn’t I have?”
This involves second-guessing myself on the fly. (“Jim, is this about making sure these people know you don’t play D&D? Huh?”) Lately I’ve been trying out the anachronistic alternative of comparing it to video games, “but in person.” (“It’s like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, but with erasers!”)
If someone’s still interested, I just talk about what I like about the hobby. And after all, I like it a lot. This starts with something like Nate Bruinooge‘s simple, beautiful formulation, “I love playing games, and I love spending time with my friends, and this let’s me do both at once” and ranges, in one memorable conversation with an improv troupe-mate, to a pretty detailed example of “how the decisions people make advance the story.”
In general, I take advantage of and reinforce the cultural dynamic that, these days, lots of people are into lots of obscure stuff, and people are simultaneously all a little self-conscious about it and also more affirming of other people’s oddball enthusiasms than they used be, in the days of my youth before Gary Gygax and Stan Lee finished remaking the world for me.
* Some of my favorite people are mundanes. Yes, it’s a terrible term – a two-syllable protective-reaction strike. I would like a substitute that isn’t it’s mirror-twin, “normal,” or anachronistic like “mainstream.”
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
8 Responses to Geeking Out and Speaking Out
Categories
- Administrivia (13)
- Critical Analysis (50)
- FAQs and Guides (5)
- Games and Supplements (24)
- General (238)
- Industry Analysis (17)
- Reviews (19)
- Uncategorized (100)
- Writing Exercises (19)
Archives
Recent Comments
- Timo on Commitment and Dungeons and Dragons
- Amy Sutedja on Commitment and Dungeons and Dragons
- Buzz on Commitment and Dungeons and Dragons
- Amy Sutedja on Commitment and Dungeons and Dragons
- Ginger Stampley on Commitment and Dungeons and Dragons
Hmm. I must still have some deep, deep neuroses around this, because I simultaneously recognize your bullet points as reasonable and yet can not imagine myself doing the same. Not in a crowd I didn’t already know was “safe.” Can’t even paint the mental picture.
And I imagine a bunch of us are the same way. So this I gotta ponder.
Well, the follow-up post explores the extent to which “deploy privilege” is the secret sauce here. I think that’s either NOT the story or not the WHOLE story. But it needs considering.
Not that you lack for privilege yourself, healthy young tech-savvy white man! <g> So my patented method could work for you!
I hate to be a dill, but I forgot this was an issue years and years ago. The point at which the Matrix and Spiderman were pop-cultural normatives is the point at which I stopped feeling like a freak.
So, if this helps folks, yay! But I was honestly surprised to see how many folks I know have expressed an inability to talk about their “geek” hobbies with “normal” people.
It’s funny. Even today, gaming is . . . different. To me, and a lot of others, I think, though apparently not you, which is awesome. I’m with you on pretty much every other geeky hobby though.
Jim,
I’ve been thinking about this and I realized there is one place where I tend to get deeply embarrassed for folks who talk about it publicly, and that is Martial Arts.
At work one of the heads of Implementation recently was talking about moving to SCRUM (blah blah tech crap) and he says “I study escrima and in that art we learn the concept of…” and I’m suddenly deeply embarrassed for the guy.
And yea, someone in the room cracked on him in the guys cracking on guys genre of social interaction (which I do a lot, but wasn’t the asshole this once). I don’t remember the exact comment, but it was a “why is the Karate Kid leading this meeting?” type thing.
Now, this example wasn’t so bad, the guy did a decent transition job of it. But most of the times when folks bring up “I know Kung Fu” as a conversation topic I find it so deeply endemic about self-confidence and identity-politics issues that it makes me feel ashamed for them that they’ve got so much to prove.
So, yea, there’s that little bit of irony from me. And yes, it almost certainly has to do with how I (and other geeks) use “I study martial arts” as a “I’m cool like a jock and can kick a jock’s ass!” defense.
After recent discussions of the Bereznak affair and reading the “letter to my daughter” that’s going around discussing it, I realized something: I’m a woman and I game, and I like superhero movies and SFF, and I’ve been a fan of Doctor Who since the Baker years (Tom, of course), and so on and so forth–but I’m not sure I’m a geek and ‘m not sure I identify as a geek any more. Geek as an in-group identifier (as opposed to geeky, which I don’t doubt I frequently am) seems to require action in a hostile way: defending one’s fannish totems and identity against perceived outside attacks.
If that’s what makes people geeks–everything else having been adopted by the mainstream–then I’m ok with giving up the identity, which makes it a lot easier to not worry about what other people think about my hobbies. I do things that are far more mockable than rpgs, for crying out loud! I sing karaoke. I like Coldplay!
I could never admit I like Coldplay in public.
The youngsters that I hang out with tell me that if someone says “oh, you mean like D&D?” you should say “yeah.” Because then they’ll say “I used to play D&D it was really fun” or “I always wanted to play D&D but my cousin wouldn’t let me” or “cool, in college I played a TON of rpgs.” Nobody like 30 or younger, my like-30-or-younger friends assure me, will ever give you grief for rpgs.
I still flinch a little when I say “yeah, like D&D,” but so far they’ve been right.