I’m doing some (late) spring cleaning today, and I’ve decided this might as well also extend to my WordPress drafts. Here are a couple links I meant to expound upon, but instead I’ll just present them straight before they gather any more dust.
Month: June 2007
Characterization and Identification in Narrative Games
That’s an awfully long title for a pretty short post, but I wanted to make sure I wrote this down to return to later before I forget it:
I’ve been watching the HBO series The Wire on DVD lately. It’s a serialized police drama that’s more about character development and social critique than catching bad guys. One thing that I’ve chatted about with friends regarding the show is that there are so many different characters to identify with; while there are a few particularly major ones the show focuses on at times, these can include police, drug dealers, and working-class schmoes alike. I’m not very far into it, but so far at least one pretty major character has died. It was foreshadowed, and yet it still surprised me.
I haven’t really seen this kind of multi-character identification done in a video game. It’s not that it can’t be done—I hear Indigo Prophecy features something like this, so maybe I should check that out. The problem is simply that games are so oriented on “winning” that drama takes a back seat. Would people even want to play a game in which working towards a goal with one character means potentially hampering efforts with another character?
Filling the Gizmodo-Shaped Hole in My Life
After that link Dan sent me today, I went ahead and added Gizmodo to my regular blog feeds, sort of as a trial run. Now I’m wondering how I managed to miss doing this sooner. I guess I figured “gadgets” were kind of beyond the scope of my dissertation, but this is much more broadly about geek culture and technology than I imagined. Just now I came across a post that begins with this priceless sentence:
“Since you’re at Gizmodo, and given our usual demographic, there’s a pretty good chance that at one time or another you wished for super powers.”
I love that. (And not just because it’s illustrative of the stuff I’m writing about regarding overlapping media use groups.)
The next post I looked at in more detail was about McFly 2015, a grassroots campaign to get Nike to manufacture the shoes that Michael J. Fox wore in Back to the Future 2. I’m sure I should have something clever to say here about the blurry boundaries between mainstream science-fiction/cult films/designer clothing, but honestly, my mind has just been blown. I guess I’ll keep this blog awhile.
Update: Wait, they have an entire category for items related to nerd furnishings? I have to step away from this before I go into some sort of ethnographer frenzy.
Manliness, Post-It Style
Apparently, nobody makes fun of geeks more ruthlessly than geeks themselves:
Having trouble with the ladies? Your personality isn’t to blame, I’m sure, as the fairer sex loves it when you describe funny LOL CATS images and talk about how Ubuntu Linux would take over if people would just give it a chance. No, it’s got to be the lack of facial hair. Everyone knows that a thin goatee is the fastest route to a woman’s heart, and if you were cruelly dealt a babyface in the card game of genetics, then what chance have you got?
Japan to the rescue! Thin paste-on facial hair for the beardically-challenged, available from $15 to $28. You’ll be mayor of Ladytown in no time, I’m sure. With a winning personality like that, how can you lose? –Adam Frucci
How do I know that Adam is a geek? Well, aside from the fact that he’s writing for a major gadget blog, how many non-geeks do you know who know what the hell a LOL CAT is or can name a specific Linux distro?
Update: Link courtesy my friend Dan, who assures me that he has met Adam Frucci, who is indeed a geek, “but he’s very nice and an excellent writer.” And yeah, I expected as much—my comments on Adam’s “ruthlessness” were meant in good spirit (honest). Let this all be a lesson about how you can say whatever you want about geeks as long as you are one yourself, kind of like making fun of your own ethnic group. Also, Adam’s last name ends with a –cci, much like my own last name, so we’re practically related. (No word on whether this enables us to mock Mario or Luigi, who are technically Japanese by birth.)
Ink3d
Fellow Annenberger Paul sends along a link to some geek tattoos, noting: “This should not only be the title, but also the cover of your book.” As long as I’m posting this, might as well also mention that Kotaku has a whole category for video game tattoos. (Eat your heart out, Cornel.)
Dumb Luck as an Ethnographic Method
As I’ve been writing up the methodology section for my dissertation proposal, I realize that the degree to which rather successfully I rely on happenstance probably seems unbelievable. Ethnographers are supposed to go out into the world to immerse themselves in the culture of interest, and so I spend thousands of dollars (largely out of my own pocket) to visit fan and tech conventions. The thing is, though, that ethnographers are really easy to switch into “researcher mode”—so every time I bump into something that seems even remotely relevant to my dissertation, I take a closer look. Nowadays, as it turns out, you can’t take two steps in any direction without stumbling over something geeky.
Embrace Nerds, Reject Sports, Be Cool
I tend to think of skateboarders and starving artists as already pretty well established in terms of subcultural/countercultural cachet. Apparently, using terms like “nerd” and “dork” can signal them as even more eager to be known as outsiders. At the Art Dorks website, Chris Mostyn explains this artist collective’s name and approach (link via Boing Boing):
Dorks. Isn’t that derogatory? Not from where I’m standing. A dork, nerd, geek, weirdo, whatever, is someone who doesn’t fit into a cleanly defined mold of what a person should be in our culture. It is someone that is usually looked down on for not living up to a standard of normalcy. […] We all share a love of drawing and whether we make monsters or meat, robots or rabbits, it is work that revels in and celebrates growing up in a pop-culture, sci-fi, kung-fu cornucopia of a culture. We make what we know, and what we know is that life is not always normal. It doesn’t always wear name brand clothes, drink light beer and watch Monday night football. It’s just life.
Meanwhile, Skate Nerd similarly positions its subculture in opposition to sports, the archetypical pastime (I infer) of the conformist mainstream. As one t-shirt explains, “If I thought skateboarding was a sport, I never would have started.”
Both of these examples also suggest something that I haven’t really seen addressed yet in academic research on fan cultures and media subcultures (but if you have seen it, please let me know). That is, how do people actually get involved in their interests in the first place? Not just the “moment of epiphany” that I’ve read in some fans’ accounts, but what was going on in the skate nerds’ lives when they “started” skating (unaware that it would later come to be associated with mainstream sports—ironically, largely thanks to Tony Hawk, who also helped mainstream the video game)? What was so relevant to the Art Dorks about “growing up in a pop-culture, sci-fi, kung-fu cornucopia” that made them want to include this in their art?
Just thinking out loud today—no quick answers, but comments are welcome at any point. I’ll be checking out Rejuvenile from the library tomorrow (also brought to my attention by Boing Boing), which will probably offer some food for thought on kids’ culture continuing to engage adults.
Tourist’s Guide to Geek Mecca
Tom Spurgeon has written up a lengthy guide on getting the most out of the San Diego Comic Con (or, as he calls it, “Nerd Vegas”). I’ll be honest: more than anything else, I’m posting this because I want to remember to read it later. Let me know if I’m likely to bump into you at the con this year, though.
Senators Battle, Geeks Leap to Action
Game Politics reports on Sen. Charles Bishop (R) slugging Sen. Lowell Baron (D) on the floor of the Alabama state senate. This comes as a follow-up to an earlier report, since clarified that U.S. senators nearly came to blows over video game legislation.
I was going to let it pass with a chuckle and no further mention, until I noticed that the Decatur Daily’s coverage notes that Bishop “not only exposed the state’s divided Senate to the world, he also provided fodder for pundits and computer geeks”:
YouTube.com carried the video footage, as did blogs all over the state. Early Friday, reporters who cover the Statehouse got e-mails with still images from the scene, including one mock video game cover entitled “ROCK ’EM, SOCK ’EM Battlin’ Senators.â€
One nameless lawmaker who had his own verbal battles with Barron wondered if he could capture the video scenes as a computer screen saver.
All you need to do to be a geek these days is use YouTube or keep a blog. Our people are everywhere now. (Photoshopping video game covers has always counted, of course.)
Anti-Geek Policy in Online Environments?
Official PlayStation Magazine reports that the virtual environment interface of PS3 Home will only allow basic human avatars. (Link via Kotaku, via Games Radar.) Home’s executive producer told the magazine:
If everyone’s walking around dressed as orcs or stormtroopers or whatever, then you lose that welcoming, accessible element that means Mum, Dad and your sister might get involved as well. The idea is to keep it as accessible, mainstream and friendly as possible.
He’s probably right that allowing geeked-out avatars would turn away certain audiences, though I’m not sure how to respond to his use of the word “mainstream.” This also potentially raises some interesting questions: what could or should be mainstream in an environment when people can choose to look like practically whatever they like? Whatever the case, something tells me that persistent PS3 users will find a way around this limitation (assuming it’s not so limiting that people just don’t care to use it). It seems unlikely that Sony would go out of their way to police inoffensively geeky avatars.
Geek Studies 
