I Can Even

I can even.

Today, Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a reader in which a self-described "nerd" discussed his inner misanthrope in a weird cry du croeur about how "being a nerd was not supposed to be a good thing." The letter comes across as deeply angry; angry that the word "nerd" is now not just a topic of popular culture, but has been embraced, extended and, to some degree, extinguished. The complaints he makes are just odd; the deeply weird and wonderful experimental comics of the 70s and 80s are still around. So are surreal video games. So are role-playing games. You don't have to play TSR's latest "It's like Warcraft, but with real human beings"; there's always Pathfinder.

But more than that, I remember being deeply nerdy and yet I never felt that the original creators owed me anything; I always recognized when I might be intruding on someone else's turf. I also remember being excluded, but never exclusionary; my AD&D games were welcome to everyone who knew how to shower and play nice, and if the gender balance wasn't 1:1 it was closer to that than it was to zero. We wanted like-minded people to be there with us, for us; we enjoyed each other's company and affirmed each other's humanity.

Sullivan's writer just can't have the word "nerd." It belongs to me, too. It belongs to everyone, male or female, who deeply loved something so much they wanted every last little detail of it embedded in their brain, so they could turn it over time and again, analyzing every facet of it until it had become a part of them.

The furor only points out that there's a community of men (yes, sadly, it's still almost entirely of men) that doesn't need validation. It needs therapy.

The most charitable description of GamerGate I can come up with

The most charitable description I can come up with for GamerGate is this:

Over the past several years, games depicting and providing agency and narrative to feminist, queer, minority or disabled characters and players have become much more prevalent in the marketplace. Game review magazines, sensing a new source of attention and income, namely, the women, queers, minorities, and disabled who have been buying games all along, have actively sought out such games in order to review them. Given that reviewers have limited time and money to purchase, play and review games, this rise in the review of such "marginal" gaming must come at the expense of traditional AAA titles. This results in a distortion of the marketplace that some fear will result in the cancellation or scaling back of the expensive blockbuster games that they know and love. Since expensive blockbuster games are perceived as providing the bulk of the funding supporting the pomp and circumstance of events like PAX or E3, the cultural artifacts of traditional gaming are threatened.

Unfortunately, we're not going to have a discussion about whether or not the rise in video game marketing featuring or about someone who is brown, female, gay or disabled actually represents a threat to the gaming industry. I don't think it does, but it would have been a lovely conversation to have.