I think we’d agree, though, that we shouldn’t have to be ashamed of our hobbies, or hide them for fear of being judged. The stereotypes associated with geeks/nerds are so pervasive that it’s not just idiots who believe in them. The question that follows, I suppose, is: How much are those stereotypes changing?

Church:
If the ethnography doesn’t work out, maybe I will build the geeky hot-or-not site to see what kind of data I can collect. (Or not.)

Z.:
Good point. And: I’d do play-by-internet as long as somebody else DMs/GMs. I haven’t been able to play in a campaign since before I could legally vote…

Jacob. It should be relatively easy to put together a geeky version of “Hot or Not.”

Yes. There’s a sort of validation through consumption; by buying into the system, geeks get to play inside a game that the market has prevalidated, which unfortunately usually gets traded for a lot of prebuilt content. In games like table-top RPGs where there’s room for so much personal creativity, this is a lot to give up. Making geeks pay for the privilege seems like they are getting taken advantage of, which further marginalizes them.

Re: action figures v. rpgs, my best hand-wavy explanation for this might be that inside of a mainstream culture, action figures are at least comprehensible (if you didn’t have any dolls when you were a kid, one of your friends did) but RPGs are less commonly experienced. My explanation for why I’ve gamed is usually something like “it’s a fun mix of a game of chance and a long improvisational play”, which explains it as the mix of two known acceptable activities.

Is there anybody that has sat down with an hoard of freshman university students and played a long series of “is this geekier than that” games with them? Would be interesting to have a giant pile of data to compare all this with.

There are also matters of committing to memory personal (What’s your character’s patron deity?) and “cultural” (Will a half-orc be accepted in an upscale tavern in an all-human barony?) minutiae that certainly aren’t for the intellectually faint of heart.

And getting back to the meat of your post, I too was disappointed that this question was dodged. Ignoring something like this leaves a worse taste in my mouth than flatly denying it. WotC could have easily drawn a parallel to the fact that games like WoW are becoming more socially acceptable and thusly implied that this de-nerdification may be extending to pen-and-paper games as well. They could’ve even laughed it off with a “Cheetos and Mountain Dew” riff. Instead they elected to duck it and ignore what is, for better or worse, the legacy of D&D.

One final note: we really need to work up some sort of play-by-mail/-post thing for all of us wayward tabletoppers who’ve gotten separated from our respective parties. Just something to think about.

Church:
Despite what I may claim in mixed company, the reason you offer is precisely the reason I don’t play any RPGs anymore. (I also gave them up for a while because I didn’t want GMing to be my only creative outlet, fearing I wouldn’t put effort into efforts I considered more “productive” at the time.)

I wonder, though: Why should D&D be more deeply associated with geekdom than, say, Star Wars action figures?

The WotC response was, I think, supposed to be a thinly veiled comment on ‘geek pursuits’ in popular culture. It’s not a complete answer, of course, but its the same one I’d give if I worked there.

The practical reason that many of us former players stopped is that it’s difficult to find people willing to invest that kind of time in a game once you’re past about college age. For a ‘nerdy’ game, it’s a remarkably social one.

I think the ‘dorky’ connotations of D&D come from its long association with geekdom, often used as a form of shorthand. This developed some time after the game’s debut. Even when “AD&D” showed up, it still wasn’t considered a particularly nerdy pastime (at least where I grew up.) Somewhere along the way it was relegated to the archetypical basement. I suspect that the LARPers helped that process along, but I have nothing to really cite for that.