If a television show turned cultural phenomenon spawns diehard fans who recite dialogue by heart, wear costumes inspired by the show and buy all the tie-in products, are these devotees nerds? If the show in question is Star Trek, The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the answer is certainly yes. But what if we’re talking about Sex and the City?

Mark Medley, a reporter writing for the National Post, asked me this question a couple weeks ago. Now, it kicks off an article titled “Female Trekkies.” (Another version, sans my brief quote, made it to the Victoria Times Colonist under the title “Sex and the City Fans. Geek or Chic?”)

This may sound a bit confusing to people who aren’t familiar with Sex and the City and its devoted fan following. For some fans, being a SATC fan goes beyond catching up on the show every week: It means buying the outfits featured on the show, and being thrilled to catch the movie premier now that the show’s off the air. Sound familiar, browncoats? Some fans of geeky media may surely think so, such as comics writer/novelist/blogger Jamie S. Rich, who describes (in a link via Chris) a screening of the new Sex and the City movie:

Really, it was like I was at a comic book convention, but one for chicks. Though, I don’t think it’s fair if I show up for the Hulk screening covered in green make-up I’ll get called a geek and going to see Sex and the City in fake couture is somehow not geeky. You can’t even make a claim that having boobs is what makes it different, because I know a lot of comic book guys (and sports fan guys) with bigger boobs than any of the actresses in the movie (well, except Jennifer Hudson). Nerds in any other underwear are just as nerdy.

I’m sure there are some around here, too, who would argue that ‘geek’ is now a broad enough term to apply to just about any fervent interest, especially when applied to pop culture in this way. That take on the concept of ‘geek’ lends it a little legitimacy, when you think about it—how could ‘geek’ be a bad thing when just about everybody is a geek nowadays?

That said, when Mark Medley asked me whether I thought SATC fans were geeks, I told him no. Or, rather, I told him that my research prioritizes what people tell me over what I think personally, and I suspect that these fans (a) wouldn’t call themselves geeks and (b) wouldn’t be considered geeks by most of those who do consider themselves as such.

Annalee Newitz, io9 and She’s Such a Geek! co-editor, was quoted as denying this geek definition flat-out:

Women who follow Sex and the City are not geeks. … They are doing what soap opera fans have always done: obsessively reading about their stories, and buying related consumer items. Are women who read Vogue geeks? Are women who know every detail about Sephora cosmetics geeks? No. You can’t expand the term ‘geek’ to mean anyone who is interested in something without draining the term of all meaning.

And one especially enthusiastic SATC fan quoted in the article kind of backs this up, distancing herself and fellow fans from this label:

I don’t think there’s anything nerdy or geeky about Sex and the City. … I think it’s more of a diva, glamour [thing]. I guess that’s more what I’d consider myself.

So what’s the big difference here? My quote that made it to the article suggests:

Being identified as a geek, or identifying oneself as a geek, kind of signals an understanding that you are or you know that you should be feeling embarrassed about what it is that you’re interested in. … And I doubt that…Sex and the City fans are really particularly embarrassed about their great interest in the show.

This isn’t a complete explanation, of course, but a reporter can only fit so much of my lengthy ramblings into one article. I thought it might be worth it to expand upon this a bit here, though.

In this context, I think that the big difference between a geeky fan interest and a not-geeky fan interest is how much the interest conforms to broadly understood norms of gender and maturity. It’s tempting to say that geeky/nerdy interests are more “intellectual” or based around obsession over “data,” but really, that wouldn’t count out SATC fans or even most sports fans. (Some geeks may be surprised by the breadth of statistics and history known to the average sports fan.) The only dimensions we’re talking about here are depth of enthusiasm and an interest in costuming (or fashion, if you prefer). Sports fans, too, will similarly “dress up” (in jerseys and/or face paint) for major fan events.

No, what we’re seeing here is that some interests are characterized as geeky and some are not, regardless of the specific behaviors or level of excitement involved. Sports represent a traditionally masculine interest, celebrating competition, aggression, and physical prowess. And, arguably, this is all connected to adult interests of strength and (to put it bluntly) suitability for mating. At the same time, being a SATC fan represents a sort of acceptably feminine interest in a feminist age. Even the SATC fan’s comment quoted above resists the “geek” label in favor of “glamor” or “diva,” a clearly gender-coded understanding. What’s particularly interesting to me about SATC is the way that it updates these feminine interests for a feminist culture. The characters aren’t the image of the female consumer constructed in a lot of old television and advertising, dedicated to swooning over heartthrobs, living for husband and family, and spending frivolously. They may be just as interested in relationships and shopping, but they’re sexually open, and successful career women in their own right.

Geeky pursuits don’t really fit anywhere in this paradigm of age- and gender-appropriate interests. To the world at large, they seem primarily aligned with childish boys, not adult men or women. Comics, games, and sci-fi represent escapist fantasy, a rejection of the hypermasculine, and not quite aligned with the traditionally feminine. The war paint of a sports fan somehow seems more manly and acceptable than the war paint of a LARPer. And in comparison, the fashionable dress and four-inch heels of the SATC fan is practically unassailable as an acceptably adult and gender-appropriate “costume.”

Of course, I’ve never claimed it was my job to arbitrate who is a geek and who isn’t. I pay attention to how others decide that for themselves and for one another. Sex and the City fans, now’s your chance to let your geek flag fly and stomp on my own observations, if you’re so inclined. So far, though, I’ve had the impression that geekiness is defined as much by how the world looks at what interests us as by how deeply we get involved with those interests.

I thought I’d share some thoughts on a few of the panels and presentations I saw, including the panel I chaired in the Digital Games division. It’s not representative of everything I saw, and sadly, I had to miss several things I wanted to catch, but that’s the way things are at a big conference with lots of interesting stuff going on.

Gender Studies I: Performing Gender. I met Heather A. Beasley at an earlier panel, and I’m glad I did; my ears perked up when she said something about geek identity. “Witches, Warlocks, Vampires, and Damsels in Distress: Gender Performance in Live-Action Roleplaying” presents an interesting and challenging question: Does pretending to take on certain traditional (even hegemonic) gender roles actually boost geeks’ self-esteem?

As I’ve written about here before, geek identity is marked for many by an active and vocal rejection of certain cultural norms, including “appropriate” behavior based on gender and maturity. Why, then, do we consume so much entertainment media that seems to affirm traditional gender roles, including the ideals of the heroic man rescuing the damsel in distress? Heather’s specifically studying LARPing, but when you think about it, the same question could be applied to any number of geeky “power fantasy” entertainment media. Come to think of it, I think some geeks get a kick out of seeing the normative gender relations thrown out of whack in such media (e.g., playing a game or seeing a movie with a powerful woman who’s not just a sex symbol), but that makes LARPs and RPGs that much more interesting to consider: Why settle on normative gender roles when you make up the story and characters yourself? The answer, according to Heather, may be that it boosts self-esteem outside the game, remaining separate enough from life to encourage reflection on real-world gender relations (though she acknowledges the flip side, the potential danger of reifying stereotypes). This project is just getting started, so I’ll be interested to keep up with it.

Television I: Gender and Identity. Amber Botts gave a presentation titled “Nerds and Geeks and Slackers … Oh My? Chuck, The Big Bang Theory, and Reaper’s Geek Chic Romantic Heroes.” It was nice to hear someone outside of blogs and Wired magazine acknowledging the slew of recent shows targeting a geek demographic. I especially enjoyed the examples of how such shows cast men in the traditionally “female” role of heterosexual relationships, such as when Chuck (I think?) dances a tango with a woman but needs her to lead (and gets dipped at the end).

Ultimately, Amber suggests that the geeky guys from these shows are being groomed not to keep challenging gender norms, but to show that they can graduate to more traditionally acceptable male roles—if not aggressive “alpha” males, then at least to caring and courageous “beta” males. Is there even a way of depicting a “gamma” male such that audiences know they should feel proud of such a character?

Communications and Digital Culture II: The Mainstream/Data Stream. In “‘We Win at the Internet’: The Definition of Digital Mainstream,” Mirian Greenfield reviewed a successful attempt at Google-bombing a politician’s name to be associated with something vile (something we might call “the santorum model”). Ultimately, though, Miriam rejected this as an example of an idea going “mainstream,” as the success of the Google-bomb didn’t necessarily reflect a broader public consciousness of the issue online (if I understood that right).

This led to an extended exchange among audience members about what “the mainstream” really is on the web. Some suggested that for such an item to be “mainstream” in our culture, it would have to be picked up by other media outlets like newspapers and television. This still leaves the question, however, of whether the web has its own mainstream (recognized among the most dedicated users) much in the same way that “mainstream” comics are much more fantasy-genre-focused than mainstream entertainment in other media. If that’s the case, even this Google-bombing may not qualify: It’s just gaming the system, not necessarily representing web-public opinion. I thought it was an interesting conversation, anyway.

Digital Games V: Drugs and Violence. I also got to chair a panel with Jason Farman and Cynthia Nichols. Cynthia (a co-author with Amy Rask and Ian Turnipseed) presented “Video Games: A Potential Influence on Steroid Use Attitudes and Behaviors.” The study found a positive relation between playing Blitz: The League, which allows you to medicate players on the fly, and a positive attitude toward steroid use. This sounds more like correlation than causation to me, but what I found particularly interesting was in the broader scope of the survey the authors conducted, which found that college students who spend a lot of time playing games (that aren’t Blitz) tend to be pretty anti-drug. Given all the negative hype around the effects of games, that seems like a result reporters might find story-worthy. There’s arguably some displacement effect—people who are home playing games aren’t out doing drugs—but what I find even more interesting personally is the possibility that this reflects some value or ideal in gamer/geek cultures.

Next, Jason Farman presented “Hypermediating the Game Interface: Grand Theft Auto and the Alienation Effect.” He discussed how Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas could potentially act as a critique on gangster imagery and violent content when the protagonist is dressed up clownishly, forcing the player to reflect on what’s happening on-screen. I wonder if the argument could be taken even further—are all games experienced this way by virtue of the various displays and instructions on screen, breaking the sense of immersion you might get in film? As one audience member pointed out, however, it may be a little too hopeful to suggest that every example of such hypermediation is designed to (or successful at) getting people to reflect on narrative content. Personally, I wonder how common such reflection is beyond folks like Jason and myself, who can’t help but think really hard about the games we play because that’s part of the fun for us.

And as for me, I presented “Getting 1UP on Death: Failure and Consequences in Narrative Video Games” (which I’m soon submitting to a journal, following some revisions and a new title). It’s actually less about violence than about storytelling, suggesting that having to die and retry scenes in narrative games breaks a sense of fictional coherence (building off the ideas of rules, fiction, and coherence proposed by Jesper Juul in Half-Real). I didn’t actually show any slides—I forgot the adapter to my Macbook, didn’t feel like loading things off a thumb drive onto somebody else’s computer, and didn’t really need pictures anyway—but the notes indicate that there are slides, and I tend to post both my presentation notes and slides here, so there you go.

Thanks… And finally, I just wanted to close by offering a few specific notes of thanks. Thanks to Heather Beasley and Jessica “J.M.” Frey (whose presentation on cosplay I missed, unfortunately) for some interesting conversation over Irish pub music. Thanks to Matt Byrnie for meeting up to chat about geek research. Thanks to Jason Farman, Cynthia Nichols, and everyone who asked questions in the audience for making our panel so fun to be at. And thanks especially to Tony Avruch, co-chair of the Digital Games division, for taking the time to give me a lot of practical input.

Comics Activism in the University Library: Comixology offers the first part in a series on how one university librarian (whose job is not to build up the comics collection) rallies support among faculty to build up the library’s comics collection.

Geek Activism in the City Streets: Yahoo News reports on an effort to rename one city’s 42nd street after the late Douglas Adams. The motivating party behind this campaign is an online geek community (blog, forum, store) I was previously unaware of, Geek in the City.

Ugly Activism in Buenos Aires: A BBC article recounts the tale of Gonzalo Otalora, Argentine writer of Feo (“Ugly”) and semi-ironic “campaigner” for the rights and recognition of ugly people.

His book, Feo (Ugly), has just been republished and is selling well. On the inside cover is a picture of Gonzalo as a youth. It is not a pretty sight.

“I was a child with thick glasses, spots and braces,” he said. “The kids made fun of me at school.

“Later the girls rejected me in the discos. And then when I was looking for work, I felt so ugly and insecure that I was rejected again and left without a job.

“The great challenge in my life has been to stop being the school nerd—and thanks to my humour and bravery I’ve managed to overcome all that.”

That the focus here is on looks more so than braininess or interests may speak directly to regional differences in how ‘nerd’ is defined. Buenos Aires is particularly known (or residents think of it as being known) for its “beautiful” people.

Evolution of the Nerd: Z. passes on a link from Australia’s The Age which proclaims that Geeks Rule, OK. The article goes on to describe a variety of subgroups of geeks, and why geeks at large are now “the dominant force in popular culture.

All I Want For Christmas: Popular Science polled tech luminaries and internet celebrities while compiling its “ultimate for-geeks, by-geeks gift list.” Individuals polled include Jonathan Coulton, Jimmy Wales, Fake Steve Jobs, Wil Wheaton, Xeni Jardin, and others.

Usted es un Nerd Enorme: A sepulcher in new video game Uncharted contains a message in Spanish that reads:

If you are reading this grave, you’re a huge nerd. Please get a life and a girlfriend.

Kotaku crossed out part of the original response (which had sarcastically lambasted whoever thought that reading Spanish was nerdy), probably because comments that follow the post suggest that most readers found it more funny than offensive.

Virtual World Research, The Sequel: Slashdot notes that Edward Castronova’s Shakespearean virtual world, Arden, didn’t really work out as planned—there simply wasn’t enough interest from players. Now in the works: Arden II. The gaming/economics researcher reflected:

You need puzzles and monsters, or people won’t want to play … Since what I really need is a world with lots of players in it for me to run experiments on, I decided I needed a completely different approach.

I find his approach interesting, and I do think that online games could offer some fertile ground for research in economics, but I’d be nervous about extrapolating too much more about social/psychological research more broadly from behavior in a virtual world. Aside from that, my biggest concern is that experimentally manipulating the conditions between different servers of the same game would simply encourage people to jump ship to a new server, which would wreak havoc on your data. Still, I wish this project the best, and I’d be interested to see whether this yields any results on whether interpersonal behavior within virtual worlds maps well onto behavior in person vs. other online contexts.

The Ups and Downs of Transmedia Storytelling: Comics may represent the place where Hollywood goes for new ideas, but it also seems like the medium may represent the place where fan favorites go to die. Ever since Joss announced that Buffy would be seeing a canonic “season” in comics form—and, shortly thereafter, that Veronica Mars might also be resuscitated in this way—I have been particularly interested in how others might use comics to continue franchises that face major economic barriers in other media. Now, Slashdot reports that Joss Whedon’s Firefly franchise will be coming to comics—but ironically, that’s the format that fans may be least interested in seeing. This doesn’t surprise me too much; after all, Firefly was great largely because of its cast.

Net Linguistics: Nelson suggests some unusual emoticons from games, and follows up with some notes on the evolution of the <3 (“heart”) emoticon (latter link via Boing Boing). The <4 emoticon seems like a pretty classic example of how programmer thinking might influence linguistics, sort of a visual/textual equivalent of “love++.”

On a related note, Geek Gestalt notes that Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “w00t.” I’m not sure whether this is a sign that l33tspeak has moved into popular usage or whether this is an event that would actually encourage such a move, but it seemed noteworthy whatever the case.

Cons as Vacation Spots: MSN City Guides offers suggestions for a bunch of “geek getaways” based on different interests. It’s not entirely comprehensive or accurate (E for All was not bigger than PAX, despite high expectations), but it certainly does read more like a travel guide than the typical newspaper approach of marveling, year after year, that people are dressed up so funny-like and are drinking more than expected.

Don’t Watch Snakes on a Plane Alone: Slashdot refers us to a study suggesting that enjoying movies is contagious. The post quotes one researcher:

By mimicking expressions, people catch each other’s moods leading to a shared emotional experience. That feels good to people and they attribute that good feeling to the quality of the movie.

This is a different interpretation from what I expected. Personally, I’ll watch television alone, but I always wait for company to watch a movie. This article suggests that people give the movie credit for emotions that are actually cued by other people; I always thought of it more in terms of magnifying what I enjoy about a movie by being able to share it with people I care about, adding a new dimension to what is in the movie alone.

Games Teach You Useful Skills: A 12-year-old swedish boy outsmarted an elk, saving himself and his sister based on behavior learned in World of Warcraft (link via Boing Boing). I kind of liked the story better when I thought he had been attacked by a moose, but either way it’s pretty weird and impressive.

I saved the post as a draft and never really got back to it. The argument in my notes, anyway, was this paragraph:

Perhaps our goal, then, should not be to calculate a universal rubric for quality or engagement, which results in theories that seem reductive, overreaching, or awkwardly cobbled together, like the (admittedly interesting and ambitious) GameFlow model does for games. Rather, we should identify what it is that individuals and communities find rewarding about their favorite works. Not, “Why is Star Wars so good?” but “What is it that people find good about Star Wars?” Closely related to this is the question, “What do people do with star wars?”

I ended up following up on this idea somewhat in my recent post on how we should evaluate “art” in games, suggesting that we break our evaluation down into formal elements (like focusing on “atmosphere” versus “storytelling” in games) and practical results (like lasting historical relevance, or inspiring immediate political action).

Outside of games, another specific example for this (to be described in the aborted essay) was the example of “worldbuilding,” which Cory Doctorow describes as “the science fiction writer’s practice of meticulously (or not) drawing up the contours of a fictional place—from the physics to the biology.” Cory’s not a fan of this practice. An essay he links to on this topic suggests that M. John Harrison is not a fan either; he calls worldbuilding “the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there.” And, actually, I’m not a big fan of reading other people’s worldbuilding either (though I recall from my high school days that worldbuilding was the most fun part of designing homemade roleplaying games). Nevertheless, we must recognize that for some, at least, worldbuilding not only holds certain appeal as a formal element, but may be evaluated as effective or ineffective by audiences. We can see differences in fannish appraisal of quality in worldbuilding when we contrast responses to how this was handled in the original Star Wars trilogies and the material that followed with the prequels, or in viewing fan reaction to different Tolkien books or the comparison between the books and the movies. Here, discussion of quality is not monolithic and oppressive, defined by the wealthy classes and handed down from on high, but posed in context, framed by questions of use: quality for whom and according to what? Socioeconomic class clearly plays a part, as Bourdieu discusses, but that may not tell the whole story of how taste is made in more specific instances.

There you have most of my notes for “Quality Should Not Be a Dirty Word” (minus some additional babbling about Stuart Hall and jazz). I’m not going to finish that essay, though, because I have much else to do, and, more importantly, because Jason Mittell already did a fine job of it and posted it to his blog. “Lost in a Great Story: Evaluation in Narrative Television (and Television Studies)” not only reflects on media researchers’ shyness about issues of evaluation, but attempts to apply a culturally framed evaluation to a particular media object, the television series Lost. He gets away from the all too typical academic approach to television which cloaks author opinion with terms like “complexity” or “nuance” (and is dead on in pointing out this practice), and instead suggests some specific formal factors that keep people coming back to the show.

I do think the analysis could go a bit further. A noteworthy counterargument comes in the comments that follow from Ian Bogost, who suggests that fans’ faith (that all the plot twists will fit together as if planned) seems is quite likely to be misplaced. (Though I disagree that leaving giant questions lingering between seasons is a way of fleecing suckers in the audience, which I find analogous to arguing that each chapter of a book should leave no major questions dangling). More niggling to me is the question of why I should accept the argument that Lost‘s use of the techniques described here is superior to Heroes‘s use, which seems attributed to some unidentified mass of fans and critics. Overall, though, I think this is a noteworthy step toward discussing issues of quality assessment in media research, and I’m sure glad some other Jason took the time to do a good job on it.

“Hero Building”: On Gizmodo, an embedded video and some comments on “NY Jedi School Trains Lightsaber Enthusiasts (To Be Bigger Geeks).” The first few comments are mostly about how people are shocked that attractive women are in attendance, but that eventually moves into discussion of how profitable it would be to own a battery store in the area. For social researchers, the clip is worth watching for one instructor’s discussion of how the classes allow for “hero building” among shy attendees; otherwise, it’s worth watching because the lightsaber fights are actually pretty impressive. Updated for the line I meant to quote from the video but forgot about, near the end (thanks, Jordan): “It’s about nerds trying to better each other, and make their lives better through the dorkiness that makes them great.”

Nerdcore is “Insane”: The Boston Globe has an article on nerdcore that touches upon the tensions in the culture better than most newspapers’ takes that I’ve seen (link via Dan). MC Chris explains why he’s trying to distance himself from the scene, some of the rappers make a case why it’s an homage to hip hop rather than a (potentially racist) parody, and some nuggets here even suggest that it’s more like mainstream music stardom than one might imagine. Of the nerdcore concert at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, one documentarian notes, “It was insane. They eventually had to shut the show down…. They caught rappers doing coke in the bathroom, they were smoking joints on the floor. There was literally porn stars there.” (Incidentally, I’ve been informed that the porn convention in Vegas happens at the same time as CES.)

The Fall of the ‘Graphic Novel’: Eddie Campbell laments the loss of ‘graphic novel’ as a useful term (link via Journalista). Those who first popularized the term wanted to create a distinction not just between saddle-stitched and squarebound comics, but between those with literary and artistic pretensions that might find a foothold in mainstream bookstores and those that still carry a stigma of juvenility and geekiness. Of course, now it’s associated with traditional superhero comics and manga. It’s uttered with irony by many, transparent as a gussied-up term for ‘comics’ with no useful formal or critical distinction. In Eddie’s words, “it got borrowed by a bunch of boobs and it came back busted.” That may sound somewhat unfair, considering that even the artsiest comics artists tend to imagine their work as sharing the same medium with Spider-man and Dragonball Z, but as Eddie’s post points out, it’s the critics who feel the need to make some distinction, and that’s a distinction that could make quite a difference for some publishers.

Nerd Politics: Z. and Matt S. refer me to this Time article on “The Ron Paul Revolution.” Apparently, this libertarian Republican is the nerd candidate:

“He’s about something that American nerd culture can get on board with: really knowing one subject and going all out on it,” says Ben Darrington, a Ron Paul supporter at Yale. “For some people, it’s Star Wars. For some people, it’s Japanese cartoons. For Ron Paul, it’s free-market commodity money.”

“The Internet’s Awesomest URL”: Kotaku refers me to Homotron, a new tech blog spinoff from GayGamer. Along with Pink Kryptonite (for comics) and Velvet Dicebag (for tabletop games), these form “an unassailable bulwark for gay geek culture to thrive,” according to Homotron’s welcome post. I’m not sure what makes it particularly “queer”—looks like your standard tech blog to me, so far—but I’m fascinated by the implication that there is a distinct “gay geek culture” separate from (or nested within) geek culture more broadly.

While I do often get to compare my field notes with other bloggers’ posts about events like Comic Con in a broad sense, this must be the first time I’ve been able to compare notes on such specific situations at such an event. I was pretty amazed to see how similarly we described it all. (However, I totally made up the part about her being a grad student. We agreed that we got along with one another, though, and more than half my friends nowadays are grad students, so somehow I just filled in the blank on that one for myself.)

Additional reports on the casting call come from Bostonist (link via Church in my last post) and BU’s student newspaper (which I remembered to check because I saw a guy taking photos and asked where they’d be). That rapping fellow with the MIT chains and LED belt buckle sure made an impression on us all, apparently.

Now, back in Philadelphia, I’m finding that “I auditioned for Beauty and the Geek” is a great conversation starter with people. I also find it both kindly complimentary and vaguely unsettling that people keep telling me that I’m clearly not geeky enough to make it on the show. I’m doing a whole dissertation on geek culture here. How much more geeky can I get? This, along with my lack of interest in running Linux, is another reason why I have trouble explaining to people whether I can consider this project a “native ethnography.”

Thanks to LeDiva for emailing and giving me permission to link her post, and thanks also to Ben from Nerd Nite for commenting on “Polar Expeditions.” Interviews can be fun, but It’s especially exciting to have people contacting me to volunteer information about the events I attend for research.

Understanding Webcomics: Anne Thalheimer, a webcomics blogger, muses over what a “webcomic” really is, given that plenty of comics artists whose stuff exists online don’t consider themselves webcomics artists. (Link via Journalista.) As we’ve discussed here recently, there aren’t as many formal differences between web and print comics as some predicted, which makes this, as far as I can tell, a purely academic question. Seeing as how Wittgenstein couldn’t find a single, unifying definition for ‘game,’ I suspect that the webcomics community may not have much more luck in achieving its analogous goal. Still, these kinds of debates have a lot of practical use within the community of artists and enthusiasts, as discussing formal issues inspires innovation and potentially also outreach to broader audiences. (I wrote a paper about how this happened especially during the 1990s with regard to print comics and Scott McCloud’s definition of comics which I may finally get around to sending to a conference this week.)

The Other Nerdcore: Kotaku brings the Nerdcore Calendar to my attention. I assumed that this was nerdcore as in “hip-hop,” but no, it’s more like nerdcore as in “softcore,” and softcore as in “porn.” Last year’s calendar had a retro gaming theme, and this year’s has a superhero comics theme. Both feature trivia on selected dates, sort of saying, “what happened on this day in geekdom.” You can check out the calendar’s page at TotallyNerdcore.com, titled with “Welcome geeks, nerds, and dorks of all kinds!”—but be warned that it’s not safe for work.

Television Genre Hodgepodge: G4 is technically a cable channel about gaming, but it will be airing syndicated episodes of Lost. The rights will be shared with the SciFi Channel, a genre which Lost (probably?) belongs to. G4′s version, “Lost 2.0,” will have an online version and little “factoids,” which apparently attracted a younger audience when they did the same thing to Star Trek and Cops.

Tearing Down Science: Robert Lee Hotz reports for the Wall Street Journal on medical scholar John Ioannidis’s claim that most published research findings are wrong. According to the Dr. Ioannidis, “A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.” I really need to follow up on this to read the original article, as it seems pretty relevant to me for two reasons: one, from here it looks like his claims are general enough that some may look to apply them to social science research, including media effects research; and two, among many nerds, faith in science resembles something like a religious fundamentalist’s faith in scripture (a claim that is meant without offense but which members of both groups may get huffy about).

Blogging for Academics: My fellow Annenberger Deb points me to a post on blogging for academics. It all seems pretty obvious from my perspective, but sometimes I forget that not everyone quite understands how internet searches work, and not everyone quite understands how academic job hunting works. Long story short: Only use your full name for stuff that you don’t mind associated with your professional identity, and note well that many or most “First Person” columns at the Chronicle of Higher Education are pseudonymous for a reason. Oh, and as blogging software goes, I personally prefer WordPress to Blogger because I find it useful to categorize posts for ease of browsing and searching later, but Blogger is indeed simpler.

Hippies and UFOs: Andy Roberts describes hippie culture’s fascination with UFO imagery. (Link via Boing Boing.) I’m not sure how I want to elaborate on this, but it seemed worth mentioning here for two reasons: one, geek culture has been directly compared to hippie culture, so the shared sci-fi preoccupation is interesting; and two, because I was just chatting with someone the other day about how UFO abductions seem to have become passé since X-Files jumped the shark.

On Comics: Chris Ware’s introduction to The Best American Comics 2007 (via the Comics Reporter, I’m pretty sure). I found it interesting because I’ve written quite a bit on comic creators’ fears and concerns about the development of the medium and the industry; Chris Ware has been one of the most outspoken of those I’ve quoted, including a statement in one radio interview years back in which he suggests that the very visual language of comics is better suited to telling jokes than telling more meaningful stories, and so must be reinvented. In the introduction linked here, he’s a little more optimistic about how comics are doing nowadays, and implies that taking a less narrative approach to comics may have succeeded in reinventing that language.

On Webcomics: Also via the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon responds quite ably to an angry letter that his site focuses on comics No One Reads to the exclusion of webcomics which are supposed to be The Future. (The letter-writer insists that he doesn’t just mean gaming comics and manga rip-offs, and the fact that he needs to reassure this speaks pretty well to some of Tom’s points about webcomics.)

On Nerds, by Way of Comics: As long as I’m cannibalizing all my content from Tom today, I should note that he also links to an article in the Edmonton Journal proclaiming that nerds now rule. Many many choice quotes here, including:

In the eyes of many, the comic-book-loving sci-fi fan is a nacho-cheese-scented, bespectacled oddity sporting mismatched socks, greasy hair and pasty skin.

But “nerds” are no longer the stereotypical archetype they once were.

They now walk and live amongst us – doing everything from hanging out at the pub to playing sports, running for political office to designing the gadgets we use and, of course, producing the movies and TV shows we’re most likely to enjoy. [...]

Popular culture is playing an important role in legitimizing “nerd culture.” Comic books and sci-fi are now regularly turned into movies (X-Men, Hellboy) or co-opted into TV shows (Lost, Heroes), and the once-nerdly subject matter seems to be gaining popularity.

“Geek is cool now,” says Elizabeth Vail, 21, “lieutenant commander” at the U of A’s Science-Fiction Club: Subspace 6-20. “We’re not persecuted anymore.”

“I think most people who don’t know what we actually do would still label us as nerds,” says “captain” Josh Rehm, 23. “It’s sort of a bubble with holes in it – people can see what we do. But I think there is still a stigma attached to it because ‘sci-fi club’ is in our name. Automatically, sci-fi equals ‘nerds’ or equals ‘geeks.’ “

You get the idea. Mostly I just wanted to make note of it because a reviewer recently told me my paper about geek culture needs more proof that the popular image of geeks/nerds is changing.

On Missed Opportunities: Thanks to Hipster Please for referring me to the site for Geek.kon, a geek convention held last weekend in Madison. The site includes a photo gallery and links to press coverage, including a CNN story. Not that I could’ve gone, really, but I am bummed I didn’t know about it until after.

On Other Opportunities: Following Geek.kon, I will console myself with the hope that I can catch Nerdnite in Boston in November on a “non-science night” by popular demand. (They may still need volunteers to present, so feel free to send an email to nerdnite {at} nerdnite {dot} com if you feel like doing so. Check out here for an earlier post on the event.)

On Gamers and Nerds in the Media: And finally, consider a couple quick links from Kotaku on how NBC uses ‘gamer’ as shorthand for ‘nerd’ and CNN treats games as a danger for kids. Games are defended as being intended for adults by Newsweek‘s N’Gai Croal, who further expounds on this in a post on “The problem (and the danger) of the continued infantilization of video games” (part 1).

On Games as Narrative: Oh, and one more thing, added just after I published the post: The New York Times has an editorial up about how Halo 3—and Bioshock, for that matter—have not delivered gaming to cultural and artistic relevance as much as some gamers seem to believe. Speaking as a lover of narrative games myself, I sadly and wholeheartedly agree. I’ll try to get around to finishing my post on Bioshock sometime to help explain this, and sooner or later I’ll also be finishing up a paper (now submitted to a conference as an abstract) on how death acts as a narrative disruption in games.

On the hipness of nerds: The blogger behind .Evolving Music., a self-described “nerd hag,” reports that nerd is the new black.” Commenter Johnson laments, “I hope this doesn’t start to spawn a bunch of nerd posers. I can’t imagine anything more horrifying than a frat boy saying ‘Yo bro, the new edition of D&D just came out, it’s so fucking tight bro.’” Meanwhile, Idea City interprets my description of the XKCD event as an example of “true geeks” asserting their true geekiness in opposition to appropriation by the hipster set.

Randall on the Meetup: Speaking of the XKCD event (or “meetup,” as I keep forgetting everyone else is calling it), the comic’s own creator, Randall Munroe, has written a fine blog post about how the whole thing went down. Includes photos, a description of the trebuchet they used to fling things at a place I used to play frisbee, and a link to a write-up in the Boston Phoenix Magazine.

TV’s Geeks: MSN showcases TV’s Greatest Geeks. Funny side note: I used the exact same picture of the Simpson’s “comic book guy” in my presentation Wednesday. (Thanks to Cabral for the link!)

Game industry targets school kids: I wrote a post yesterday on Shouting Loudly on the Entertainment Software Association’s new anti-piracy campaign—a K-5 curriculum teaching kids that intellectual property must be respected, and fair use only exists in the classroom.

More on “The Great Nerd Culture Gap”: Church recently brought to my attention Time Magazine‘s new nerd blog by Lev Grossman, Nerd World. I was fascinated by his post on how “the mainstream” is still might not get nerdy pursuits even as our interests make get increased media coverage, but I think I’m even more fascinated by what his readers have to say in response.

“Sitting down and watching music was a new thing — it changed the mass market’s notion of what music entertainment was,” he says. As we sit in his office, he describes how Rock Band could be the next stage of evolution for the music industry, as well as the game industry. [...] “In five years, this is how people are going to consume the music they love.”

And in the case of Robot Chicken, we go from playing with toys to watching other people play with their toys:

“The show looks like what nearly every kid did: You got out your cars and G.I. Joes and smashed them together,” says Chicken fan Mike Johnson, codirector of the 2005 stop-mo blockbuster Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. “The show works because it captures the joy of playing with your toys.”

In both cases, these products are about enabling us to do things we weren’t otherwise able to do as adults. “Playing music is one of the most blissful feelings life has to offer,” Rigopulos says, “But it’s too fucking hard to learn how. Almost everyone quits after six months.”

The barrier to playing with our toys, however, is one of social acceptability rather than difficulty level. We’re able to play with our toys, but perhaps we don’t feel we’re allowed to—unless it can be done through appropriately adult media. This means television in the case of Robot Chicken, or even video games in the case of Lego Star Wars, thanks to gaming’s new status as an adult pursuit. (Something tells me you’ll be hearing me describe a paper about this in a couple months.)