Somewhere near the life-size toy Halo guns and the “Air Guitar Hero” booth, a woman gasped with delight upon seeing the box under my arm. “Where did you get this?” she asked. She seemed East Asian, somewhere between her late 20s and mid 30s.

I explained which room the toys were at, and said there were probably many left, based on how fast they were being taken. “Are you a collector?” I asked.

“No,” she said, still smiling, “I have a three-year-old who would love this, though.”

Though they are both comparably large conventions that look pretty similar from the show floor, the Consumer Electronics Show is very different from Comic Con International. This was my favorite example illustrating this point, but it’s certainly not the most extreme example. I’ll be writing about this (and some other recent research excursions) once I get back home to Philadelphia this week. In the meantime, go check out the still ongoing conversation about geek music which I blogged about the other day. I just realized there’s a whole second page (and maybe more) of posts which I completely missed, so I need to return to that soon, too.

“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.)

Penny Arcade and its Expo: Joystiq has a handy write-up on the Wil Wheaton keynote at PAX, full of assertions of geek cred. Also, Wired has a handy write-up on the fellows behind Penny Arcade, with further references to their own geek cred. I read this on the plane ride to Seattle and made a mental note to return to it later for all the juicy tidbits within, especially the bit about their new clothing line. (Also note that subscribing to Wired apparently earns you a Geekipedia of some sort.)

Nerd shows: Between Chuck and Big Bang Theory, the Onion AV Club points out that geeks and nerds seem to be popular material in the upcoming fall TV lineup.

Darth Vadertron: Comments following a Gizmodo post suggest the spectrum of fan reaction when Darth Vader is adapted to a Transformers action figure that turns into the Death Star. I guess some are of the mind that one geeky thing plus another geeky thing equals a really awesome geeky thing, whereas others are unimpressed. Much of being unimpressed apparently involves criticizing the details of the figure, such as pointing out that Vader never needed a gun, and asking, “What’s he gonna do in his transformed state? Orbit me to death?”

World of Puberty: A recent article at the Escapist follows the development of the World of Darkness RPG canon, suggesting that the earlier incarnations held their appeal in the world’s dark mirror of puberty. This article is also noteworthy for introducing me to the term ‘grognard capture’ (from Greg Costikyan), which refers to a game design’s ability to narrowly appeal only to hardcore gamers. I guess this stands somewhat in contrast to what I was trying to describe the other day when talking about the “casualcore” gamers Microsoft seems to be imagining must exist, who want less complex games but are expected to shell out prices only an enthusiast would ever contemplate.

Other blogs: Henry Jenkins links to a couple new fandom-oriented blogs by academics: Graphic Engine (about “special effects, videogames, film and television”) and Stranger 109 (exploring “gaming, culture, and technology”). They seem like they might be of interest to readers of this blog who are particularly interested in the formal aspects of traditionally geeky media—and I have to admit that I’m digging the flying saucer image atop the former.

By the time I left Lisbon, I had chatted with people at four stores selling comics, one selling board games, two selling video games, one specializing in science-fiction figures and paraphernalia (though several of the above also sold various anime and/or sci-fi figurines). Several of those people told me they could set me up interviews with some English-speaking customers. I also got a friendly and helpful email reply from João of the Lisbon Gamer blog (a proud geek whose wife also blogs at Geek By Proxy).

The students at UCP were also quite helpful; I know now, for example, that while they know the word “geek,” they also have two separate words for someone who seems strange, like a Star Trek fan, and for someone who is excessively studious. The first is toto (which I may be misspelling), whose other meaning refers to the ponytail hair style; I think that’s probably not a coincidence, considering that many geeky fans wear their hair long (see also the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons). The latter term escapes me, but it compares a person with nose buried in a book to a bull charging, head-down. I’m getting an interesting picture of what it means to be a geek in other cultures, and I hope to work that into the dissertation and/or an additional paper. I’ll probably write more here on the topic after my travels and proposal are behind me.

I’m looking forward to exploring more of Paris, having spent my first day here walking from the Latin Quarter to the Arc de’Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower (and about halfway back before I came to my senses and got on a bus). My hotel in the Latin Quarter is directly across the street from a comic store and a video game store, around the corner from another video game store and a gambling/gaming store, and not too long a walk from a store that seems like an importer; I have yet to visit, but I noticed on the bus ride past last night that it advertised (in English) “Comics,” “Science-fiction,” and “Manga” on the awnings, with windows full of models and action figures. I had not been planning on writing much in my dissertation about toys/figurines, but they occupy such a common and prominent space in fan/geek-oriented retailers that the subject probably deserves some attention in future interviews.

John Swansburg has an article at Slate comparing the new movie to the 1980s animated Transformers: The Movie. He notes that the creators of that movie sheepishly admit in the DVD commentary track that characters were killed off to make room for more action figures (remember: commentary tracks are underutilized resources for research!), but this actually makes for a more thoughtful and affecting story.

Wired has a gallery of “Best Transformers Fan Photos,” and Gizmodo links to its “Fav Transformers Fan Videos,” largely from BotCon 2007.

My first thought on this was that this completely cuts out plenty of self-identified geeks whose media interests have nothing to do with digital media, such as comic book fans, toy collectors, and role-players. I don’t have any data handy that demonstrates that these groups willingly called themselves geeks before Devo and Bill Gates lent the term a little more credibility, but the group that refers to itself as geeks now certainly has some important historical antecedents that existed under a different name. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘geek’ wasn’t used synonymously with ‘nerd’ until the ’50s, and ‘geek chic’ wasn’t seen in print until the ’90s, but the seed of what we mean now when we talk about geeks existed much earlier.

Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book goes so far as to suggest that the way we currently understand geeks can be traced back to the late 20s:

Once in the subculture, the boys fine-tuned one another’s identities around the self-definition “science-fiction fan”—an indifference to clothes and appearance, a manic but unsentimental bonhomie in their meetings, an amused disdain for the drones who didn’t understand them. There was no word for it yet, but now we can see this as the birth of geek culture. And from it every subsequent geek culture—comics, computers, video games, collectible figurines—has either grown from or taken much of its form. (Jones, 2004, p. 37)

From this it goes on to cast Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel as a member of this subculture.

Geek Monthly, meanwhile, suggests that Star Wars might have marked “the birth of geekdom”:

Long before Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s pop and Yoda proved size matters not, Star Wars was a pop culture milestone, a film that managed to transcend being simple popcorn entertainment to become an enduring classic on the level of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.

I’ve heard that Star Wars succeeded in uniting the formerly disparate fantasy and science-fiction fan communities, which have basically been the same community (or at least the same convention market) ever since. (I can’t remember where I heard that, so if you know of something I could cite, please send it along.) Star Wars also introduced Hollywood to movie merchandising, which had a significant effect on keeping fans involved even after the movie(s) ended. Also notable is the fact that Nerd Pride Day (el día del orgullo friki), started by fans in Spain in 2006, is celebrated on May 25—the release date of Star Wars.

Perhaps even more relevant than arguing about the history of media fan traditions, however, is the origins of geek culture in student harassment. Well before the spread of digital media, kids derided one another as “nerds,” and before that, as “eggheads,” for seemingly being studious to the exclusion of being social and fun (as referred to in a book I was reading today, published in 1979, and positioning “eggheads” as a term popular in the 1950s). Even if the terms change a bit, the meaning remains the same, and school is where people first encounter these terms. Also, it’s worth noting that fairly recent research (as recently as 2005, that I’ve seen) indicates that kids still use ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ pejoratively. Lots of these kids, as indicated in my interviews and in existing literature, get into geek/nerd crowds in their local school cultures—is that not (or does it not potentially develop into) “geek culture”? The pejorative usage of ‘geek’ and ‘nerd,’ of course has little or nothing to do with computers, but getting labeled that way almost certainly affects the way people construct identities and communities into adulthood.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that digital media aren’t central to geek culture, just that I wouldn’t say they caused its “birth” so much as its blossoming. It’s pretty relevant that Nerd Pride Day was organized over the internet, and my research so far indicates that this is how lots of geeks have networked with others sharing their interests. Plus, when I ask interviewees why they say it’s now cool to be a geek, even the comic book collectors (who don’t consider themselves computer geeks) credit computers and the wealth people assume they must bring.

Whatever the case, I figured this would be the best forum to think through these thoughts as I write up my literature review and think about structuring my chapters. Please feel free to comment or email if you have any input.