I find the campaign interesting because it’s very much like MIT’s “Nerd Pride” slogan, but even more official and widespread. The various ways that American has tried to lay claim to ‘wonk’ strongly resemble the ways that people have tried to define reclaim ‘geek’ and ‘nerd,’ down to claiming that there are many “types” of geeks, and explaining meaning through backronyms like “general electrical engineering knowledge” or “knurd” (for “drunk” backwards). Given that American University is based out of Washington D.C. and attracting many students who are quite interested in being described as “policy wonks” someday, the new campaign is a kind of way to signal that it’s producing a particular local flavor of geek.

The Eagle, AU’s student newspaper, features comments from folks who don’t quite appreciate the connotations of this new label. Inside Higher Ed notes, “While some noted the positive associations with policy experts, many others posted comments about the nerdish associations with the word”—which is true, but not quite the whole story.

One “AU parent and marketing maven” suggests in the Comments to that article that the word has nerdy connotations which might prove problematic. When you tally up the responses between anyone who notes the connection to ‘nerd’ (‘geek’ is never mentioned), however, you don’t see much concern with nerdy connotations at all. “[Wonk] essentially means ‘nerd,’ which is fine,” one student quoted in the article said, expressing more of a complaint with the way the branding campaign was conducted than with the actual results. In other words, the complaints I’m seeing aren’t about students feeling stigmatized or insulted, but about concern that the campaign won’t actually work. (And I think you’re going to see that at any school that spends years and millions of dollars on any branding campaign, no matter what the result.)

I don’t know how effective the campaign will be in getting people to stop asking “Which one?” when students say that they’re going to American University. We now live in a safer environment to brand oneself with a nerdy word, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t work ahead of AU. If this campaign can stretch the connotations of ‘wonk’ to imply that it’s a nerd who tries to affect policy or change, no matter what their expertise, and if AU cements a reputation as “the wonk school,” I could see that being a selling point for many students. I think has MIT promoted the concept of “Nerd Pride” more than “Nerd Pride” could ever elevate MIT, but nobody asks for clarification when you say you’re at MIT—and they left other nerdy words up for grabs.

Cinema Blend offers “5 Reasons Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Failed to Find an Audience,” but its reasoning is somewhat suspect at times, and even the title seems like a misnomer to me. “Scott Pilgrim” is currently the top Trending Topic on Twitter. My friends have been talking about it for weeks; a bunch of us saw a free advance screening, and a bunch more saw it on opening weekend. The blogs I follow regularly have been generally gushing praise. The issue doesn’t really seem to be that it “failed to find an audience,” but that the audience it found wasn’t really big enough to promise the kind of box office take that you’d expect with a $60 million budget. The whole phenomenon feels strangely reminiscent of Snakes on a Plane: Everyone was expecting the hype to equal success, when in fact it might have been only enough to make sure the movie makes a modest profit in the long run.

Cinemablend may be onto something in pointing out that the pop-culture references and gamer culture in-jokes may have been a little esoteric for the cinemagoing populace at large, but I don’t think too much specialized knowledge was really required to “get” the movie. Yes, you’ll appreciate recognizing some Zelda music during one dream sequence, but knowing the music is from Zelda isn’t really necessary. The really esoteric references have been stripped in the adaptation from comic book to movie. (My favorite scene in the entire comic series shows Ramona getting dressed to go out, generally ignoring her boyfriend, while he drones on about a particular X-Men comic in which Wolverine gets crucified.) By focusing more on rock music in the plot and fairly generic 8-bit game imagery in the visual style, the movie tapped into common media tropes that should’ve been recognizable to most American moviegoers, from those who lament that punk is dead to those who actually shop at Hot Topic.

I’ve heard people suggest other reasons for why Scott Pilgrim didn’t do better, like how so many who were dying to see it saw advance screenings at Comic Con and local theaters (such as myself). It’s a fair point, but there’s no way that accounts for the $24 million gap between #5 and #1 on the weekend box office take (or even the $13 million difference between #5 and #2, Eat Pray Love, which I’ve never even seen an ad for).

Besides the possible issues of how accessible this content really is, then, I see a couple other things going on here.

One factor in Scott Pilgrim‘s reception is a backlash against the image of the “hip nerd.” A recent NPR piece on “‘Scott Pilgrim’ versus the Unfortunate Tendency to Review the Audience” gives a hint at how sick some critics (and perhaps, by extension, some moviegoers) are getting of the nerd image:

After referring to the first part of the movie as a “dork-pandering assault,” The Boston Phoenix reviewer goes on to say that Michael Cera’s performance is “irritating” in part because of “the non-stop Pavlovian laugh track provided by the audience at the screening I attended.” (As far as I know, that’s a first: “You made the audience laugh, you irritating actor in a comedy, and that’s what’s wrong with you.”)

The review in the St. Petersburg Times begins, “First of all, I’m not a video gamer. I have discovered more appealing ways to not have a life.”

The New York Observer sniffs that the film is “clearly directed at an audience with generational ADD.”

Here’s one from Philadelphia Weekly: “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is Fan Service: The Movie, an insular, punishingly alienating experience preaching only to the faithful, devoted hearts of arrested 12-year-old boys. It’s singularly fixated on video games and shallow visions of women as one-dimensional objects to be either obtained or discarded and offers no possible point of entry to anybody over the age of 30.”

I can see how some viewers would get sick of seeing nerdy heroes lately, as that seems to be the bulk of what we’re getting in some genres, and Scott Pilgrim is the most celebratory of the bunch. This trend is reviewed somewhat in “‘Scott Pilgrim’: The End of the Nerd as We Know Him,” in which a Salon writer suggests that the titular character is a “Nerd in Name Only” (or “NINO”). The author was pretty far off in his prediction that Scott Pilgrim would beat The Expendables, but otherwise does a decent job of summarizing how the geek image has been mainstreamed and monetized.

That said, calling Scott a “NINO” (“Nerd in Name Only”) kind of misses the point of what we mean when we call ourselves nerds, but in the author’s defense, his appears to be an outsider perspective. The truth of the matter is that the pop culture image of the nerd is finally catching up to the self-image of the nerd, now that arch-geeks like Edgar Wright are at the helm of blockbuster movies. We the dorks are starting to realize, as a culture, that we are kind of neat. The self-image of the nerdy adult may include gentle, humorous, and honest self-deprecation, but it doesn’t preclude dating. It sees creative talents, like being in a kick-ass band, as part of being a nerd, not mutually exclusive with it. Its sees understanding of truly esoteric pop culture references as markers of authenticity, a shout-out to fellow nerds who know that what we are now is influenced by what we were as kids.

Calling Scott Pilgrim “dork-pandering” is unkind, but not entirely inaccurate. At least Judd Apatow’s movies have the sense to show their lovable losers getting knocked around, insulted, and embarrassed. None have the gall to introduce the protagonist with a label reading, “Rating: Awesome.” To a viewer or critic who isn’t ready to stop dismissing dorks as losers, I can see how a movie that shows geeks how we see ourselves would seem ridiculous.

I don’t think, though, that Scott Pilgrim‘s disappointing performance can be blamed only on “nerd disdain.” This leads me to the second factor I’d like to suggest. Remember how many times you watched The Phantom Menace before you realized it wasn’t as awesome as you thought? Well, Scott Pilgrim is no Episode I, but it did have some pretty major flaws.

I know I am inviting some serious flaming on this one. Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun, and it was funny. I laughed several times, mostly at lines I remembered from the comic book. But let’s be frank: The basic plot—boy meets girl, boy fights enemies to be with girl—was generic. And, perhaps most problematic, the pacing was extremely rushed. Hollywood movies have a very codified sense of pacing that audiences have come to expect. (Watch The Mutant Chronicles sometime for an example of a movie that ignores this at its own peril.) When the reviewer cited in that blockquote above notes that it was made for those with “generational ADD,” I think that’s a critique of the transitions as much as the audience. The movie jumps from scene to scene with reckless abandon, featuring a non-stop energy that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. If the filmmakers hadn’t been so concerned with being true to the comic, there’s no way there would have been a full seven evil exes. There just wasn’t time for them all.

I wonder whether the movie dropped the ball attracting those nerds who weren’t already reading the comic and plugged into the hype surrounding this. If you weren’t already looking forward to it, but still belonged to the hip/nerdy potential target market, I think the best that could be said of the movie was summed up in that Salon piece mentioned above: “The film is empty-headed and utterly devoid of drama, yet aesthetically elating.” That was my own main disappointment with the movie, though not really a surprising one to me: It was fun, but emotionally and thematically vapid compared to the comic book.

This may be a bad thing for the movie, but it’s at least somewhat heartening when you think about the development of traditionally geeky media more generally. The reason I love that scene with Scott babbling on about an X-Men comic to Ramona is because it feels awkwardly, painfully real and familiar. It’s a piece of the drama of their relationship, something that goes beyond the generic “defeat the baddies, get the girl” plot. The Scott Pilgrim movie had to focus on “boss fights” to reach the end, while the Scott Pilgrim comics had a lot more wiggle room to explore the experience of being a directionless twenty-something trying to figure out how friendships and relationships are supposed to work.

I think that point is a major part of what’s missing from so many of the cultural critiques about the ascendency of the nerd to the “pop culture overlord,” in the words of that Salon piece. Yes, “geek chic” has a great deal to do with marketers and content producers finally realizing that geeks represent an audience eager to spend money on media. But it’s also important to note that this also represents a sort of ascendency of traditionally geeky media to something more complex, more sophisticated, more—well, adult.

It’s delightful to hear Zelda music in a dream sequence and to see foes burst into coinage when defeated on the big screen. Blockbusters can’t always sail on mere delight. We all know it’ll make a killing in DVD sales, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not the sign of the Revenge of the Nerds that so many thought was foretold. At the end of the day, though, at least we can reassure ourselves that it was a much better adaptation than LXG.

From Games to Comics: I saw a few people (including my buddy Dan) link this Kotaku post about an Apple patent for a technology that would turn your video game stories into comic books through a series of screen shots. The example used in the patent is clearly from Mass Effect, with the implication being that this is most intended for games where the player gets to choose how the story unfolds, so each comic created would be about a player’s own, personal story.

Kotaku seems pretty jazzed about the idea. Personally, I’m confident this would result in many terrible comic books that might make us realize just how disjointed video game plots tend to be. Maybe that’s a good thing, though, as it might encourage better stories in games in the long run. As I mentioned in a recent post, for instance, Alpha Protocol and Heavy Rain both foreshadow things that the game might never deliver on again later, depending on what choices you make. We forgive that kind of poor storytelling in games because it’s a concession to player choice and because games are often so long that we forget what happened earlier. I think we would notice those kinds of plot holes and paths leading to nowhere if we could revisit the stories in another format.

With Great Power: A BBC article summarizes a study by Sharon Lamb describing how superheroes make poor role models for boys. (I can’t find just one article, as the study seems to have been presented at a conference and possibly derived from the book Packaging Boyhood.) The researchers suggest that it’s problematic that so many comic book heroes are either hypermasculine jerks or lazy slackers, as they present poor role models to boys.

What I found particularly interesting, though, was that the researchers don’t seem to be condemning superhero comics altogether, but sort of commenting on how the “dark and gritty” move since the ’90s has resulted in male characters with less depth and emotional vulnerability. I imagine that there are examples of heroes that don’t fit this “problematic” mold nowadays, and I’ve never been one to suggest that material for adults should be changed or restricted in order to provide “healthy” material for kids, but I thought it was some interesting food for thought. In a way, Lee and Ditko’s Spider-man was a real nerd role model for readers, but I imagine those are harder to find in comics today.

Catching up with the Trend: The BBC also asks “Will Geeks Inherit the Earth?” (with regard to politics and business). The Guardian muses on “The Geek Stranglehold on Cinema” (which may be debatable after Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s unimpressive box office take this past weekend). CNN asks: “Geeks: Smart, Harmless, Authentic, Exploited?” Adweek notes that “Consumers Embrace Geekdom,” and Businessweek reflects on ThinkGeek: The Home of Geek Chic.” (I am pretty sure these came from Church, who sends me so many interesting links that I lose track of them.)

The Psychology of Geek Community: Psychology Today offers some words on how Comic Con offers a community for geeks and nerds. The article notes…

The folks at the convention may use the Internet to create their own virtual communities of like-minded “friends” (I use the term friends loosely, in much the same way as Facebook does). But there is something about stepping into a convention center, an exhibit hall, and a hotel, knowing that you share an interest with almost everyone there.

… And handily sums up about two or three chapters of my dissertation. Turns out I can be pretty wordy!

“Why does everyone automatically assume I know tailoring and cooking?”: Geek Feminism reposts an incisive critique of issues of sexism in World of Warcraft and gamer/geek culture more broadly, “I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery.”

I have a bunch more links about Scott Pilgrim, but I’m thinking that deserves its own post after I get some other work done.

The basic point of the paper is to offer a rough typology of elements that players find “appealing” about games, providing an analytical vocabulary that critics, scholars, and developers can use in describing what “works” (and what doesn’t) in game, and why, without assuming that it’s the players themselves who exist in types. The appeals I’ve been looking at are those that I’ve heard or read players themselves describe, even if indirectly, when discussing how they engage with games. I’ve been describing these appeals lately mastery, story, sociality, and foolery (not too unlike what I called them in my early musings on this subject). Some other kinds of appeals have occurred to me as potentially worth discussing, though I haven’t heard other players specifically describe them as much—e.g., do the Wii and Dance Dance Revolution offer an appeal of physicality distinct from other kinds of appeals?

It’s occurred to me recently, though, that I’m leaving out a couple other kinds of “appeals” almost willfully, and maybe that’s just a bit too convenient for me. You don’t hear players describing these as things they like about games, but you might hear players note them as reasons why they play games.

These are the appeals that players themselves refer to when they talk about planning raids for World of Warcraft even when they don’t really enjoy the game anymore. These are the appeals that keep people coming back again and again to Facebook games that offer no story, no challenge (and thus no sense of mastery), no social interaction, and no way to explore, break the rules, or otherwise “fool around.” These are the appeals that Ian Bogost was critiquing when he designed Cow Clicker.

Cow Clicker is a game on Facebook that involves nothing more than logging in periodically to click on a cow. It is meant as a satire of other Facebook social games, an object lesson on the pointlessness of games that require frequent, repetitive updating—what Ian calls compulsion—and offer no more challenge, strategy, or creativity than simply clicking a mouse—what Ian calls optionalism. (Ian describes other effects of formally pointless Facebook games, but I think you’d be harder pressed to argue that players actually respond to “destroyed time” as an appeal.)

Arguably, compulsion may be seen as a trait of the player than an appeal built into a game, but I mention it here because I think one could argue that some games are designed specifically to capitalize on this. Game designer Nels Anderson, for instance, draws out the comparison between these habits in Facebook games and “gaming” in the casino sense of the term. Facebook games that require you to do nothing but periodically click on a cow are essentially like slot machines, only without the slim chance of a monetary payout—they are compulsion plus optionalism in a nutshell. Roleplaying games and MMORPGs often skip the optionalism for a rather textured gameplay experience, but arguably encourage compulsion by requiring grinding or even by providing an environment in which new equipement must always be acquired for “Keeping up with the Joneses.”

And so I feel stuck in my mission to describe the appeals of gaming. I want to offer broad categories of appeal so that just about any other kind of appeal can be broken down into them—e.g., story might include either or both “spectatorship” (in narrative games with lengthy cut scenes) and “directorship” (in narrative games where you get to choose the direction the story takes). If I really want to be entirely inclusive in describing what gets and keeps people playing games (as opposed to proscribing what ought to be available as an appeal), I may have to figure out a way to include appeals that I personally find more problematic than appealing.

And as a bit of a postscript: I wrote this draft, let it sit awhile, and then found out that Michael Abbott is putting together a similar sort of project at his Brainy Gamer blog called The Fun Factor, which approaches this question more from the micro-level than my macro-approach. Head on over and leave a comment to describe what you enjoy about particular games, which he’ll be compiling later.

To be fair, critics’ complaints with the game are not unfounded. The game is indeed a transparent rip-off of Mass Effect, but was stuck in development for so long that it looks and feels dated now. Released months after the supremely polished Mass Effect 2, Alpha Protocol has the graphical fidelity of the first Mass Effect, but without the eerie and expansive alien worlds. The run-and-gun combat also feels like the first hour of Mass Effect‘s, in which weapons are so wildly inaccurate that it feels like firing blind. You can instead focus on putting points into “stealth builds” with little or no focus on gunplay, instead focusing on a pared-down sneaking mechanic reminiscent of the Splinter Cell series. This is a recipe for frustration, however, thanks to extremely challenging boss fights in rooms where you have nowhere to hide. And, though I haven’t seen others mention this much (perhaps because some reviews I’ve read seem to find the plot confusing), the game has occasional serious issues with keeping its story straight, such as when my protagonist seems surprised during one mission to discover intel that I (the player) already paid for and read in-game before the mission even started.

All of that said, Alpha Protocol does two things that blow most of its contemporaries out of the water in terms of narrative game design. I hope Obsidian reuses these design decisions in its later games, and that others find some influence in them.

The first of the two things Alpha Protocol does right is a focus on dialog as game. I don’t just mean allowing you to choose your own things to say in dialog scenes. What I mean is that conversations become a mini-game of their own, in a way. Dialog isn’t just flavor to pad the space between “action” scenes—it is a kind of action. In the very beginning of the game, the protagonist is told that he was recruited for this operation because of his ability to manipulate people, making it clear that whatever your choice of skills, whatever your imagined attitude, you’ll get rewarded for reading other people and speaking to them accordingly. And then the game delivers: During a conversation, the game (relatively unobtrusively) tells you when a conversation partner begins to like or dislike you more based on your responses.

There are benefits both to being liked and being disliked, depending on the character and the situation. Sometimes you need to weigh what’s most valuable to you as a player and as a spectator. Would you rather personally impress a certain mob boss, or would you rather blackmail him, now that you’ve discovered he lied to you and nearly got you killed? Would you rather have a handler who hates your guts, knowing that this will make you a better fighter just to spite them? Do you really want a coked-up, murdering mobster to consider you a pal?

To consider a contrast, recall that in Mass Effect a great many dialog prompts turn out the same way no matter what you respond (which becomes disappointingly apparent when you replay using a different kind of character). In both Mass Effect and Fallout 3 (and even more so in Mass Effect 2), conversation options are pretty cleanly split between “thing I need to say to keep things moving” and “better thing to say, unlocked by progress of a conversation-related skill.” If you’ve got a high enough Speech skill or Charm/Intimidate skill, it’s just about never worthwhile to say anything but the special “unlocked” dialog option. This can be fun, but it also feels rather unlike actual conversation, especially as many of the “locked” dialog options are extremely obvious to anyone who’s ever been in a real conversation before (which hopefully includes all of us). Dialog then becomes a reward for the point-allocation portion of the game, rather than a game in itself.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Alpha Protocol‘s approach, meanwhile, is that all of these conversation options—and other choices you make along the way—seem to actually matter, even if only in tiny but observable ways. This brings me to my second point about what Alpha Protocol does so impressively: making character choices feel truly relevant in how stories unfold. I realize even as I type this that it doesn’t sound very different from what earlier RPGs have accomplished, but the difference here, I think, is in the details, in how far the developers were willing to take this concept to make replays feel genuinely different. Bioware has made a big deal about how many thousands of variables it tracks between Mass Effect installments—but as players point out, the actual effect of your actions in Mass Effect 1 tended to be no more than a brief email message in the sequel.

Having played and replayed Alpha Protocol multiple times now (it’s very quick to get through once you know what you’re doing), I can attest that dialog, challenges, and rewards can change quite dramatically depending on various choices you make. Acting suave, professional, or aggressive to any given character changes how they regard you, what information they give you, and what information they share about you with others. This means that the order in which you do your missions is quite relevant, as your reputation can precede you as you get later in the game. Characters address you differently depending on how you’ve treated other characters, whether you approach missions with stealth or rushing in with guns-a-blazing, and what kind of clothing you happen to be wearing. And, of course, the game offers the kind of major lynchpin choice moments that you see in other games, and more of them than you tend to encounter elsewhere—multiple moments of deciding who lives or who dies, whether to prioritize a mission over a friend, and so on.

Your choices are further chronicled by minor “perks” you get awarded along the way: A couple extra skill points, a bonus to Endurance, or a discount on intel prices to mark noteworthy accomplishments, like that time you snuck past those guards, made a friend with an informant, or finally got 100 critical hits. In general, you get rewarded one way or another, regardless of what you do, but the point here is that the game lets the player know in a concrete way (even if you don’t play the game repeatedly like I did) that there was more than one way to do things, with more than one possible result.

The reason why I say that Alpha Protocol has the potential to be so important is that the two things it excels at—dialog and choice—represent the union of a traditionally “narrative” element with a traditionally “gamelike” element. In this way, it’s kind of trying to do the same thing as Heavy Rain, despite how dissimilar they seem to be on the surface. Personally, I believe these games are on to something, even if they haven’t quite gotten it yet. Both are trying to find a way to tell a story with “action” that isn’t just a series of fight scenes. (Heavy Rain has few fights at all, and Alpha Protocol usually rewards you much better for remaining completely unseen than for winning fights.) I think the major failing of both games is more one of plot than of gameplay: If you’re going to develop a game system tailored to telling a story, it needs to have a story worth telling. Plot holes and inconsistencies are bad enough, but both games also offer so many choices that they fail basic storytelling tests like following up on their own foreshadowing (unless you choose very specific options along the way).

If we’re ever going to see a game that has any kind of narrative purpose besides “an action movie you get to control,” we need games that can handle dialog and protagonist choice in interesting ways. It’s not enough just to make us watch a conversation, and I’m starting to wonder whether the illusions of choice we’ve gotten so far will continue to satisfy in the future. Alpha Protocol is not the long-promised game that will prove to everyone that “games can be art,” but it’s potentially a bigger step than critics give it credit for, and we could do worse than to look to it as an influence.

The social sciences have too often jumped in feet first, raising unnecessary panics over video games, “fad” mental illnesses, and “crises” of sexual assault. I’ll acknowledge that it’s probably difficult to sell a book or get a government grant arguing that something isn’t a big problem, yet it is time for the social sciences to carefully consider the chasm that too often exists between the data that they produce and the claims they make to the scientific community and general public. Words such as “epidemic” should only ever be preceded by words like “smallpox,” and should henceforth be stricken from the social scientist’s lingo. (…)

The evidence just isn’t there for an epidemic of narcissism or anything else. Social scientists would do well to exercise a degree of caution when interpreting data. Just like with the little boy who cries wolf, people are bound to notice too many phantom epidemics. The price to be paid is the credibility of social science itself.

Of course I was thinking “video games” (and “comic books”) before I even got to the part of the article where the author mentions this. (Little did I know while reading this that the author, an associate professor of psychology at Texas A&M, has already written about his take on game “violence” in particular.) I recommend the article for all academics who will wring their hands over the next big cultural boogeyman, and to all professors who lament the moral fiber of “kids today.”

(And as an added side note: As someone who was bullied and played dodgeball as a kid, I’m a little offended by the commenter who calls dodgeball a “particularly horrific game (in which authority figures actually encourage normal kids to act like bullies).” Maybe the bullies were different in this person’s neighborhood, but where I grew up, bullies beat you up, up-close and personal, and did not invite you to play a game of dodgeball with them.)

This article focuses on how people interact in arcades, and how social dynamics and the cultural connotations behind games influences who plays what and with whom. It’s not nominally about geeks or geek cultures, but this study did end up influencing how I thought about my dissertation research. When you get to the parts about how people insulate themselves socially, and particularly one moment in which a boy loudly proclaims upon winning a game, “I’m the One! I’m ****in’ Neo!”, you may see what I mean.

A lot has happened since I wrote the first draft of this paper, back when the Wii was still codenamed the “Revolution.” I wish I had been quick enough in revising it and progressing through the academic publishing process that I could have explained why the results of my research indicated that Nintendo’s new console was going to sell like hotcakes, but not as much among the gamers who call themselves “hardcore.” The best I can do is point back and say, “In retrospect, this should have been obvious to us.” Ah, research.

My thoughts on the terms ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ as applied to game players have also developed somewhat since writing this article, but I think that has more to do with how the terms are applied elsewhere than with what seemed appropriate for this paper. I opted to use ‘experienced’ over ‘hardcore’ in the most recent revision, and I suspect I could have replaced ‘casual’ with ‘inexperienced’ or ‘irregular’ (which is not at all consistent with how you’d refer to a “casual” gamer who plays Plants vs. Zombies several times a day), but those terms have their own sorts of connotations as well. For now, I hope I can be forgiven for using the terms that seemed most appropriate at the time, despite their lack of terminological specificity. For more on how I was thinking about the terms, check out Diane Carr’s excellent 2005 study in Simulation and Gaming, “Contexts, Gaming Pleasures, and Gendered Preferences” (sadly, not available free online unless you belong to a library that subscribes to the journal).

Of course, probably the most predictable development since writing this has been the continued erosion of the arcade business model in the US. The first draft of this paper covered such developments in greater detail, but I had to pare the focus down to something more manageable. For now, though, I’ll say that arcades have only gotten more scarce since this paper was written, and I think that’s a shame. For all the negative stereotypes surrounding such establishments, what I remember most about my months of research was how central some of these arcades were to their communities. The two sites where this struck me the most—”City Arcade” and “Strip Mall Arcade”—are still in business. The other two have closed since turning in the final revision of this paper to the journal editor. I can’t speak for the reasoning behind closing down “Campus Arcade,” but as far as I know, “Sports Bar Arcade” was still doing good business when its landlords refused to renew its lease so the space could be sold to a chain store. As the end of the paper predicts, chains like Dave & Busters still seem to be doing okay.

As a final side note, I thought some of my readers here might arch an eyebrow upon reading the sentence, “One of the most useful tools at my disposal was being good enough at certain games—and being sufficiently able to gauge the ability of my opponents—to control for the outcome of a match.” Please do not think me merely boastful. Before graduate school, I worked a job as an overnight security guard in a mall (which was not among my research sites). I was only expected to patrol once every few hours, and invited to use the rest of my night as I wished, so long as I stayed awake. The mall left the arcade open all night, where it remained accessible only to the security and cleaning staff. The arcade had Soul Calibur 2, and I am drawn to playing characters with Italian names. Let us leave it at that.

(But yes, I do still stink at the entire Tekken series.)

In other words, people really, really want to know what the difference is between geeks and nerds.

Recently, I noticed that Wikihow cited this post in its guide on “How to Tell the Difference Between Nerds and Geeks.” The point of my “Geeks vs. Nerds” post, however, was to argue that there is not a difference—or at least no one, true, universally agreed-upon difference. The point of that post was to catalog some of the many different ways that people define ‘geek’ and ‘nerd,’ and the distinctions between them, illustrating that these terms evolve in meaning from place to place, day to day, person to person. Many people insist that there is a difference, and for them personally, perhaps there is—but no guide will ever adequately tell you what is the right thing to call another person, as the Wikihow article itself wisely cautions by the end.

In defining what these terms are supposed to mean, people frequently refer back to their origins. The first recorded usage of ‘nerd’ dates back to Dr. Seuss’s 1954 If I Ran the Zoo, appearing shortly thereafter in journalism as synonymous with “a drip.” A lot of people trace ‘geek’ back to the term applied to circus performers who bit the heads off live animals, but the Oxford English Dictionary notes that it goes back much further to refer to a “foolish” person, potentially even appearing in an early form in Shakespeare’s writing.

The problem with leaning on etymology, however, is that meanings change over time. Most non-geeks do not remember the circus-related connotations of the word, and most self-professed geeks don’t even seem to realize that the word goes back even further. It’s interesting to trace where these words started, but what they mean today is much more easily traced to recent events: movies about high school and college, colorful figures of the electronic frontier, and memories of our own childhood.

I’ve enjoyed collecting and posting all various definitions and distinctions between these terms, but I think I’m calling it quits now. “Geeks vs. Nerds” will stand unedited from now on (barring some happening far too exciting and relevant to pass up). In the end, I think the final word on this issue goes to the webcomic responsible for my third most trafficked post, xkcd. In the meantime, I’ll echo the aforementioned Wikihow article’s advice: “Aim to assume nothing and to treat all fellow human beings with equal respect, whatever label they’re self-applying or you’re tempted to apply.” I’d further caution my fellow self-proclaimed geeks and nerds not to get too offended when people call you by your less preferred term as an adult. Whether the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth or we’re seeing the Revenge of the Nerds, neither of these terms needs to be an insult if we don’t take them as such.

But that is not what this blog post is about.

This blog post is about “Zero Punctuation: Achieving the Cross-media Transformation of Ludological Hermeneutics,” a recent article from the Escapist. The author critiques Croshaw’s reviews as themselves critiques of gamer culture and gender norms. At first, I found it pretty spot-on, if a bit unnecessarily obtuse. Then, I started wondering if it was actually intentionally obtuse. I honestly wasn’t sure of what to conclude until I got to the end, where “Max Steele” claimed to have a Ph.D. from Miskatonic University.

I relate this anecdote for two reasons.

First, that’s a pretty funny gag right there.

And second, Lord help me, but I still found the article interesting, despite being nigh-impenetrable. I can’t decide whether this is a credit to the author or a sad commentary on academics’ willingness to inure themselves to overly complex writing. Maybe both. Or maybe I just used the word “inure” in a sentence without even thinking about it.

On a somewhat related note, I stumbled upon a post on Star Trek cufflinks, titled “Not Just for Geeks,” describing how geek fashion can still be quite elegant as well as a philosophical statement. (Despite noting that this fashion statement is not just for geeks, the author does describe himself as a geek and a nerd, in case you were wondering.)

Personally, I find myself stocking up on less geek apparel ever since I took on the assistant professor job and cut back on convention visits following the dissertation research. I just have fewer situations to wear the stuff, now. (That said, I wouldn’t mind replacing my old “Magneto Was Right” t-shirt, my original homemade one since destroyed in the laundry. Maybe without the text this time, for the love of cryptic imagery.)