We’re launching with a bunch of reviews already up, with plenty more on the way. I’d especially like to draw your attention, however, to some of the commentaries and features I’ve been working on over the last few months, including pieces on…

• what roleplaying games look like when they don’t involve playing roles;
• game controls in a world without buttons;
• some lessons learned from Glitch;
• the evils (and some of the good!) of cool-down timers in game design;
• an argument in defense of pointless games;
• and the ethics of “freemium” as a business model.

I’ll have more to say soon about some of the other venues I’ve been writing for. For now, though, I’m too excited about this project finally seeing the light of day to share this space with anything else!

1. Just because women buy misogynistic products, or sleep with artists of misogynistic products, does not mean that those products don’t express misogyny. […]

4. Feminists are not always looking for something to be angry about. But it’s hard to overstate the sexism in American popular culture. […]

6. Liking art that is misogynist, racist, sexist, or homophobic doesn’t necessarily make you those things, and indictment of that art doesn’t have to be an indictment of you. […]

Folks need to breathe a bit. I think our conversations about culture would be a lot healthier and more interesting if we could hold two thoughts in our hands at the same time and acknowledge that we like problematic stuff. Because really, we all do.

She’s responding to recent discussions relating to rap music, but the connections to ongoing debates in geek culture struck me as so relevant that I couldn’t just link to it on Twitter and move on. I want to be able to refer back to this later, as these debates seem to end up in the same places every time.

I came across this pre-trick-or-treating photo while rummaging around a box in my mother’s house, looking for photos for a documentary, and today seemed like a good day to share it. In case it’s not clear, this lineup includes a robot, a ninja, a pirate, and a zombie. (I’m the tall one.) All we were missing was a monkey, and we would’ve had a complete geek zodiac.

Thanks to Jarrod, Jeff, and Stephen for permission to share this one with the world, roughly 20 years after it was taken.

Over at Kotaku, Kirk Hamilton offers a fairly comprehensive round-up of critics’ comparisons between the game and its trailer, and some thoughtful consideration of why so many seemed so let down. What was so special about this situation that it should provoke such strong reactions? It is, after all, just an ad, and everybody knows by now that cinematic game commercials typically have little to do with the actual gameplay experience. Why get so worked up about the game being different? Kirk hazards a guess:

The trailer was well-made and engaging; it channeled a hugely popular TV series (Lost) and it showed a little girl getting brutally murdered as her mother looked on. But I think the real reason for the trailer’s impact was that it promised us something that, as it turned out, we wanted very badly.

We may not have known it at the time, but I think we want a zombie game that is tragic and sad, action-packed and tense, full of loss and emotional catharsis. We want a game to make us tear up, to show us impossible loss, to make [us] come to terms with the actual risks and small but human costs of a deadly viral outbreak. Brilliantly, manipulatively, the Dead Island trailer promised us that, and our desire to see our wish fulfilled outweighed our skepticism. It was fun to believe that maybe, just maybe, this game would be different from the others.

I think he’s close, but not quite there. As Tom Bissell writes at Grantland, “There is, anyway, only one story worth telling in a zombie game, and here it is: See those zombies over there? You should probably get away from them.” Sure, on a thematic level, zombies represent all kinds of metaphors about consumerism or our inherent primal nature or whatever – but at the end of the day, the plots tend to be pretty much the same.

I don’t think the world is specifically clamoring for the most emotional zombie story ever. Rather, I think we just want more games that tell stories worth caring about at all, told in a way we haven’t seen in so many other games already. Dead Island looked like it might be one of those games, and it wasn’t.

Big-budget video games with complex narratives are still pretty dominated by the genres typically associated with geeks and young men: science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, with the more “realistic” end of the spectrum occupied by gangsters, soldiers, and cowboys. Think back to the most acclaimed stories in video gaming and see if you can come up with one that doesn’t fit into one of those subsets. Mass Effect, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Fallout, Shadow of the Colossus, the Final Fantasy series, and even the Uncharted games end up at something fantastical by the end. (Honorable mentions go to anything published by Rockstar, though I wonder if it’s no coincidence that they have more mainstream appeal and also come up less often in the “games that made me cry” conversations.)

These are, of course, not exclusively the domain of geeks; they’re also the blockbuster genres of Hollywood action movies. Hollywood, however, has also managed to make some stirring dramatic content in other genres. In video games, if you want drama and high audiovisual production values, you pretty much have to accept that the story’s also going to have wizards, space marines, or – sure, what the heck? – zombies. I imagine that “an emotional story about zombies” must have been seriously enticing for some of the people ogling that trailer, but I think it was too explosively popular for that to be all that was going on.

This is what I think happened: We almost got a rare taste of what we keep insisting video games can be. Meaningful. Emotional. Thought-provoking. Artful. And – this is key – different. The trailer made us wonder if it would be different not just in its story, but in gameplay, each component complementing the other.

When was the last time you saw a major console release that told a grand story and really played differently? The first title that comes to mind for me is Heavy Rain – a deeply flawed title to be sure, but so much broader in its story, in its scenes, in the ways that you could interact with its world, than perhaps any of its peers. Other games map one or two constantly repeated actions to each button – press RT to shoot, X to reload, A to jump, over and over again – but Heavy Rain had us cradling a baby to sleep, searching a crime scene for clues, escaping a car in a wrecker. The controls didn’t always work very well, but the approach meant that we got a real story rather than the same action scene played out over and over again in different settings. No wonder that so many who saw Dead Island’s trailer speculated that it might be “Heavy Rain with zombies” – we haven’t really seen other games attempt any story with quite so much range in emotion and content, successful or otherwise. We expected something more than another game about whacking monsters with blunt instruments.

I don’t think we can really hold it against Techland for not meeting our expectations with Dead Island. It’s a rare developer that can risk a AAA console release that bears practically no resemblance to any known genre of gameplay. After all, it’s something of a truism among critics and developers that a game with a good story but cruddy gameplay isn’t worth playing, whereas a game with a cruddy story can still be playable. And it sounds like Dead Island is playable, at least.

I think it’s worth noting, though, that so many of us really hoped for this to be that other game, that special and different game. There’s an audience waiting for this, and I suspect that the developer who finally pulls it off will be celebrated and imitated for years to come – with or without the zombies.

I received the strangest question in an interview once: somebody wanted to talk to me about MC Frontalot, who coincidentally has a new album out. They wanted to know why rap about nerd things, or make comics about nerd things…. I scrunched my whole face up, and the region between my eyebrows shifted tectonically from plain to mountain. But he could not see this, so I was forced to express my confusion with the human words.

This was a person writing an article for a newspaper, a device which transmits culture, but he didn’t seem to understand what he was doing! Maybe he was confused because he was taught to “speak” without “voice,” that is, to communicate neutrally. Maybe he found the printing press in the woods, and operates it via dimly understood rituals. But here’s the apparently impenetrable math: people create culture. And they create it by describing the world in terms which are relevant to them. Who does he think makes all this stuff?

All that changed was the hand on the tiller.

I find myself having a similar conversation quite a bit. I try not to hold it against people who don’t understand, though. It’s not always obvious to outsiders why the whole “nerd” thing would remain relevant to us into adulthood. I guess that’s why I wrote a dissertation trying to explain it.

At dinner I got straight down to it. Did he still play? “Yes.” Strike one. How often? “I’m preparing for a tournament this weekend.” Strike two. Who did he hang out with? “I’ve met all my best friends through Magic.” Strike three. I smiled and nodded and listened. […]

So what did I learn? Google the shit out of your next online date. Like, hardcore.

I’m not writing this to condemn the author of this article; a sizable portion of the internet seems to have done so quite extensively already. Nor am I writing this to speculate about what Gizmodo, a heavily nerd-trafficked blog, was thinking in running the article (though the “nerd bait” theory seems reasonable). Rather, I’m writing this because I think I might disagree with the message many of my fellow nerds take from this story.

The message I saw implied in many responses to this story – mostly in the form of tweets and blog posts – was that this is why we geeks have to hide who we are. I see just the opposite. This is an excellent example of why we shouldn’t feel the need to hide who we are.

I can see why people get the other message from it. This is precisely what we were conditioned to fear growing up: irrational judgment, and public dismissal by those we can’t help but admire and find attractive. From the outside, this looks like a geek nightmare come true. The savvy but hapless nerd gets a date, only to get laughed to his face. The embarrassment goes public, and the geek is mocked in front of the entire world. (A post about your dating life on a blog with many millions of viewers is certainly public on a broader scale than high school gossip, but high school sure feels like the entirety of the world while you’re there.) It is easy to point at this and ask if it’s any mystery why we would hide our own interests.

Take a moment, though, to see this from another perspective. The story doesn’t end with that Gizmodo post. Soon after I read it, the story exploded in my Twitter feed, with links and responses among the folks I follow.

Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander)
i think magic the gathering is incredibly nerdy. but i’m not a champion at anything. would TOTES date him.

Joey Comeau (@joeycomeau)
I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but I’d way rather go out with a Magic: TG champ than a Gizmodo editor. Any day.

Gus Mastrapa (@triphibian)
If you are not a geek ally you are a geek enemy.

I also had a spirited little side discussion with some friends about how the fellow in the article probably wasn’t interested in having his real name used this way, but perhaps that’s neither here nor there.

The responses I’ve seen to this have been overwhelmingly condemning of the original post. That may represent a minority opinion in our culture at large, but it’s still part of a broader trend of people being unashamed of their geekiness and less judgmental toward nerds. In high school, we might have belonged to just a small group of geeks. As adults, however, it’s a lot easier to find others like us. And on the internet – perhaps even on internet dating sites? – we are legion. This story started with a single person’s snap judgment, but blossomed into a showing of nerd support.

I’m not saying that you should make your Magic: The Gathering and D&D exploits the centerpiece of your online dating profile. For better or worse, managing how we present ourselves in everyday life is fundamental to normal social interaction in our culture. I hope this story illustrates, though, that we don’t need to actively hide who we are for fear of judgment, at least as adults. Yes, sometimes we will be judged, but our world is bigger than it was in high school. We no longer have to deal on a personal level with those who dismiss out of hand, once we’ve been dismissed (or dismissed them ourselves). And once we’ve gone our separate ways, we can get back to to dealing with those who are more open-minded – and those who might even leap to defend our nerdiness in front of the world.

I hope you’ll forgive the moment of navel-gazing, but the topic felt especially worth revisiting in light of Ben Abraham‘s recent Gamasutra article, “Games Criticism, Women Critics, and Challenging Sexism.” Shockingly (to me, anyway), some readers posted comments to that article dismissing the entire argument for not citing enough evidence that sexism exists. These are people who don’t know what sexism is. Asking for evidence of sexism is like asking for evidence of “imagination” or “politics”: it’s an abstract thing, but it’s so obvious once you understand what it is that it’s mind-boggling that anyone would refuse to believe in it.

Part of the problem, I think, is that many people have an ignorantly narrow view of “sexism” – a view I myself unwittingly espoused on my own blog three years ago:

All the actual behavior we’d think of as misogynistic or sexist in geek culture has almost exclusively been visible to me on the internet (or described by others in certain small, isolated contexts full of nerds, such as at certain conventions and CS departments). Not that there aren’t woman-hating dorks wandering around the streets or at the cons I’ve attended—just that certain anonymous or isolated social contexts make people feel they can let this side of themselves show.

A lively exchange in the comments following the post does go some way toward clarifying this. Even so, having just spent two years teaching at a women’s college – including offering a course on “Images of Women in the Media” and many assignments on sexism and misogyny – I think I’ve gotten (slightly) better about discussing these issues. I figured it was a topic worth revisiting.

It’s true that the most overt, vitriolic, and unashamed displays of misogyny I ever witnessed in the course of my research were on the internet. But to say that “all the actual behavior we’d think of as misogynistic or sexist in geek culture has almost exclusively been … on the internet” is devastatingly narrow. Really, this should have said that I only witnessed geeky men harassing and bullying geeky women on the internet, but I picked up some anecdotes of it happening in other contexts.

Sexism more broadly speaking, however, is subtle and easily missed if you don’t know how to recognize it. In geek cultures, for instance, sexism manifests as women getting less recognition and pay than men for the same work (as pointed out in Ben’s aforementioned article), being encouraged to study some subjects in school over others, being chosen as the public face for gaming and tech products only if they’re both intelligent and pretty, and not getting traditionally “masculine” products marketed to them at all because, you know, girls don’t like that stuff anyway. Sexism isn’t just men openly treating women badly, but a whole set of assumptions across our culture that quietly but significantly influence how we all live our lives.

It’s actually quite easy to remain willfully ignorant of sexism. Typically, it only requires coming up with excuses to maintain the status quo. One popular example is to explain hiring and pay disparities in tech companies as a matter of men just happening to be more “qualified.” That only holds up if you’re willing to ignore that the criteria for “qualification” are sexist themselves – either (or both) in terms of restricting access (e.g., cultures that make women feel like trespassers) or arbitrary and exclusionary prerequisites for membership (e.g., years of programming experience even before reaching college).

From my experience teaching courses on this topic to many young women, I can assure you that it’s not just men who fail to recognize sexism. “Feminism” was practically a dirty word among the students where I taught, and that was at a women’s college. One student admitted that she was so nervous about being stereotyped as man-hating that she figured she’d take what liberties she had and quit while she was ahead – yet still behind where we should be as a culture. Along those lines, consider too that many women do recognize sexism, but don’t speak up about it at every turn. After all, you can only spend so much of your time arguing the obvious to those unwilling to listen.

Men experience sexism, but not in the same way that women typically do. During the course of my geek cultures research, it always galled me whenever I read things on Slashdot tagged with “misandry” which were about calling men to task for treating women unequally. Consider, for instance, when Tim Berners-Lee called out “‘stupid’ male geek culture” for discriminating against women in engineering. (The “misandry” tag has since been replaced with “prejudice.”) This is not misandry (however offended any of us might be by inferring that this applies to “geek culture” at large). Rather, this is pointing out sexist practices against women in an industry.

What does misandry or sexism against men look like, then? It does not look like men getting shut out of jobs or getting paid less; that claim comes from those who prefer the current structure of privilege, chafing as they see inequalities very slowly eroding. Rather, sexism against men manifests as an expectation to fulfill the stereotypes of manliness: being physically strong and capable of violence when need be; not feeling allowed to cry or express emotion; happy with promiscuity and treating women as sex objects; and, perhaps most of all, not feeling allowed to be attracted to other men. These are stupid, unfair, and sexist things expected of men.

And, much like women can fail to recognize sexism against their own gender without even realizing it, men can do the same. Geeks are helping to propagate misandry every time they teabag you and call you a fag when they beat you at Halo. They’re promoting sexism – against women and men – every time they talk about one-upping jocks by stealing their girlfriends.

I’ll stand by the opinion that some male geeks bully women – and, I’ll add, each other – as a reaction to their own feelings of powerlessness and rejection. Much of the oppression geeks have felt is very real, in the form of cruel taunting, exclusion, and, sometimes, physical violence, with most harassment coming from members of their own gender. I think we see especially frequent and hateful geek misogyny online not because women cruelly refused to date male nerds, but because possessing women is the yardstick for dominance among men, and some geeks are still bitter about their treatment at the hands of jocks.

Suggesting possible origins of hateful behavior should not be seen as forgiving geeks for bullying, or as blaming the victims of geek sexism, or even as blaming men who bullied geeks when they were kids. Adults are responsible for their own actions, and this kind of behavior isn’t justifiable even if we can take some steps toward explaining it sociologically.

But bullying and harassment aren’t the end-all, be-all symptoms of sexism. Not by a long shot. Geekdom suffers from the same pervasive sexism of our society at large, which means it has a long way to go. Recognizing this and correcting it in our everyday lives is the first step toward fixing what’s stupid about our world.

The geeks who aren’t part of the problem can and should be part of the solution. I’ve met brilliant, caring, wonderful nerds and geeks from all over the spectrum of identities. While some revel in childishness and hatred, or leap to the defense whenever they feel attacked, others are sensitive to bullying and oppression because they know what these things feel like. Which kind of geek would you rather be?

The reasons behind this decision are personal, so I’ll skip the details. I will say, though, that I don’t see this as “quitting academia” so much as engaging with it differently. I’m still slated to go to at least one conference this year, still keeping up with my favorite journals, and still working on a book that I hope will be of interest to general and academic audiences alike. I like academia. I just don’t feel the best way for me to participate in it right now is as a tenure-track professor.

All of that said, I’m really enjoying working on some projects I didn’t have much time to do as a full-time teacher and the coordinator of a Communication department. Currently, I’m developing a mobile game with a friend that I’ve been dreaming about making for years, writing about games and culture, doing some freelance production and consulting work, and, of course, getting Geek Cultures into shape for publication.

For the time being, I’m working on establishing a reliable income from freelance writing, design, and consulting. My LinkedIn profile is geared toward part-time and temporary work, but if you happen to know of a neat company or nonprofit that could use a full-time, Boston-based specialist in geeks, games, online communities, and visual communication, please feel free to drop me a line.

And stay tuned to this space – I probably won’t be any less busy than I was as a professor, but I still have plenty of nerdy things to blog about.

If you’re a geek or a nerd and you’d like to be interviewed—especially if you happen to be over 40 years of age and/or are living in Europe—drop JB an email at jbperetie@yahoo.com. European interviewees will be easier for JB and crew to film, of course, but rest assured that you can get away with speaking in English if that’s your only language. (We got on just fine with that this afternoon, which is good, as I speak no French, and my Spanish/Russian/Old Norse skills are rusty at best.) And don’t worry if you’re camera-shy; they’re not only looking for people to film, but even just people to chat with on Skype to help with their research.

So, once again: email jbperetie@yahoo.com to chat about geek culture, and help a French documentarian today.

The subtext of this article, I suppose, is that I think cultural researchers could benefit from a broader understanding of what “counts” as research. In communication and media studies, at least, I think a lot of scholars and editors have grown gradually more accustomed to the idea that “virtual ethnography”—studying a culture via the internet, as opposed to in person, for extended periods of time—has its place. Even within this subset of research practice, though, I think it’s important to remember that people develop a sense of culture online in ways that go beyond posting to forums and mailing lists, which is what most online ethnographies I’ve read have focused on. I drew on that kind of thing in my own research, of course, but the web is a big place, and what goes on online doesn’t necessarily stay online. “Culture” is sometimes bigger than any one community of people, and a broader approach to online research can offer new perspectives on that.

My own approach to “ethnographic blogging,” then, involved surfing the web just to see where it would take me, writing blog posts on the off chance that others would comment on them and link to them (thus giving me more sites to read via trackbacks), and using info from online communities to locate suitable “offline” communities to study. (That’s in addition to all the “normal” participant observation and interviews I conducted, of course.) It probably seems haphazard and unscientific to many other researchers, but I suppose I’m the kind of researcher who tends to publish in journals with “Science” in the name only when accompanied by words like “Cultural.” Actually, I got the sense that one of this article’s editors thought my approach might have been too systematic, as I chose certain websites as “starting points” for my online meanderings. From a practical perspective, though, I’m not sure how else you’d start, and I did my best to include a range of starting points, representing a variety of concepts of what it means to be a geek. Some of them I still follow; others were invaluable to me as a researcher, but turned out not to be my cup of tea for personal reading.

I know the title “Ethnographic Blogging” may kind of imply that the blog itself is the ethnography, much as with ethnographic filmmaking. Alas, no—the title just occurred to me as a way to describe my weird hybrid of methodological approaches. Somewhere deep down, though, I harbor a (now not-so-secret) hope that somebody will eventually make an ethnographic blog in the truest sense—or that it’s already been made, and I just haven’t found it yet. Would it just read like a serialization of an ethnographic manuscript? Or would you get to know a culture day by day, post by post, alongside a researcher? How would future readers even navigate it and make use of it? I’ll leave that to someone else to ponder for now. To be honest, I wonder how long it will take for blogs to start to seem dated as a format, given how many internet studies focused on “multi-user domains” in the ’90s, as if those were the wave of the future. (Though you’d be surprised how well some of their results hold up in other online environments today.)

In the meantime, if you spot (or practice!) any kind of ethnographic blogging, please do send me a link. I’d love to know that this isn’t just limited to one nerdy dissertation experiment.