Tag Archives: definitions

Meta Geek Tagged

If you know these men by name, you're an Office Space geek.

If you know these men by name, you're an Office Space geek.

Being a geek to me means loving something to the point of marginalization. Anything.

Do you argue over whether 50 Cent is fiddy or fitty? Rap geek.
 
Do you know the individual ERA of your team’s entire bullpen over the last five years? Baseball geek.
 
Have you mentioned Thac0 at a party? D&D geek.
 
Can you recite the measurements of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Neil Bort? Teabag geek. (Could. Not. Help. Myself.)
 
It’s about marginalization. When you get passionate, does the conversation start flowing with you or does it stop and eyes start rolling? It’s “geeking out” when your passion surpasses the audiences tolerance for your obsessive interest. Now, this doesn’t mean a group of people can’t be geeky about a topic because within the group they aren’t marginalized. It just means if that room was full of average people, the dedication to the “geek out” would be relegated to, well, those geeking out. Believe me, when I start discussing Lockean linguistics with gamer friends, I can tell from their reactions that I’m the geek. 
 
So you aren’t either a geek or not a geek. Everyone’s a geek about something, likely more than one something. So you’re not a geek, you’re a geek about X. Like Curly said in City Slickers, it’s up to you decide what that one thing is. Except I still think it can be more than one thing. So it’s more like City Slickers two where Jack Palance’s zombie twin showed up.
 
But what about terms like dork and nerd? Okay, we should do a little parsing since it’s a clear definition we want. If geek implies obsessive interest, I think these days it does so without the added burden of intellectualism contained within nerd–and dork is just a diminutive without classification. Geeks have something to be geeky over, dorks are just “not us” without any burden of addressing what makes them dorks. It’s self-evident that a dorks dorkery is such because they simply are a dork and thus not us. Seriously, it’s hard to parse the term dork and not sound like a 5-year old. Embarrassingly hard. In fact, I concede the line of thought for now on its own silly merits.
 
So geekery is like a metatag. When you have a marginalized interest that you spend way too much time on per societal norms, welcome to geekdom. You’ll find a lot us around–everywhere you look. This is a place to revel in that obsessiveness.
 
My geekery? Game systems, words, rhetoric, football, politics, linguistics, philosophy, 80s pop culture, and addressing minutia in overly analytical ways…
     

On definitions.

It’s hard to say whether or not a geek has come out of the basement, as one must define “the basement” before this statement has any purpose or meaning. It seems there are essentially two interpretations:

  1. The basement is literal, as in the cubby hole in which the geek seeks comfort, outfitted with the tools of their particular geeky flavor.
  2. The basement is figurative, an expression encompassing the comfort zone surrounding someone and their geeky hobbies that encompasses not necessarily a place but also the people who serve as companions and/or confidants.

As an architecture and gaming (video, board, and RP) geek, the first interpretation interests me as physical space. Everything from the kitchen table to a home theater falls within this category. Some geeks only engage in their chosen hobby in a particular locale, either out of necessity (a video game console is generally required to play video games) or preference (the kitchen table has the memories of countless campaigns etched into its scarred surface). “Coming out,” in this case, generally means removing oneself from this ensconced location (or a similar venue) and going somewhere where the activity in question may be observed by those who do not participate. Perhaps this means a coffee shop for a pen-and-paper roleplaying group, or a gaming room at a convention (such as what Austin had during SXSW).

Other people will pursue their interests wherever and whenever they can. To them, space matters not, for the pursuit of the activity is tantamount. They still insulate themselves from the outside world, however, through their environs and/or companions. Gaming in the living room or the local hobby store is no different to the guy with his trusty dice bag and clip board of character sheets in his backpack. The second interpretation applies more to this type, as coming out of the basement means removing themselves from the protective bubble shielding them from what they interpret as the “outside.” An example for our dice-toter may be teaching his RPG-neophyte friends how to play D&D at home.

Naturally, these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and may depend on the hobby in question. As I mentioned earlier, some require special conditions or equipment, or they may require multiple people. Technology has a hand in blurring these lines, however. Thanks to portable game systems like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, a video gaming geek can “come out of the basement” in a park or on public transportation. Laptops, PDFs, and dice rolling programs allow RPG geeks to throw dice almost anywhere. Coming out of the basement, therefore, is getting easier to do. The preponderance of technology in our lives makes the executive sitting on the commuter train, staring and poking away at a little box cradled in his hands barely worth noting. Maybe he’s reviewing today’s meeting schedule on his Blackberry, but perhaps – just maybe – he’s finally tracked down that elusive, rare Pokemon.