In Defense of Nerdery

This actually happened to me during the write-on competition, but I was busy enough that I didn’t want to waste time putting it down on “paper.” Now that I’ve got some time (original composition of this post happened on a bus from DC to NY), I feel like I should get this out there.
So, it’s Thursday, and I’m relaxing by the Mass Court pool, finishing up my write-on reading, when a group of the other residents sit down near me, and start talking. The conversation wasn’t the most interesting thing ever, and it was pretty clear that they weren’t the type to be friendly to people they didn’t know, so I tried my best to just tune it out. However, my interest was piqued when they moved to the subject of gamers. As usual, these “popular” kids couldn’t possibly understand why anyone would want to play video games for fun, surmising that it must be because “they can’t go to a bar and pick up a girl.” Now this kinda annoyed me; who’s to say that going to a bar to get hammered and pick up some floozy for meaningless sex is the end-all/be-all of existence? But what really got me was the last comment they made on the topic, which came from one of the women in this conversation:
“So I was at a bar last weekend, in the ladies room, and I hear this girl talking to her friend. The friend asks, ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ The girl is like, “He’s at home, with his friends, playing WoW. I think I’ll go over later and play WoW with him.” And this is a HOT girl. What’s the world coming to?”
This just pissed me off. Ok, we get it, it’s “cooler” by some arbitrary standard to get wasted and act like a moron than it is to stay at home and play Warcraft. But who are you to say that acceptance others is not a good thing? I agree, the stereotype of the gamer is some overweight, pimply kid who never showers and lives in his parents’ basement watching internet porn and is entirely incapable of normal human contact. But we’re not all like that. Along with those who I’m sure would fit your stereotype, the gamer community includes students, people with jobs, and parents who game alongside their kids. Just because we don’t fit some ideal of what one should be doing with their Saturday night doesn’t mean that what we choose to do is not just as valuable to us as your drunken weekend escapades are to you. To belittle anyone for not fitting themselves into whatever small social compartment that you believe their outward appearance would force them into is wrong, and more than a bit pathetic.
To quote the classic Revenge of the Nerds (which has been on G4 pretty much constantly), “none of us can be free until nerd persecution ends.”

May all your hits be crits,
B