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Foz Meadows wrote an interesting piece on female geeks and being excluded by default. Which brought to mind a game a friend of mine got last month called "Geek Battle." It's more or less Trivial Pursuit, except that your categories are things like comics, video games, science, and "geek life." (I can't remember what geek life is supposed to look like, although I think one of the questions in this category was about the color of caffeine?)
This is a really fun game to play, actually, if you play it with people who you're on a similar footing with -- my roleplaying group was pretty well-matched although some of us could remember the early days of arcade games better than others. But if you play it for long enough, it's very apparent that it's reifying a canon of "geek" that's centered on a geek culture that has been really exclusionary.
It asks you to name Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and Monty Python movies and Douglas Adams novels and Kurt Vonnegut novels; heck, I don't remember one question about manga or anime, and that's certainly as "mainstream geek" as old arcade games. Someone whose experience of being a geek came from reading Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler and watching wuxia movies would have been shut out.
If you look at the dust-up over whether you can be a "real fan" without reading or appreciating Heinlein, I think ... a lot of people are really invested in a definition of "geek," or "fan," that means we all have the same common reference points. And those common reference points are really important to people, or at least, that's the only plausible explanation for people who insist on quoting and requoting Monty Python long after it's stopped being funny. (They're important to me, too, or I wouldn't have gone to see Thor 2, which I thought was a pretty bad movie but showed up just enough on Tumblr that I felt I was missing out by not seeing it.) But it's not an accident that those common reference points usually end up being things that are made by white guys, you know? And then people end up recycling a canon of "mainstream geek culture" with lots of the diversity filed off.
I'll keep playing Geek Battle. I have fun when I play it. But it sucks that it plays into the idea that some people are better than others at being geeks, and it sucks that it puts a veneer of objectivity onto a really subjective, and biased, vision of what a "real geek" should know.
This is a really fun game to play, actually, if you play it with people who you're on a similar footing with -- my roleplaying group was pretty well-matched although some of us could remember the early days of arcade games better than others. But if you play it for long enough, it's very apparent that it's reifying a canon of "geek" that's centered on a geek culture that has been really exclusionary.
It asks you to name Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and Monty Python movies and Douglas Adams novels and Kurt Vonnegut novels; heck, I don't remember one question about manga or anime, and that's certainly as "mainstream geek" as old arcade games. Someone whose experience of being a geek came from reading Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler and watching wuxia movies would have been shut out.
If you look at the dust-up over whether you can be a "real fan" without reading or appreciating Heinlein, I think ... a lot of people are really invested in a definition of "geek," or "fan," that means we all have the same common reference points. And those common reference points are really important to people, or at least, that's the only plausible explanation for people who insist on quoting and requoting Monty Python long after it's stopped being funny. (They're important to me, too, or I wouldn't have gone to see Thor 2, which I thought was a pretty bad movie but showed up just enough on Tumblr that I felt I was missing out by not seeing it.) But it's not an accident that those common reference points usually end up being things that are made by white guys, you know? And then people end up recycling a canon of "mainstream geek culture" with lots of the diversity filed off.
I'll keep playing Geek Battle. I have fun when I play it. But it sucks that it plays into the idea that some people are better than others at being geeks, and it sucks that it puts a veneer of objectivity onto a really subjective, and biased, vision of what a "real geek" should know.