Dear People Who Read This Tripe,
Look, Everyone loves a gamer, especially nowadays. The rise of the Age of The Geek brought with it not only an appreciation for playing games in all of its forms (and innovating some new ones) but also an appreciation for the gamer itself. See, the gamer, as an animal, is a strange one, and can take many forms. It used to be that the term gamer applied specifically to one who indulged in games to such an extent that you could call him a fanatic without being considered too judgmental by anybody except him. However, nowadays the Gamer has metamorphosed into a myriad of different forms, to the point where swinging a cat on a college campus would be impossible without having to apologize to whoever said cat belongs to, and then, were you to probe a little deeper, find that they most likely consider themselves a gamer of some sort.
The same has become true of the title of geek, and by extension nerd. These two have perhaps a semantic difference at best, that I won't deny. But with every Tom, Dick, and Jane admitting to being a trekkie, liking Star Wars, becoming obsessed with learning russian or politics and then calling themselves a geek for having a hobby has come a cost. That cost is that everybody feels like they get a piece of every pie, however the learning curves for things like Fantasy Football, The Stock Market, learning small tidbits about ancient culture, or learning to play the world's best roleplaying game, all vary wildly in difficulty. Of course, different people will have different difficulty with different things, and the fact that everyone feels comfortable in their hobbies now, that's fantastic, and a huge step forward socially speaking.
HOWEVER, There is one problem that has emerged from our acceptance of and encouragement of everybody's weird and fantastic hobbies, people haven't changed. As anybody with any amount of faith in a higher power OR large amount of experience in the world will tell you, people are just the absolute worst. Like seriously, just the absolute worst. That being said, on the spectrum of being the worst, the worse of all are those without hobbies. They are machines, cold, calculating, judging. Of those with hobbies, those who jumped on the geek train, who never experienced any kind of suffering for it, are worse between the two, and that was the last remaining good thing about the old way gamers and geeks used to be defined, that they had to suffer for those titles and carried on despite it made them warm and welcoming to any newcomers, whereas those who have never had to suffer like that, on the average of my experience, would rather criticize and humiliate "newbs" than actually grow their hobbies. Which ultimately leads to the reason I wrote THIS ARTICLE.
Sincerely,
Brad "Certified Nerd" Roberts
