Teenage Isolation and RPGs

[AnyaTheBlue]

This is kind of an off-topic post, but I'll try and make it as relevant to the Forge as possible.

First, a pointer:

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html">Why Nerds are Unpopular

One of the theses of this essay is that nerds are unpopular in Jr. High and High School because they are not as interested in being popular as they are interested in being smart.  They don't have a lot of spare attention to devote to the work of being popular because they are actually looking at things in the real world that are beyond the boundaries of the artificial society that kids make for themselves in school in lieu of being able to participate meaningfully as junior members of real adult society.

This is personally fascinating to me, and I think it provides a very real rationale for the high overlap between nerds and gamers in US secondary schools.  Instead of just focusing on real-world issues and smartness, gaming provides kids a forum for constructing a secondary, self-contained society which values some more adult qualities (such as imagination and knowledge of historical culture, or whatever).  Creating your own imaginary civilization and a hero therein provides a kind of buffer for the relative emptiness perceived in the artificial, zero-sum game society that is US High School kid culture.

Anyway, that's what occurs to me upon reading this essay.  Am I full of it?

[John Kim]

This is personally fascinating to me, and I think it provides a very real rationale for the high overlap between nerds and gamers in US secondary schools.  Instead of just focusing on real-world issues and smartness, gaming provides kids a forum for constructing a secondary, self-contained society which values some more adult qualities (such as imagination and knowledge of historical culture, or whatever).  Creating your own imaginary civilization and a hero therein provides a kind of buffer for the relative emptiness perceived in the artificial, zero-sum game society that is US High School kid culture.  

Hmm.  There was a study a while ago:

DeRenard, Lisa and Manik Kline, Linda. ``Alienation and the Game Dungeons & Dragons.''  Psychological Reports, 1990, 66, pp. 1219-1222.

It was described by Nick Yee (I haven't read it myself), who did http://www.nickyee.com/rpg/">his own study as well.  In DeRenard and Manik, gamers were analyzed in terms of feelings of powerlessness, worthlessness and isolation found no significant deviation from a non-gaming sample, except in the area of "cultural estrangement". Cultural estrangement in the study was defined as awareness and interest in popular entertainment, and gamers were found to score lower than non-gamers. On the other hand, they also found that non-gamers reported a higher sense of "meaninglessness" than gamers.  

So this seems to pretty clearly back up your idea.  Extrapolating wildly: Gamers are isolated from mainstream culture but form their own social groups and activities instead, and indeed find meaning in this.

[Loki]

To say that the reason that people are unpopular in highschool is because they spend more effort being smart than being popular is pretty simplistic. I'm a nerd. I was a nerd in highschool because I was smart. I was also reasonably popular. There were plenty of people that were getting beat up for being socially inept or otherwise different who weren't smart.

I'd say if there's a connection it's between beating and smarts. Kids in high school tend to value the same things that adults value in American society: attractiveness, money and power/influence (which in high school means being popular, getting laid, etc). American society doesn't highly value smarts. If you disagree, I challenge you to name more than a handful of scientists that have the same name recognition as any sports star. We say we value smarts, but what we value is the money that is sometimes attached to new inventions, etc.

So why the beatings and cruelty? The author of the article has it right--the kids in danger of falling into the pariah category need to differentiate themselves. Beating someone up also has the benefit of letting you assert yourself--making you more powerful in the eyes of your peers. Guys beat up nerds because it makes them more dominant, and most females are attracted to dominant men.

But why?! You may wail if you're a nerd in high school. Well, the good news is that there are other criteria for acceptance, sexual attractiveness and dominance--but when you're in your teens, the body is in reproductive mode and can't afford to split hairs. When you get out of high school, people start making choices based on things other than who can kill the most saber toothed tigers. So just survive until then and you'll be much, much better.

Now you might be thinking "Loki, you preachy bastard, what about RPGs. I dunno--could have something to do with fantasy. My life sucks, so I'll spend time imagining that I could split your skull with an axe and have a girlfriend with a chainmail bikini."

But that might just be me. Mmmm, chainmail bikini. :)

[Callan S.]

From my own reflections, intelligence is just self destructive in terms of self worth. You think too much and you start to peel away your self worth because outside sources tell you things and on that you decided that its not there for you.

It's not actually there for the cool kids either. It's just that they are either too stupid to realise or haven't paused to think about it.

Of course, when your young your not quite smart enough to truely realise that no one else will ever know your worth fully. Outside sources aren't at all useful. You become the bull by realising you are already the bull, so to speak.

Funnily enough, RPG's parralel this idea though. Leveling and kewl toyz become some sort of credentials, when really they are the result of qualities that were in the individual player even before the leveling and toyz.

And being beaten up in school for being a nerd, that appals me! In Australia I think that happens a lot less than in America. I never actually got in a fight at school, though there was some chest beating, shoving and such BS from others. I get the feeling America has a real culture of violence in schools, with the victims themselves latter saying 'it'll all alright, once you grow up'. That is not helping to break out of the cycle. </sermon>

[Scourge108]

One thing that struck me as interesting was when the author noted the crossover of "nerds" and "freaks" or "stoners."  One area where I noticed this crossover the most in my high school days was gaming.  When I started in the early 1980s, it was the "cool" thing for a rebel to do.  If you really want to freak your parents out, you start smoking pot, listening to Ozzy Osbourne records, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.  So I remember many stoners and nerds bonding in D&D games in high school.  I actually think it's unfortunate in some ways that the gaming community has done a thorough enough job convincing the public that their hobby is non-threatening.  I just hope enough copies of Dark Dungeons are out there that a few stoners will still give it a try.  There are worse things they could be doing, after all.

[M. J. Young]

Gee, I remember participating in Nick's study, and I must have read the results, but it had completely gone out of my mind. I'm going to have to try to find time to look at it again.

I don't think the word "nerd" had yet come into vogue when I entered high school at the end of the sixties. I was one, though. I'd been the target of beatings since probably second grade, and by the time I was a freshman I'd pretty much realized I was never going to be accepted by my peers.

The fact is, I was intelligent; I just never knew it, and probably I didn't care. Being intelligent didn't get you friends. I spent absolutely zero time on efforts to be smart. I did no homework, never studied, often daydreamed in class. I was smart enough that I could absorb osmotically enough information to get passing grades. I didn't even particularly care about that.

I gather that role playing games appeared in about 1973--which is the year I graduated high school. So there were no such games or gaming groups then. There was a chess club, but I wasn't in it. I was loosely connected with AV and Stage Crew, but only very loosely--I worked a couple of school plays, but I never took a projector to a classroom to show a movie or anything (I guess they don't do that anymore, do they? Geez, I feel old). I was in the band, because music was the only thing I knew I could do. I despised football because 1) football players were popular, to my mind for stupid reasons; 2) I was completely unathletic (stemming from medical problems in my preschool days which I never overcame); 3) being in the band meant we had to attend all football games and cheer for those idiots. I am one of the few guys I know who doesn't know when the Super Bowl is until they announce the winner on the news. When my son joined his high school football team, I did my best to hide my disappointment and show some support, but I'll gladly admit I was relieved when he quit. There was a computer club at my school, guys who wrote programs saved on paper tape to feed through a teletype to a mainframe thirty miles away in another district with whom we had a timeshare contract. I knew all the guys in it, but I wasn't one.

Stoners--I'm not sure we had any. There were drugs around, but if you weren't in the social elite no one offered them to you. I knew someone who got offered drugs, apparently a lot, but I don't know who offered them to him. He was popular. None of the geeks with whom I had lunch knew anything about getting drugs.

If you weren't athletically superior, you were a target. If you were lucky, you managed to get together with other targets and create some better memories.

One of my sons managed to convince his peers that he just might kill them if they pushed him too far. He never had any trouble at all after that. Now, if I'd been really smart, I'd have thought of that myself.

I hope the article has other theses. The only thing I wanted in high school was to be popular, and it was the one thing I couldn't have.

--M. J. Young

[Christopher Weeks]

One of my sons managed to convince his peers that he just might kill them if they pushed him too far. He never had any trouble at all after that. Now, if I'd been really smart, I'd have thought of that myself.

That was my approach.  I was still sometimes beaten, but when it was really unfair (and it wasn't always) I made damned sure that bad things happened to my adversary.  My dad told me when I was about five, "If you eat shit now, you'll never get your mouth closed again."

I'm sure I didn't fully get it at five, but the next day I sunk a fork into a bully's leg at my Montessori school.  And it sunk in deeper over the years.  I bonded with the crew that overlapped the gamers and the dangerous kids, and it served me well.

Oh, and we were geeks, not nerds.

Chris

[Sean]

I grew up in Silicon Valley, where there was a kind of interesting computer nerd/stoner axis out of which a lot of role-players came. My core group though was not really part of either crowd, though we intersected strongly with both: we were just smart kids who underachieved in our classes and didn't really fit in anywhere. This meant no sex for any of us until college, though: the only guy who was self-confident enough socially to get it was saving himself for marriage.

The expectations of nerds change over time. They were supposed to be quiet, keep to themselves, and head for low-level white collar jobs in the fifties, I think; later on they were supposed to be hedonists and stoners; later on, in what some regarded as an improvement, they were supposed to be computer hackers.

I'm getting some evidence from my students now that the current crop of male nerds is under permanent suspicion of homosexuality. That is, apparently today's (male) nerds set themselves off by being somewhat better dressed: which is to say that if you're a young man, and you don't absorb the culture of slovenly mass consumption of alcohol, sex, sports, and permanently stained sweat clothes, you must be gay. A male colleague of mine, not gay, was told by one of his students that she assumed he was "because he wore nice shoes." If this is true, it probably has something to do with some weird subconscious marginal = liberal = gay = nerdy association.

The relevance of this comment to RPG theory? Well, I was a nerd, and RPGs helped me out in some ways. Maybe getting a good sense of what today's nerds are all about (whether they're Heavy Metal stoners or vampire-worshipping goths, e.g.) will help us get a sense of what kind of games are likely to grab young people today. Whether the anecdotal evidence I adumbrate above is correct or otherwise.

[Loki]

I get the feeling America has a real culture of violence in schools, with the victims themselves latter saying 'it'll all alright, once you grow up'. That is not helping to break out of the cycle. </sermon>

Just in case this was in reference to my post--note that I said "survive until then and you'll be much, much better", not that it's alright. ;^)