Something I find myself reflecting on more and more as I grow older is just how odd so many of the people I gamed with in my youth were. I mean that in the best possible sense. Back in the late '70s and early '80s, there weren't as many organized outlets for people with niche interests as there are nowadays. If you were into, say, The Lord of the Rings or Star Trek – or if you liked history or mythology or miniature soldiers or even if you read books no one else in your school had heard of, there just weren’t many places you could go to find like-minded souls.
Because of that, my early memories of entering the hobby are filled with eccentrics and enthusiasts, each one weird in his own particular way. I remember, for example, a guy who constantly insisted that "there was no such thing as a 'broadsword' during the Middle Ages." I already told you about Bob. And then there was me, who spent his spare time obsessing over ancient alphabets and cobbling together imaginary languages for the fun of it. Somehow, we all got along – or at least, we all put up with each other long enough to play D&D or Traveller or whatever.
It’s hard to overstate how formative that was for me. For example, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard by older roleplayers I met at Strategy & Fantasy World. I would listen to people talk about chanbara films, Napoleonic tactics, and Norse mythology, all while hanging out in game stores and at library games days. I was introduced to a lot of different things simply because the then-new hobby of roleplaying attracted a very wide group of players with varied interests and everyone congregated in the same places.
As I've said repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, we didn’t always get along. In fact, we argued and, sometimes, we seemed to barely speak the same language. However, in those days, I often had no choice but to associate with people outside my immediate circle of comfort and taste and, because of that, I learned things. More than that, I grew.
Phil Dutré recently summed this up perfectly:
It’s also telling that gaming-at-large has become largely siloed and compartmentalized. In the 70s/80s/even 90s wargaming/roleplaying/boardgaming was still considered one big hobby (with a lot of crossovers), and one naturally came into contact with all sorts of people interested in various angles.
These days roleplayers and wargamers and board gamers almost seem to be different breeds, barely knowing of each other’s hobbies, let alone spending time with one another. My point is that, by having nowhere else to go, the early hobby brought together a lot of us weirdos and we learned stuff from each other. As I explained above, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard through these people, just as I shared my love of ancient alphabets and languages, while others shared their love of history, mythology, philosophy, etc. I am literally the man I am today because I had no choice but to hang out with people I might otherwise not have. Today, I feel as if too many gamers self-select for people just like themselves in the narrowest senses. That's a shame, because having to learn to get along with people very different is a great way to improve oneself.
I wonder if part of the magic of the early hobby as I experienced it was precisely this unexpected mixing of oddballs. Even in the early 1980s, there simply wasn’t enough critical mass to allow subgroups to splinter off and form their own tightly curated communities. You couldn’t just find “your people” and ignore everyone else. You had to sit down with whoever showed up. The result was often volatile but also suffused with creative ferment. It was a fertile space where ideas, interests, and personalities collided, bearing strange fruit.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not advocating for forced conviviality. The hobby is broader now and that’s a probably good thing in some respects. However, I do think something was lost when we all retreated to our own silos. When roleplayers stopped hanging out with wargamers and video gamers forgot that tabletop roleplaying even existed and when people began treating the games they play as lifestyle brands rather than as shared endeavors.
Back then, I played with others in:
ReplyDeleteA bank vault, a funeral home, a barn and an abandoned warehouse...
with...
a semi-pro football player, a juvenile hall corrections officer, a hardware designer, a devout Catholic who only played paladins, a chronically ill middle schooler, a kid REALLY into ninjas, an actual thief (who ended up going to jail for it), and a bunch of farm kids...
Age range: 11=34
Distractions during breaks in the (on average) 15 hour sessions included modeming into the University's HACK server, Raiders on Atari, Art of War (both the book and game), swimming in the river, computer games, round-bale jump races, and LARPing Ambush! with bb guns and fire crackers.
It was really, really different.
So as someone that’s both much younger than most of the people here, and is also studying social clubs (among other things) for my masters, I’m curious if people break up the culture of RPGs in to ages like James did with adventure design. https://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/01/ages-of-d.html?m=1
ReplyDeleteLike for me there’s pre-5e (before I started playing), the YouTuber/Stranger things era (when it became ok to put D&D in your dating profile) COVID (duh) and post COVID (people start explicitly getting in to gaming to meet new people).
I'd say there's Oe, which was (very) roughly divided between - for want of much better, less geo-centric coinage - the Midwest Wargamers and the California Roleplayers. There were two streams of players: crunchy "taciturns" and freewheeling "trippers". You can squint and see it as a division of "college weirdos" and "blue collar working weirdos"
DeleteWhen the college kid went missing, and the PI assigned to find him fabricated evidence and narratives pinning it on a (12 years too soon) LARP dungeon-delve that never happened, which coincided post-launch of Holmes (which increased accessibility to the public) and the launch of AD&D (which provided the arcane and confusing rules which were easily mistaken by the public for inscrutable occultism) the meteoric rise of popularity in the game gave way to a "new club", circa 1979. This led to larger, and in some ways more dynamic alliance of playing groups.
The number of players at the table at this point leveled out at between 5 and 8, including the referee. Massed player groups of 18-30 went from an occasional thing to a rare event reserved for GenCon or possibly a large university. Some of this was the increasing involvement of players as DMs. Despite the very specific resistance by Gygax especially but other originators to provide anything but limited access to the rules for players, almost every player - Basic or AD&D owned a copy of the referee's resources.
This changed the composition of the interactions. The players were still weirdos, but more and more frequently as this era wore on, players unconsciously metagamed, making decisions based less on what the DM might arbitrate, and more on what the rules said. For example, in 1975, someone playing a 1st level MU would think nothing of descending solo to the third level of Blackmoor, relying on his wits and wisdom to determine on a case-by-case base how he might navigate a monster. By 1982, that same player would know that his PC was "in over his head" at that dungeon depth and probably wasn't going to earn XP just for being clever, and their weren't a lot of ways to outclever a 3HD mimic and still get away with any gold/kill XP.
This group as a whole didn't *try* to play this new way, but it was a natural result of wide access to the rules. We knew how the game worked - it was hard to suspend belief for the sake of flavor when we had objectives in mind! There were, of course, the annoying ones who put no effort into roleplaying adventure gaming at all. I'm looking at you, typical fighter.
This period, between say '77 and maybe '85, featured "clubs" that were a more diverse collection of weirdos who were drawn to the game from more streams: the metal head playing out his Howardian, HEAVY METAL movie soundtracked, Hyperborean fantasy complete with dragon-riding supermodel groupies; the computer nerd constantly thinking how the table experience could be systematized enough to be truly and sucessfully simulated in Pascal or BASIC, beyond the Eamon Adventures or HACK or Text Games; the Japanophile who instantly recognized the monk class as Kung-Fu rather than Friar Tuck, and played him to death (and usually annoyance); the wargamer; the Colecovision Gamer; the Historian; the Token Tolkien elves are better guy; the jock; the girl who was into the Smiths but could actually play; the old bearded guy who smelled and was kind of interpersonally annoying but who had actually interesting PCs, the Rush kid; the WWF superfan; the little brothers; etc.
DeleteAlmost everyone wanted in during D&D's fad stage, but the players made for really solid, dynamic and no-holds barred gaming...and - this is most important - whether they played in Greyhawk or Blackmoor or Mystara or or generic lands or homebuilt - we all experienced the same modules (at least the same major ones). We all played at some point the Aerie of the Slave Lords, Q, Lost City, Against the Giants, Keep on the Borderlands, Hommlet, and so on. Those from different groups experienced all of these uniquely, but also in a mystical corporeality.
This phase began its slow disintegration around DragonLance, for obvious reasons: that monolith attracted hundreds of thousands of Hickman fans who wanted to play out the novels and slowly (or in my case quickly) disillusioned existing players who had no desire to hop on that train for a literal railroaded storyline.
So the new erar of players superceded the previous in about 1985, pre-empting 2e by a little bit. These were a lot of neo-BECMI folk, who eventually got everything boiled down into the streamlined Rules Cyclopedia, while the AD&D side of things began to bloat with semi-interesting but wholly unnecessary *splat. This coincides with Gary Gygax's ouster, and the corporate evisceration of the original spirit of D&D. Players of this era liked the streamlined but robust rules, appreciated the DM's growing command as a part-time storyteller, and were pretty comfortable with rails, even if they didn't always adhere to them.
You still got a nice mix of weirdos, but the fad was gone, and it was here that the corporate game began to lose its grognards entirely: they moved to Rolemaster or Traveller or stopped gaming altogether, recognizing the ride (for them) to be over. D&D lost A LOT of "chain of custody" during this time, even as all the old school folk were still alive and active, although Tramp dropped out entirely in the mid 80s, and other TSR/Dragon originals less dramatically faded out, or adapted to the sanitized 2e approach to TSR's corporate marketing.
These gamers were younger on average, they had a greater appreciation for story-based game, more likely to LARP or SCA, augmented much more with computers, or at least began to seek ttrpgs that more closely simulated Bard's Tale or Wizardry! rathe than the other way round.
Gen 1 and Gen 2 could easily have played with Gen 3 - and did - but there would have been a distinct difference at the table. Sessions were shorter - 4 hours now instead of 8 or 12. Combat and action was more important. Puzzles were simpler, or resolved by die roll. This generation bled into 3e for the most part (although those uncomfortable with the innovations of 2e did leave when 3e cemented this direction), and survived the intiial "Wizards of the Coastification" of all things gaming. However Gen 4 springs out of the middle years of 3e, or more specifically 3.5. The gamer group at that time doesn't just find THACO to be an amusing artifact of an earlier time, but an anathema. It consists of far more people interested in media outside of reading: games and movies, and in mechanically replicating the fiction of those channels. Gen 4, other than its refugees from earlier generations, had very little in common with the previous generations, but still could come together around a table for a different kind of game.
DeleteA portion of Gen 4 sensed that there was more to the game, so when the digitized pablum and wholesale bleaching of D&D came with 4th edition and 5th, that Generation knew enough to connect with its grognards, and seek out new ways to play. Enter the OSR.
Now we come full circle. Instead of two major streams of gamers of the 1970s, we have, co-existing in at the very least a detente, two major streams of games: the Gen 5 Story/Narrative and the Old Skool.
I'm probably missing a generation or two, but I tagged in at the tail end of Gen 1 groups - with it Erol Otusian shroomy chaos, primarily played in Gen 2, left for Rolemaster halfway through Gen 3, and then years later saw my oldest son independently join Gen 4. I think I'm pretty close.
Just wow... I saw so much of this unfold, but never quite saw it laid out clearly like this. Marvelous set of posts, Daniel. I'm in this phase: "and it was here that the corporate game began to lose its grognards entirely: they moved to Rolemaster or Traveller or stopped gaming altogether, recognizing the ride (for them) to be over." We moved over to MERP and its simplified Rolemaster rules, and eventually table-top gaming came to an end until the OSR relit the fires.
DeleteIt's notable how much true diversity (as opposed to superficial, such as skin color) we achieved back in the day, without focusing on it at all! Difference and weird was welcomed. That doesn't mean pandered to, as today, and that doesn't mean we'd smile, nod, and always agree with you. Quite the contrary! But anyone was welcome to game, argue, hypothesize, laugh, goof off, research, and live...together. Those were great days.
ReplyDeleteNot sure we're quite as silo'ed today here in the UK. I play RPGs, Wargames and Boardgames. One of my daughters plays RPGs and Boardgames (and CCGs). The other admittedly only boardgames. (They are either side of 30 years of age ... perhaps they are no longer young.)
ReplyDeleteHey man. I've been reading your stuff for many years, since before Google Plus days.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to seem like a nag, but I'm concerned about you publishing content on SubStack. They're really, really not a good platform to be associating your name with. For example, they recently spammed users promoting a pro-Nazi blog, displaying a swastika, and there's no room for pretending that they don't know what that means: https://www.usermag.co/p/substack-sent-a-push-alert-promoting-nazi-white-supremacist-blog
See also: https://leavesubstack.com/
I know this is a struggle, and that we'd all rather not have to involve ourselves with 'politics', but I feel that this is important, moreso nowadays than ever before. Please consider moving to another platform - I think in the long run it will be for the best.
Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns and for being a longtime reader. I truly appreciate both.
DeleteI understand and respect why you (and others) might feel uncomfortable with Substack as a platform. The issues you raise are serious and I don’t take them lightly. Like you, I wish we lived in a world where these kinds of decisions were simpler and clearer.
That said, we’re long past the point where there’s any such thing as a “pure” platform. Every tool available to us, whether it's Substack, Patreon, YouTube, Twitter, or even some of the more niche alternatives, has associations, investors, users, or content that many of us would prefer not to endorse or be linked with. If I tried to avoid every platform touched by something disagreeable or offensive, I’d soon run out of places to publish anything at all.
For me, the key issue is not the platform but what I do with it. I’m responsible for my own work, my own voice, and the kind of community I foster around it. I don’t believe using a particular publishing tool means I endorse everything that platform hosts or promotes, any more than posting on the internet at all means I endorse everything on it.
I’m keeping my eyes open and, if Substack becomes untenable for me, I’ll reevaluate. For now, it offers a combination of functionality, reach, and ease of use that works for what I want to do. I respect that others may draw the line elsewhere, and I wish it were a cleaner, easier landscape to navigate.
Thanks again for your message and for caring enough to raise the issue. I hope you'll continue reading, wherever my work ends up appearing.
Substack is superb. Thank you for continuing to use and support it, James, and not bowing to the calls to virtue-signal.
Deletehttps://stonetoss.com/comic/in-good-company/
DeleteOr Adam, just here me out, it's not the platform. It's just a small, vocal minority.
DeleteOnce again our experiences differ, back in the early 80s wargamers and role-players didn't mix that well in the gaming circles I frequented in Rome, back in the day.
ReplyDeleteWargamers tended to be white-collar adults or college students, while role-players tended to be rather uniformly upper and middle-class teen-agers steeped in anime.
The two sides of the divide hardly, if ever, communicated.
As time passed the divide waned, so much so that it disappeared sometimes in the 90s.
I'd say it disappeared mostly because the RPG generation developed diverse tastes (videogames, card games, fantasy wargaming...) and experimented while the historical-wargaming generation either accepted change or died out.
Todays gamers look to me a lot more diverse and omnivorous than they used to be in my memories of the 80s gaming scene.
It seems to me, now, that it is natural for people to play one or two rpgs, maybe a couple of card games and boardgames, plus videogames.
When I (rarely) go to conventions I see very little "siloing", same thing for internet discourse: most people I chat with on the net -some 10 to 30 years younger than me- find the notion of separated nerd communities rather weird.
That's fascinating! I wonder how much of this is regional.
DeleteI think it's almost entirely regional.
DeleteGaming used to be a "big city, upper/middle class thing".
You had to know english to get into gaming during the 70s and part of the 80s as there were no italian publishers.
The 90s were the turning point, "the revolution" was fostered by Vampire, Cyberpunk, Magic and the internet.
One thing that really helped, imho, is that Italy is still more socially homogeneous than Northern America.
I’m surprised kids were in to anime so early in Italy. Here in the US, anime fans were not really a thing until Manga Entertainment branded the whole medium as violent, sexual "adult" (in a teen boys will love this not you need life experience to appreciate this kind of way) cartoons.
Delete@Weston anime first appeared in italy in 1978 with Heidi and Grendizer, while many debated the violent content (and some anime were censored) the success was enormous and a deluge of anime followed suit very fast.
DeleteWe had Gundam, Jeeg, Captain Harlock, Urusei Yatsura, Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger, Getter Robot, The Rose of Versailles, Candy Candy and many many more on free access tv within a handful of years of the arrival of Grendizer and Heidi.
Manga, now that's another issue.
Manga first reached italy in the late early ninties thanks to american translations: I first saw Miyazaki's Nausicaa on italian national TV in 1985 but I read the US version of manga around 19990, it would still be a couple of years before it was made available in italian.
In the 1980s, I was in college and grad school at RPI. Most folks that were active in the gaming club did both RPGs and board games (not much miniatures gaming, though I did get a few people to play Sea Power II though we used cardboard outlines rather than 1:1200 ships).
DeleteBack home at MIT, there was definitely more separation, but plenty of folks did both.
As to anime... I watched Japanese anime sometime in the late 60s to early 70s - Speed Racer...
But the big push for anime at MIT came in the mid to late 80s with a couple people knowing enough Japanese to translate the anime that was becoming available.
>I’m surprised kids were in to anime so early in Italy. Here in the US
DeleteThe English-speaking world was a global outlier in how *little* Japanese animation it imported before the mid 1990s (and what it did import were mainly shows that were obscure in their home country, like Voltron). I assume you can chalk it up to the US having a large domestic animation industry.
The melting pot of "everyone who was weird and nerdy" in the early 80s" _was_ a tightly curated community. And certainly _did_ have enough critical mass to hive off its own subcommunities that went their own way. All of which had their own odd fellowships and collisions of interests and creative ferment. In fact, you _could_ 'just find “your people” and ignore everyone else', and it wasn't the case that you 'had to sit down with whoever showed up'.
ReplyDeleteYou're mistaking _your_ silo as the world, and thinking everyone else started building silos in it.
"I’m not advocating for forced conviviality." -- Good, that would be creepy and crazy, right? Advocating for forced respect for a past and a tradition that weren't universally shared among your peers/readership is still not terribly compelling, though... not outside membership in your own self-selected, compartmentalized, etc. silo.
What I've valued and enjoyed so much from reading Grognardia over the years is getting a peek inside what feels like a nearly unrelated RPG tradition to my own, from someone so similar in age and date-of-hobby-induction. It's like reading about the gaming life of an alternate-universe 'me' ;) But it means the specifics of the nostalgia just don't land, nor the assumption of being not only central but coterminous with the RPG world; and I apologize for being the cockroach at the feast, as I often have been.
There's no need to apologize. Honest disagreement, delivered respectfully is welcome and encouraged here. I appreciate that you took the time to write this comment, since it's useful feedback and offers additional insights into the experience of others. I'm never going to be bothered by that. Thank you.
DeleteReally fascinating to read the different experiences of those commenting, especially the first comment, and the last. It seems like it would generally be true the first generation of people who picked up D&D would most easy fit into two general groups, the blue collar war-gamers of the Midwest and the theatrical college campus group on the West Coast, but even those two groups would have had their own broad diversity.
ReplyDeleteI think Jame’s use of weirdos in the title is key. People that really delved into RPGs in the early decades, who spent hours playing out the imaginative stories in the role of a wizard and a star ship pilot, had to be more on the weird side of most American communities back in the mid1970s, pre Star Wars. Yes, in the mid 70s the Lord of the Rings was still fringe and obscure, had not entered popular culture, nor anything from Appendix N.
I agree. The use of “weirdo” resonates with me as I recall the friends who stuck with RPGs after a brief frenzy of interest at my school, when everyone played AD&D. I wonder though if some of the weirdness was just amplified by our being very young at that time.
DeleteUnlike James, from what I’ve seen there isn’t a siloing now between people who play RPGs, board games, and video games. However, I do see a change in the nature of the games, where many newer players don’t want direct conflict with other players, probably one reason for a decline in wargaming. (The popularity of online multiplayer shooters would contraindicate this, but perhaps people are not as comfortable being nasty face-to-face.)
And about broadswords in the Middle Ages: https://www.thearma.org/essays/broadsword.htm
I'm with Bonnacon: I see lots of overlap still between tabletop RPGs, board games, CCGs, and video games. (If anything, high-quality board games went mainstream long before the D&D 5E explosion of the 2010s, and the pandemic just accelerated that trend.) My teen son and his friends move effortlessly between all four hobbies. War games is more its own thing in my area, but even then both gaming stores in my town have wargaming tables—and not just for Warhammer 40K. (Two Sundays ago the gents at the table next to me and my son were playing a WWII tank and infantry scenario.)
ReplyDeletePersonally, I totally agree with the original post. It matches my personal experience. And in fact, James and I are of substantially identical age and grew up in the same general area. So not surprising. But my personal experience would expand this point to music (including punk and metal) and to clothes (OP shirts and jeans jackets) and to arcade games (which I never liked on my own) and to comic books (too numerous to mention).
ReplyDeleteMy experience seems to nearly identically accord with that of James as well, and I grew up in the American South!
DeleteThe internet is amazing for many things but it also can hinder cross-pollination as people seek out their niches. I played a lot more games in my youth id had never had tried because I was hanging the game shop. Someone was always running something new.
ReplyDeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteThis post has made me think what a great leveller and bringer together role playing was where I lived in the 1980s.
In my school everyone had much the same background, and there were three black kids out of about 800 students, literally three, yet two of those black kids joined our little D&D group. We didn't really socialize elsewhere, but we played D&D together.
There was to my knowledge one Jewish boy in our neighborhood and his was maybe the only Jewish family in town but, yep, you guessed it, he came and played D&D with us, always as a berserker. He was from New Jersey originally and kind of confrontational and rough, went to Catholic school because his dad felt like he'd get a better education there, he looked down on us and talked constantly about guns I'd never heard of, Uzis being his near obsession, but he'd come game with us faithfully
There was the ultra genius kid who grew up to become professor of the year in his state, wouldn't give any of us the time of day in school (or now) but came and role played with us.
D&D and other RPGs brought us together.
Like it did with the hippie who liked the outdoors, the high school sci-fi writer, the WWII/Dr. Who know it all, the kid who weighed 250 pounds, the deeply religious boy, we who shared not much else shared RPGs, and looking back the hobby was a great unifier and how uniquely special that fact really was.
We have met the 'Weirdo', and he is us.
ReplyDelete>
ReplyDelete> 'When we stopped being weird together.'
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I'm not so sure we stopped. When I look at the average convention attendees (like SDCC for example), we all seem to be weird together just perfectly fine.
To all of us, who listened to the sound of a different drummer.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I would point out that though there were exceptions (like Anonymous above at his Catholic school), the vast majority of those weirdos, at least in my world in western North America, were male and white. So while there was an exposure to a range of nerdy cultures and ideas, there wasn't that much of an exposure to the range of human cultures.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, for a lot of us, that exposure to a bunch of weirdos did also open your mind to the idea of accepting and dealing with people as they were which has I feel led to the hobby evolving into a more diverse place today.
Speak for yourself. We explored a broad swath of fantasy culture analogs back in the day.
DeleteAs well, it’s important to mention that not all human activities appeal equally to all demographic groups. There’s nothing wrong with that.
As James alludes to with the weirdo post, there was a tremendous diversity in early gaming - diversity of thought, the only kind that really matters here.
The loss of the culture of white male association is not an improvement in cultural exposure - it is a culture lost. The fact that gaming used to be a culture that was "white and nerdy" did not mean that it was exclusive or parochial.
DeleteAfter all, when whites, Asians and Hispanics get Juneteenth off of work from their company, are they actually being "exposed" to African-American culture, or simply exploiting and occupying it? I don't know the answer for sure, but I do know that D&D wouldn't make it into the lyrics of "White & Nerdy" were it penned today.
D&D came out of white (mostly male) wargaming culture, and white (mostly male) pulp fantasy. Its early days were fantastically and unapologetically steeped in complex white lore, traditions and culture.
And there is nothing wrong, ignorant or racist about that, any more than saying that Jazz is an expression of black culture, or bowing practices are an expression of varied Asian cultures.
D&D at its heart is white, nerdy and male, and that doesn't make it exclusive, but it does make it, just like all cultural expressions, vulnerable to a sort of appropriation by people (both white and non-white, I might add) who really don't grok the culture they are toying with. Contrast this with a non-white female - for example - who DOES understand the cultural underpinnings of the game, and plays the game in the intended spirit.
5e has, so to speak, culturally appropriated D&D to the point that it is unrecognizable. Its why I call 5e "skinsuit" D&D. 1978 AD&D would never have appeared on any publication with "Geek" in the name (BoardGameGeek, RPGGeek) because "Geek" was an epithet for a "white outcast." It was not something to be proud of. 5e judges, and fundamentally misunderstands the culture that created the game. It's fine, its a different game. But it is no more D&D than The Rise of Skywalker is a Star Wars movie.
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Delete> "Geek" was an epithet for a "white outcast." It was not something to be proud of.
>
Although the word 'Geek' (and 'Nerd' too, for that matter) were initially meant as derogatory, the group of people they were aimed at have since claimed it for themselves to mean the exact opposite: something to be proud of, rather than ashamed. As someone who claims to be a member of the intended group, I consider that to be a good thing.
Obviously so. My point is exactly that: In 1981, you never would have dreamed of joining a game with people who identified as geeks, any more than you would have joined a group that identified as creeps, freaks, wimps or dicksmacks.
DeleteThe fact that terms can be appropriated by users disconnected entirely from its origins, and applied in entirely different ways is exactly the point. It isn't about good/bad. It's about authenticity. I don't respond favorably to the term geek despite its change in meaning, because the term as an epithet, still carries an old sting that many others either have forgotten, moved past or never experienced.
And just to be clear, "Nerd", while still an epithet at least originally carried a few positive stereotypes: high intelligence, fastidious attention to a challenging pursuit. A 'geek' on the other hand, was a talentless sideshow - a circus term referring to a social reject, and was wholly without any acknowledgement of worth. It's why I picked that term specifically. The irony of the term is that now everyone is a geek for something, often proudly so. I still find its ready breezy self-adoption by doll collectors and television watchers to be alien, to say the very least.
Delete