Did the nerds win?

[Umbran]

Reinvention:

Suddenly it was cool to play it, but only to play it the new way. The old-schoolers were not often embraced as its pioneers and teachers so much as ignored.

One is only a "pioneer" so long as you are exploring new territory - if you come to rest in a space you find comfortable, you become settled, then a traditionalist. And if you've settled in, you limit what you have to teach future generations of gamers about. And if that's not an experience they are interested in, yeah, you slide into obsolescence.

Don't kid yourself - this is basic to generational change, not RPGs, specifically.

By the way - I started playing RPGs in the early 80s. I would be an "old-schooler", except I didn't settle in on one game or style.

The original generations who grew up on RPGs through the 70s 80s 90s had a unity

This is inaccurate. We didn't have unity - before the internet we just didn't have sufficient communication among us to recognize that there were lots of different approaches to gaming that had already developed. It became even less accurate when the World of Darkness came along in the early 90s, and made it clear how many RPG players had much different ideas about what playing as about.

... they did not care about political differences or socio-economic differences.

Upon what do you base this assertion?

In the very early days, RPGs were dominated by white guys. They weren't egalitarian enough to change that. It isn't that they did not care about these matters - their tables were not diverse enough for their attitudes to be challenged much.

They set all that aside and connected through the shared passion of the game

No. Factually incorrect. The gamers of the 70s and 80s were not somehow better than the rest of the world around them. RPG players are not, broadly, exceptional in our attitudes or behaviors - gamers are generally as bad as everyone else, and always have been. So, gamers of the 70s were generally as racist and sexist and -phobic as the 70s, and so on. And their tables showed it.

No. The original Nerds were bulk-dumped by the new kids who think the old boys racist because they are heterosexual males and kill imaginary green-skins.

That's not what happened. Culture changes over time, from one generation to the next. And, as always, not all the people come along as the culture around them changes. They were not "bulk-dumped". They didn't choose to come along.

The rebranded products now published by an industry which cares more about profit and image than it does about the people who fund it.

Oh, please. TSR had the moniker "T$R" for a reason - companies all care about profit. It is just nowadays they know a whole lot more about the business of RPGs and about the market of players than TSR ever did. They learned more than their forebears knew. Go figure!

We are all doing this because we are dysfunctional as a collective.

No, we have never really been one collective. That's a rosy retrospective fiction.

 

[Morrus]

being the virtue-signal

Oops. Careless. You only read the rules a few days ago, surely you haven't forgotten them already?

 

[Umbran]

No. The original Nerds were bulk-dumped by the new kids who think the old boys racist because they are heterosexual males and kill imaginary green-skins.

Alternatively, I'd would say that they weren't left behind because "new kids" think the old boys are racist... They were left behind because they treated people badly. If they were "old boys" it was as in the unflattering meaning of, "old boys network".

As an example, I mentioned this thread to my wife. She started gaming in the mid-80s, long before I met her. And she reports that in every game she played before getting to college in the 90s, across every group she joined, every character she had got raped. And she, herself, was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted.

So, don't expound to me the supposed virtues of "old boys".

 

[Parmandur]

The appropriation part is how the IP is being handled. They're shohorning what are basically a bunch of [expletive deleted] comittee-written fanfics into the continuity while at the same time better fanworks by non-associated people who actually care about the setting remain marginalized and borderline illegal. And this all occurs for reasons that have nothing at all to do with art.

EDIT:
and this is true of all the major nerd fandoms (with the notable exception of the cthulhu mythos, whose founding works are mostly in the public domain, thus allowing the works that came after to stand or fall by their own metits rather than by the whim of some soulless corporation or distant relative of the author)

Well, here's the thing: that isn't really an accurate description of any situation I am aware of, at all.

 

[Older Beholder]

I feel like in the 80s I was picked on more for listening to heavy metal than playing DnD.
The best way to ‘win’ in my opinion is to not care what other people think.

 

[Jahydin]

That's not what happened. Culture changes over time, from one generation to the next. And, as always, not all the people come along as the culture around them changes. They were not "bulk-dumped". They didn't choose to come along.

Agree. As someone that has been reading forum posts for ages, it certainly seemed the culture was shifting organically and gradually overtime.

It started as self-aware humor, then to personal campaign preferences, then to expectations for the game itself to change.

I think another factor too was despite the creative culture changing, there was probably pressure to not "rock the boat" and upset customers. Once it was apparent there were enough customers onboard that were on the same page, devs finally had permission to "go ham" and create the way they always wanted to.

 

[trappedslider]

I think some of the toxicity in nerd culture is right here in this thread where any expression of nerd/geek culture that goes mainstream can't be authentic and has to be appropriative or negative in some other way. It strikes me a lot more that there are still nerds who want to feel victimized despite the pastimes and properties they hold dear being more accepted in the mainstream than ever. I think it's ultimately drawing from the same well that makes Star Wars fandom so toxic because SW has change to much over time (and so have they) that it isn't and can't be the same as it was when they encountered it as kids. They don't "own" Star Wars, never did. The same is true of nerd culture in general. You all don't own it and it being more in the mainstream of media culture isn't punching down at you.

Some of the post here in this thread read to me "Great, now more people like/are aware of this thing and that's bad I'm no longer "special"."

 

[MGibster]

Sometimes it's not so easy to separate nerd culture from mainstream culture. I was born in the 1970s, and video games have been a part of mainstream culture for my entire life. If you were lucky enough to have an Atari, Nintendo, Genesis, etc., etc. throughout the 80s and 90s you weren't really seen as a nerd. In the 80s and 90s, I hid the fact that I played D&D. Even my fellow players didn't know my true identity because I wore a black formless robe with a deep hood when we played. But I never felt the need to keep video games a secret because I don't recall a single time someone was teased about playing Pacman, Asteroids, The Legend of Zelda, or Madden. Millions of Americans would recognize the theme to Super Mario Bros. if you played it for them. The only thing that's really changed about video games is it became more mainstream among older people as the population aged.

 

[grankless]

Yes. Unambiguously, yes. The things previously referred to as "paraliterature" in works like Delaney's Shorter Views - that which was at the time decried by the mainstream as "not literature", such as pornography, comic books, and science fiction broadly are the predominant modes of culture output today. Furthermore, the "nerd" demographic, inasmuch as it's ever been a thing that has actually existed, has an enormous influence on culture beyond that - all online and offline discourse has completely shifted in the wake of Gamergate, and mostly towards that political outlook! Absurd far right terminologies from 4chan and the weirder subreddits like "NPC" "chad" and "sigma male" are adopted across everyone! Elon Musk has branded himself as a "nerd" to obtain popularity and perceived legitimacy, and now look what he's up to.

The "nerds" of the 80s that are being discussed in this thread are the people in charge. It's been 40 years, you people are grown adults.

 

[grankless]

I think the issue is that, if those mainstreamers like the things, they may, in fact, be nerds.

That's the problem with interest-derived demographics -- you are one by deciding you are one/doing what one does. We previous iterations of the demographic can say we were there first and pat ourselves on the back for doing so when it was much less accessible, but that's pretty much just saying that we are older.

Nerddom isn't a badge of honor (one way or the other, or for some but not others), it's a set of interests. Full stop. If the wider world of people enjoying fiction IPs looks at what we enjoy and says, 'hey, that looks neat!,' then they are part of the movement.

This too - stop staking your whole identity on corporate media, people. They were corporate when you were a kid, too.