Archive for the ‘nerd culture’ tag
The Ascent of the Nerd #
David Brooks again earns my admiration. From his well-executed history of nerdiness:
But the biggest change was not Silicon Valley itself. Rather, the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds. Now there are armies of designers, researchers, media mavens and other cultural producers with a talent for whimsical self-mockery, arcane social references and late-night analysis.
They can visit eclectic sites like Kottke.org and Cool Hunting, experiment with fonts, admire Stewart Brand and Lawrence Lessig and join social-networking communities with ironical names. They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated.
How Gary Gygax Made D&D #
By now we’ve heard a lot about Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons, but this detail from The Economist’s obituary was new to me.
An interest in history lured him into war-gaming, the re-enactment of historical battles with miniature men and a simple rulebook. For several months the members of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (a grand name for a group of friends that met in Mr Gygax’s basement) entertained themselves by re-fighting old battles. One day, to spice things up, Mr Gygax turned a plastic dinosaur into a dragon and mixed in wizards and trolls among the men-at-arms.
His fellow-players loved it. Abandoning a career in insurance and in collaboration with Dave Arneson, a fellow gamer, Mr Gygax refined his ideas. From large groups of combatants he moved to individual characters, cooking up rules for magic spells and creating a menagerie of monsters for his heroes to fight.
Manufacturers, when he approached them, were less keen. There was no board and no way to win—and those weirdly shaped dice looked confusing. So Mr Gygax and his colleagues set up their own firm, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). Business was brisk, and D&D became an underground hit on campuses around the world. A moral panic about devil-worship only drove sales higher.