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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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In concurrence with @BahRamYou, I think what you're observing is the atrophy of the nerd culture that we grew up with. Many of the quintessential nerd hobbies are just things that people do now. Sure, maybe it's more nerdy to be really into one game than another, but the vast majority of young men play some sort of video game, so it doesn't really stand out to be really into one of them. The band nerds might still be kind of a specific thing, but when I see the local university's marching band, they don't really strike me as a particularly nebbish group. There are still socially awkward kids, of course, but they don't really seem like they have the comparative advantage in things like gaming, computers, anime, and so on. Maybe there's some other nerd subculture that replaced it that we're too out of touch to appreciate? I don't know.

I’m the same. I don’t consider most of those activities “nerdy” anymore, as they’re so common that I almost feel like calling being into sci-fi or anime or gaming or even fantasy dice games nerdy is a bit much. Especially when the stuff in question is mainstream. It’s almost a stolen valor thing where kids when I was young had to kind of hide their interest in those things only for later generations to claim it even though the stuff is absolutely mainstream and they only like the mainstream parts of the subject.

They're common, but still nerdy -- it's explicitly a subculture that's into them, even if it's a big one. I simply don't see how nerddom has been destroyed, I just believe we're dealing with a dark-matter-parallel-universe thing where Motte users are profoundly and disproportionately male, tech-adjacent, and West-Coastal.

Despite a thousand attempts to erase or abolish the fact, nerdery leans male, and in general the women into it (as well as the men) are... a little out there, typically pretty 'alt', unlikely to be the "popular girls." I expect talking about your interest in Dungeons and Dragons to be a net-negative on Tinder, for example. And what is mainstream is defined by what the hot girls think is cool to be into, sorry.

Gaming is a different story, but it depends on the game. Sports games are as mainstream as sports. Complex CRPGs are still wildly nerdy. Some popular games are in the middle, like Assassins Creed (leans mainstream) and The Witcher (leans nerdy). Minecraft is a kid's game now.

Go talk to the frat boys and the sorority sisters about "fantasy dice games", and if they're into it, I'll concede the point.

I was recently with a friend how the local SF/F fandom scene organizing the local cons etc seems like a bunch of rapidly aging Gen-Xers permanently stuck in the 90s, and one thing I observed was that kids these days don’t seem to get into the general ‘fandom’ but instead have a large number of individual fandoms around specific properties, ie Harry Potter fandom and Disco Elysium fandom and Cyberpunk fandom and what have you. Some overlap of course but less of an overarching idea of a whole genre with a history and unifying factors apart from the specific common series or other work.