Tuesday, June 19, 2007

It isn't really hard, in spite of the impression it gives.
Hours not spent working are simply spent in amassing great heaping piles of "geek cred", which can then be exchanged for goods and services.
No, wait, that's something else. "Geek cred" just gives me something to write about.
I play games. Not just World of Warcraft (though that seems to occupy quite a bit of "life space" on the spinning hard drive of my free time at the moment) but actual pencil and paper, old school Dungeons and Dragons (and I've actually developed opinions about the rules and their effectiveness in comparison with the earlier editions like some giant multi-threaded database of possibilities broken into 20 distinct dice-based opportunities for awesome) and I blog (which is like writing but instead of a notebook I use a web server shared by thousands of other users to convey thoughts and ideas, not unlike a Web 2.0 message board where all my posts are, by default, in bold).
Sometimes I even translate these concepts into computer terms with the idea that this process somehow communicates better than if I had not. Secretly, I doubt that it does.
It seems lately that the laws of the universe which govern our interactions with those around us no longer apply, or at least no longer apply in the same way.
Some of my co-workers play World of Warcraft.
Some of my co-workers have lives.
When we wander as a mixed group down to the cafeteria on the ninth floor, we usually talk about the game. Those of us who play, anyway.
Those that don't aren't excluded on purpose, but talk of Mobs, DPS, ub3r gankage and Barrens Chat seem to exclude naturally those who choose to not play.
And they slowly physically fall back to the rear of the geek pack, and you can tell when they stop even trying to talk to us when their eyes glaze over.
According to the natural order, the people that don't play World of Warcraft can (and probably should) beat the hell out of the rest of us and take our lunch money.
It feels wrong when geeks in large numbers somehow manage to exclude the people who by rights should be making us do their homework.

2 comments:

tess said...

Ah, see, where I work, the geeks are the natural higher order. Of course, I work for a University as support for a large research organization... So the geekier one is, the more respect they get...

But no one here plays WoW. They're too wrapped up in developing nano-scale technology and things like "smart dust" for the military.

Garrick said...

Smart dust? Little, tiny communications equipment?

That is CIA-tacular!