Thursday 7 June 2018

D&D, Bourdieu, and Surfing

I am not an anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist or indeed anybody whose views you should take remotely seriously. I begin that post with that disclaimer. That said, I wonder why it is that, since roughly the turn of the 21st century, "geek culture" has caught on and become increasingly mainstream (recognising that being a "geek" is by no means the same thing in 2018 as it was in 1988). I suppose a conventional explanation for this might be that it's thanks to certain notable media successes, like the Lord of the Rings films, The Big Bang Theory, the various Marvel and Warner Bros comic and superhero tie-ins, all of which have made it okay to be into science fiction and fantasy.

I wonder whether the more realistic explanation is that social capital (and actual capital) increasingly accrues, in the knowledge economy, to people who are in one sense or another "geeky". Not to get all Bourdieu about it, but liking geeky stuff has become an act of social positioning: it has become associated with wealth and status in a way in which it never was when I wur a lad. It's not that the decision to define oneself as a geek is deliberate in that way. But it has become attractive for those reasons.

Which would partly explain why (see my previous post) playing D&D is now apparently common and socially acceptable at posh universities attended by young people who will be successful in future and running the country and all that jazz.

In other words - and I don't think is remotely deliberate - Peter Jackson just happened to make a trilogy of films for which the timing was absolutely perfect: he was riding a wave which nobody else had really seen coming either and happened to catch it just as it was cresting. It's still on its way to shore now and WotC are now riding it too.

11 comments:

  1. That's all clearly correct, but I think there's also something else going on: the 1970s-1990s social type of the "nerd" (as captured in e.g. the Revenge of the Nerds film franchise) was largely a creature of that time period, which of course corresponds roughly to the childhood and adolescence of those of us in our 30s-40s today. There may of course have been earlier variants, but the social implications of being an uptight, studious type in 1955 were frankly just altogether different from being that type in a North American or British high school in 1990. And the variants that have come since have been more of an ironic reflection of the original social type: indeed, adopting a "nerd" aesthetic has for at least the last 20 years been a fashion choice divorced from the social marginalization of the original "nerds".

    Interestingly, the mainstream embrace of "geek" aesthetics is latent in the social type itself as portrayed in the 80s. The Revenge of the Nerds films, again, are a touchstone, but think of all the other media narratives in which the geek/nerd is an ugly duckling who ends up triumphant: films like Real Genius in which the nerds stick it to The Man while reveling in their geekery, or films in which the bookish girl whips of her glasses to reveal the underwear model lurking beneath, or the various plays on "geek to chic" in marketing slogans at the time. In that sense, the mainstreaming of nerd aesthetics in e.g. The Big Bang Theory is not even so much a reversal of nerd ostracism at the safe remove of the span of a generation -- it is simply a clearer and longer-running variant on media tropes that were already being promoted during the original era in which the nerd type came into being.

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    1. It seems to me like the career of the "geek" has gone from being almost nonexistent (the only people who would have been bookish at the start of the 20th century would be fusty academics and clergymen, from well-off backgrounds, and they would probably just have been described as "eccentric"), to the "nerd" of the 50s-90s reflecting that era's cultural values, to the modern "geek" with social and actual capital.

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    2. There's also been a bit of a shift towards "we're all geeks now".

      Exhibit A? Lana Del Rey's Video Games. A couple of decades ago, she wouldn't have got a convincing lament out of being abandoned for a games console. Nor would video gaming have been the preferred relaxation of professional sportsmen, as it seems to be now.

      But the increasing sophistication of video games has made *that* sort of gaming (and it's very often fantasy gaming) acceptable, the norm, and even cool.

      Still, it may be a while before the refrain goes "Go play a tabletop game ...".

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  2. I blame George Lucas. Not only did he reinvent the summer blockbuster as an action film (instead of a disaster film) he taught Hollywood that nerds love to signal their devotion to IPs through buying stuff. Nerds are now one of the few demographics that can be consistently and easily marketed to.

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    1. I blame the nerds for falling for that crap!

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  3. I think something that's involved, too, is the fairly recent creation of a 'geek culture' from quite disparate elements. When I was living in London in the late 90s with some college friends, one frogmarched me into the Tottenham Court Road branch of Forbidden Planet because he couldn't believe I'd never been in such a store. I pointed out to him that - whatever dark RPG secrets lurked in my past - there was nothing that appealed to me in the shop. I wasn't the slightest bit interested in "fandom" of any sort, or particularly interested in comics. The guilty pleasures of my (then) past were RPGs, wargames and miniatures, and Forbidden Planet didn't cater to any of those appetites.

    And that would have been true of everyone I gamed with at school, all of whom liked sport and the outdoors much more than they liked Doctor Who or Star Trek or whatever (there might have been one or two with slight comic-book tendencies, but nothing major).

    Today, of course, Forbidden Planet stocks D&D. This reflects, I think, not only the bookshop and market-share trends that your previous post nodded to, but also the creation of a 'geek culture' that combines 'fandom' of various sorts with comic books, RPGs and 'collectibles'. But I'm not sure how real that culture is - or rather, I doubt whether there are *that many* people to whom most of those things appeal.

    There are lots of areas of intersection, of course. The history/literature/mythology/RPG Venn diagram seems much more significant to me than the comics/fandom/collectibles/RPG one. But perhaps that's just the availability heuristic at play.

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    1. Yeah, that's an interesting point and you're undoubtedly right. The "history/literature/mythology/RPG" circle you identify (which I'm definitely in) is largely invisible in the public eye because you can't really market to it. Our tastes can mostly be satisfied by cheap books bought on Amazon and that's about it.

      Forbidden Planet is an alien environment to me. I like going in there now and again as a kind of anthropological study. Comics, manga, Studio Ghibli DVDs, board games, and, bizarrely, row after row of those stupid little nodding-head collectible dolls which you may have seen. A bit of Magic: The Gathering. And in a corner a few D&D books. Basically nothing that I am remotely interested in.

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  4. I get the habitus and the doxa, but how would one define the field?

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    1. Good question. I think it's social positioning in a variety of different fields, really.

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  5. Surely an element would be the enormous economic success of certain computer geeks? If a loser like Bill Gates makes tens of billions of dollars, perhaps being like Bill Gates *isn't* being a loser.

    Ancalagon

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  6. I think that you are right - it's not a matter of media, but a wider change that I think is based on the rise of computers. The students at university now have never known a world without computers and computer games. Think of it, if you were just turning 13 years old when World of Warcraft came out you'd be 27 now and well into the labour force where, guess what, you'd be working on a computer (and far prefer running games on excel to get around security software to doing data entry for pivot tables). The disruptive nature of computers in our modern social fabric is massive. The Entertainment Software Association (made up of the major players in the industry) estimates 1.8 BILLION people play games on consoles and computers and a large number of titles deal with fantasy and sci-fi material. So if nearly 100% of your university students play games, and if well over 30% of those games by title sold are FRPG like Skyrim (let alone fantasy or sci-fi inspired), there is not an under class of nerd anymore but rather a fundamental shift in society across almost all socio-economic groups. Unskilled labourers play the same video games that middle managers do (and all watch Game of Thrones). And no matter the person facing the screen, it is a small jump from playing a computer game to table-top. Peter Jackson isn't a catalyst for the cultural change in the past decade, merely a symptom.

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