Geek, dork, whatever term you want to use, I'm it.
In recent years, of course, nerd has become cool, in a way. Zac Levi, the titular nerdy star of the show Chuck runs a website called the Nerd Machine, and the Nerd shirt that they sell has been seen on plenty of people you wouldn't necessarily consider nerds. Even Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade.
By owning the title "nerd," it's become more acceptable. At Best Buy, the Geek Squad proudly owns its title. Levi and his compatriots wear Nerd on their chests like badges of honor. Video game tees populate not only Hot Topic but American Eagle. In ways, the counterculture has been turned into pop culture.
But there are still facets of the nerd subculture that haven't been fully integrated with the pop culture whole.
I recently played and finished two different games. The first game was Mass Effect 2, and the second game was Dragon Age: Origins.
Mass Effect 2 is set in space, in a far-off future. You use guns, you travel to different planets, you encounter alien species. One of the neat things about the game is how different it allows each play-through to be, and how your actions from Mass Effect 1 can affect what happens in its sequel. It's an extremely popular game across all demographics.
Dragon Age, on the other hand, is pure Tolkien fantasy: dwarves, elves, mages, swords, bows and arrows, the whole thing. It's set in a specific section of a single world, so the scope of its geography is microscopic compared to the former game. It's as close to old-school, pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons as you can get in a modern video game. Dragon Age is pretty popular, but pales in comparison to Mass Effect.
What's interesting, though, is how similar the two games really are. Aside from Mass Effect's main character speaking the dialog choices the player picks and Dragon Age's main character letting the player's dialog options speak for themselves, the settings are really the only difference in gameplay. Politics between different species play out in similar ways, romantic entanglements with other characters are conducted in the same manner, even the camera angles are similar. It's not much of a surprise, then, that both were developed by the same company: BioWare.
It's not so much the setting, however, as the role that separates counterculture nerds from pop culture nerds.
It may seem like a small thing, but that dialog choice difference I brought up is really what makes the real difference between the feeling of the two games. The first game has a classic hero in main character Commander Shepherd, who speaks and acts with authority, with the player's choices merely dictating the manner in which Shepherd gets to the same endpoint. But Dragon Age is different, the character you create as the hero can be a variety of different races, and specialize in different things, making each play through unique, but also robbing it of having a game-defined main character. To be the hero, the player must decide to make him one.
There's a certain escapism in that kind of mental creation of a character that is at the heart of counterculture nerdism. You have to be thinking of a whole separate person in a way that's actually believable, necessarily limiting yourself from thinking about your own actions in the same way. Mass Effect 2 dictates your characters personality by giving them a voice and a method of behavior. Dragon Age leaves the role completely up to you, forcing you to inhabit it to feel any sort of emotional impact with the story.
It's not a bad choice, in either direction. Like I said, I put a lot of time into each game because I liked playing both of them. In that way, I think I'm kind of both a pop culture nerd and a counterculture nerd. I've played pen and paper RPGs and I watch football. I work on computers and I work on houses.
But I'm proudly a nerd.
Of every level.
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