I was sitting at lunch with my group of friends at work, talking about various nerdy stuff as we are wont to do. There’s no doubt that we are a group of nerds, in the modern non-pejorative sense of “people who enjoy certain types of intellectual recreational activities”. We play regular Magic: The Gathering tournaments, we play Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games, we play the latest European style board games, we run a popular Internet puzzle competition, we collectively write a webcomic based on the concept of Star Wars as a roleplaying game.

We share lots of interests in common and have incredibly nerdy conversations about them. But on this day I was struck by the fact that I didn’t follow what anyone else was talking about. They were discussing some sort of special mode in some computer game, which I only learnt right near the end of the conversation was actually Diablo. Throughout the whole conversation I just sat silently, not understanding most of what was being said.

I remarked that, even though we are all clearly nerds, there are still some significant differences between us. I, for example, don’t play video/computer games. I just don’t. I used to, as a kid – I had an Atari 2600 console and spent hours absorbed in playing various classic games like Pac-Man, Missile Command, Pitfall, and so on. A bit later I played an awful lot of Tetris, and really enjoyed SimCity. But… I haven’t really played any game more modern than SimCity. I’ve had a few brief goes at these newfangled first-person perspective games like Doom, but I just couldn’t get into them. And the video games of today are essentially a complete mystery to me.

So in a conversation about video games, I have nothing to add. I made a comment to this effect, pointing out how video games were one “nerd” thing that I just didn’t do. Knowing how none of these friends are really into sport of any sort (while I am), I commented that given the choice I would much rather sit down and watch a game of football than play a video game. They said, “What sort of football?” I replied, “Well, any, really.”

Then I said, “You know how on The Big Bang Theory the guys are all nerds and they all basically enjoy doing the same stuff? They all like comic books, they all play video games. That’s not a realistic portrayal of nerd culture. There’s variation. Not all nerds like all nerdy things. They should have someone in their group who doesn’t like video games.”

“Like Penny,” one of my friends said.

“Oh my god,” said another, “You’re the Penny of our group!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 19 November, 2013 at 16:40 and is filed under Anecdote. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.