So this week is Halloween and I am really perplexed as to why we still call it that. Here in Tampa we have events like Guavaween and the Exotic Erotic Ball we drink, we fornicate, and we dress up, but rarely does it have anything to do with Halloween. A friend of mine just calls it slut-oween, because every woman he sees is dressed like some crimson strumpet of yore. Dorothy as a whore, Cinderella as a whore, Snow White as a whore, you get the idea. So many of the traditions and ideas from my childhood are being perverted by Halloween that I just can’t keep up. Even the idea that we go crazy on Halloween so we can go to church the next day on All Saints Day and ask for forgiveness is completely out the window. So what changes all of these things, probably our perceptions. Our perceptions change a lot of things and this is what we’re going to talk about today.

I’ve written a few times about the geek hierarchy and the reasons for why the subculture did certain things for so long. To recap, we started out as roleplayers and many other kinds of geeks being excluded into one group. We were in a lot of ways outcasts. We were commonly socially inept, bookish, and sometimes fairly intelligent. One of the tenets of our geek culture, and one especially evident in the roleplaying community, was our refusal to exclude others. Because it was a source of pain and loss, it was something we generally didn’t do even when we should have. Combined with this we have consistently discouraged people we see as mundane from joining the hobby subconsciously for years. These changes in perception, combined with the generational shift of gamers may be exactly why I don’t understand indie games, at least, not as much as I want to.

I came upon this realization when I was talking to my son last month about the tech team. When I was a kid geeks had the A/V club. We pushed carts full of projectors, televisions, reel-to-reels, and these funny little things called VCRs. Being on the A/V team was part and parcel of being a geek. It was also almost a guarantee that girls wouldn’t speak to you, and that you were going with your friends to the school dance. Thirty years later my son is part of the tech team. I figured out it was a very similar idea very quickly. When I went to the meeting I found out I was somewhat wrong. The A/V team has changed a lot.

Now my son was way ahead of the curve because we have macs at home, and a lot of the programs that the team uses are mac-centric or mac-only. He is also platform agnostic, set him down in front of any machine with a browser and he can figure out the rest. These are things I am proud of as a parent, and they are things that most of his friends do not get at all. I think it is funny, but I have recently been reading in the technology press that platform agnosticism is a growing trend in younger users. I should’ve gotten it then, but I am a little slow some times so I actually had to go to the meeting.

The tech team does things like producing CCTV shows, building presentations for the parent events, and supporting teachers who fail to grasp some of the equipment. It is one of the most competitive after-school activities available. There are only 9 slots a year. I mean seriously, WTF? I go to the parents meeting and there are kids all over the place. All colors, boys and girls, and all positioning themselves like runners in starting blocks. Then it dawned on me that I was completely wrong.

This wasn’t my son taking up the mantle of his geek heritage any more so than was him playing Pokemon, or Versus. This was my son becoming in some ways one of the elite. A popular kid who liked people and people liked him. Now he is still a might bookish in comparison to his peers, but that really isn’t the point. The point is that I was completely wrong in my perception of the events. It was a very jarring experience. One of the many I have had as a parent, and it probably won’t be the last. I might write about some of the things I learned raising a daughter some day, but I have always thought they were too scary, and no one would believe me anyway.

So this new generation of geeks, and even (gasp!) the generation or two before, are probably a lot less nerdy than I am used to. I have noticed that a lot lately, the geeks are getting more mainstream. So maybe these mainstream geeks with a lot more open communities, a lot less social anxiety, and much more street credibility, maybe they are communicating in ways I do not understand and building things that are too much outside my frame of reference. Even more horrifying is the thought that maybe these aren’t geeks at all. Those maybe these new generations of roleplayers are just normal people, maybe I am just not getting it, maybe I never did.

Maybe the whole idea of geeks and mundanes, of cool kids and nerds, of up and down, are working on completely different rules than I know about or understand. So maybe if you took your kids out trick or treating and went to church Saturday morning maybe it’s only my perceptions that have changed. That’s what is really scary.

See you next month.