Nerd Shame
I don't know if anyone will like this, but I wanted to write about something a little different. It's something I've struggled with playing Magic over the last ten years and some of my thoughts/experiences.
Interesting article, I think you hit a point I can relate to, many of my social friends know I play Magic, but we hardly ever discuss it when we go out or something, some people I am uncomfortable with discussing it (granted these people know I am a nerd and we often joke over it often when doing social activities) the fact that Magic is a hobby of mine just sometimes isn't their business
However on the other side, Magic is slowly becoming less Nerdy than a lot of people think, some people who play Magic or are interested in it are not close to Nerds (one of my friends I didn't even know she played Magic till a few months ago), or they play D&D and want something else to do in addition to that.
Currently Playing:
Dredge, The Rock, Lands, Spiral Tide, Affinity
Great article, can totally relate.
You need a warning in there about Googling you is NSFW.
Did you copy and paste your Okcupid profile?
Originally Posted by Koby
Follow me on Twitter @RaNDoMxGeSTuReS
You've hit it for sure.
Magic definitely fits into Nerd shame, whether we like it or not, no matter how much prize money you may have won.
Perspective - I play in a rock band in my spare time - devote a lot more time to that than Magic.
Do gigs all over the south-west from small to medium sized venues etc., and love doing it, even if the money sucks.
I also like to play Magic with friends.
Guess which one I'm open about?
I think women moreso than men are after someone going somewhere, and "Magic Player" can often infer someone who still lives with their mum, plays video games too much and watches porn too much.
Captain obvious stuff I know!
The other side of that, is that my wife loves Magic, and she got me into it in the first place.
Work that one out!
Great article man, it's one of most important non-spoken facts about playing Magic imo. I too play in a rock band and have been playing music since I was 13. During high school the peer pressure and the nerd shame became such a problem that it was probably the sole reason (maybe the finances as well to a certain degree) I quit Magic in that era. I remember our bass player and lead singer seeing magicchest.com (an online dealer back then) open in my browser and complaining about my nerdy hobbies taking our time. It was such a beating for me back then (I know the correct answer should have been f. u.) thinking I was finally a part of something "popular" and being outcast from it because of my nerdy Magic hobbies.
I quit playing then but still kept on following the MtG news every now and then, checking out decklists etc. In college I was quite social and didn't have any problems with ladies due to being nerdy or geeky (and I studied engineering, think about it hehe). But I still stayed away from the game or the guys playing Magic in the uni. There was even a FRP&Magic club they had and it was a joke among my peers so obviously I never revealed that I too was interested in the game. The only guy who knew I played Magic was my roommate and only when we were finally seniors :)
In the senior year I found out that one other friend used to play Magic as well during the same era so we would secretively bring our decks, book a study room in the library and play games away from public eyes :) We would talk about it in a secretive way like "you have it with you?", "are we doing it today?" so people around us used to think we were doing drugs or something hehe.
Still I think it was a part of building up your character and ego. Only now I can realize that having nerdy hobbies doesn't necessarily make you a "nerd" or a "loser" in the society but until you prove your worth to yourself and get to know yourself better you are bothered with other people's opinions too much and try to blend in. It certainly helps if you have other hobbies and you have other areas of interest and success in your life so that being a nerd doesn't define you. Then I think nerd shame gets reversed and becomes only an interesting twist for the people who really want to know you.
Last edited by xfxf; 09-03-2012 at 07:53 PM.
A very nicely written article.
I've found out that at least for me, it works pretty well when I openly admit to love board games. Playing board games such as Carcassonne or Ticket to Ride is a completely acceptable activity among normal people, and if they take special interest in my hobby, it's most likely safe to tell them that I also play Magic, RuneQuest and other nerdier games and that I am currently designing a few board games myself.
Though I'm not into relationships. I don't know if I would act differently around women if I was looking for a relationship.
Last edited by Awaclus; 09-03-2012 at 11:02 AM.
The land of waiting where the dead sit in their thoughts' shadow, by no moon lit.
I think you exaggerate a little bit with your Facebook content and warning your FB friends to not post nerdy stuff.
You communicate to your friends: "I am afraid of Nerd shame".
It probably doesn't make things better.
Concerning women, you are right, it is more clever to not mention nerd hobbies in the first dates.
I am 30 years old and definitely feel like an older magic player compared to others. But I have no problem with saying, that I play Magic.
My collegues know it and they make jokes like "ah, that YuGiOh/Pokemon game for little children?"
But as they are nerdy themselves (playing WoW and fantasy board games) I don't care.
I'm a few years older and also have no problems with this. It appears to be a problem of younger people, who somehow overemphasize how others think of you. And if you're afraid of a girl dumping you because of a harmless (though rather time-consuming) hobby... well, I guess I'm not into that kind of girls. It really just sounds like a teenager thing. You know, women can be quite understanding about stuff. Now you are basically making an uneducated assumption that they fucking freak out if you even hint at this card game.
If magic is a big thing to you, I see no reason to hide it or mask it as something that isn't a big deal for you.
So I guess you could say that it gets easier when you get older. Nerd shame is for teenagers.
Some of my friends sell records,
some of my friends sell drugs.
I am 25 and felt absolutely no nerd shame telling my boss that 3 years of World of Warcraft were actually pretty cool. Then again, 2 years of army beat a lot of emotional shit out of me
On the other hand, there's very important message I saw in this article:
If some person doesn't want to go deep about something, you generally should not push it (unless you're a psychologist and that person is your patient or you're a father and that person is your juvenile-age-crisis child).
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Been through a whole range of Nerd Shame phases, as I started playing magic around 4th grade, and currently still am (with a break here and there) at 23 going on 24.
Originally: I was so little I didn't give any ****s at all. A couple of my friends and I would sit in the after school program, sprawl out some cards and regenerate skyshroud trolls from the graveyard.
As we got older, the three of us started to seperate just as you do: when we were at school or parties or shows or what have you, we were doing that. Video games were allowable (playstation had broken out a year or two previous) but Magic was something we kept to my house after school and Friday Nights. We went to a few SCGp9 series events here and there, I started on the WizO forums, but there was always that Fight Club scenario - you don't talk about it unless you're doing it.
THAT continued through college, though most girls I wound up dating in the meantime found out about M:tG anyway as I had to explain where I was going on Friday nights and that, no, I wasn't seeing "some other b*tch". Never really caused any problems, but I gravitated more towards alt girls who were nerdy in their own ways rather than bleachblonde sorostitutes, so that may skew results.
Most of the time, though, there was Magic Time and Everything Else Time.
The two wound up merging soon, however, as an ever increasing number of the hardcore partiers, binge drinkers, chain smokers and all around ****ing animals I knew happened to be magic players (eventually magic player become synonymous with "guy you definitely want to drink with If you don't want to remember tonight or this week), and...well if you get ten drunk magic players together and feed them liquor until they can't stand up straight it's going to come out eventually. Some people would make cracks about it, and we would promptly shame their prepubescent girl-level liquor tolerance into the floor, laugh about it, take some of their booze and/or groceries and once or twice I think carry off a girlfriend. It was around this time I decided that while I'd never go tell everyone about it unprovoked, I'd never deny what I did for kicks either. Cardslingers are 90% monsters, and I'd treat my magical hobby the same as any other hobby, which is to say anyone who doesn't like it can get bent, up to and including aforementioned sorostitutes, because let's be honest - as much as nerdy card games are an affront to you, your voice, thoughts, and personality are a lot like a rusty rake scraping down the side of my face every time you exist in my general direction. I mean really, if THAT's ALL it takes for them to laugh and walk away, they probably sucked to begin with. Not even "i'll go build my own treehouse" mentality, that's just a stupid and preset robot response to something, and i'm going to wager the most interesting thing that person has done was go to a dave matthews concert once and TOTALLY smoked weed, even though her parents told her not to, because she does what she wants. If all it takes is a slip up and MtG and they're IMMEDIATELY walking, man up and consider your time and genital health saved.
A lot of the other local ringers are on the strict fight club plan, though. I guess I just ran out of ****s to give. For what it's worth, dating a beautiful 32 year old woman for about two years now. She's as close to normal as growing up in the 80s and 90s would allow you to be (:p), learned about magic early, and gave close to negative ****s.
It's a game, and it's a hobby. It doesn't define you even it some days it does kind of consume you. Anyone who doesn't get that isn't even good one night stand, because then you wasted a night sleeping with somebody that probably fails as an intelligent human being. That sounds fine until you realize you can wash off body fluids, you can't wash off disappointing yourself.
Have some damn standards when it comes to women and (strangely) being a magic player becomes easier.
Don't flaunt.
Never deny.
Always storm.
Kudos to ya Bryant for writing this. I have found that I shared my hobby with some and not others and I did not realize why until I stumbled on the concept of idiosyncrasy credits developed by Hollander. It really was an eye opener, and I realized that when I did not share that I play mtg it was mostly because I did not have enough rapport with someone yet to maintain the relationship.
Link to wiki page about idiosyncrasy credits:
HTML Code:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiosyncrasy_credit
'Been playing Magic since I was eleven years old. I'm thirty now. And I've made more friends playing Magic than any other amount of combined social gatherings in my entire life.
It's all about how you carry yourself; how you carry your attitude, how you look, how you project yourself, etc. If you have an heir of confidence that you can build and brush off negative perceptions of what others feel about you, you'll not only be successful when injecting Magic into an every day social interaction, you can even find ways to use it to your advantage in a variety of ways.
My wife knows the deal. And I brought up Magic before we were married.
I really liked the article as well as this thread. Hearing everyone else's grapplings with nerd shame has been really cool.
Personally I took a lot of crap for playing in middle school because middle schoolers are just plain mean, friend or foe. I only had a couple people to play with and even that fell apart as rule disputes became to common. As Kamigawa block was released I went into high school having quit magic. I started playing water-polo and swimming, and though all my teammates were gaming nerds I never mentioned my affinity for magic. Mostly because in my mind I was done with it. It came out after a couple of years that all of my gamer friends played magic too, but due to everyone's nerd shame nobody knew. It didn't take long for us to sleeve up and sling some cards and we had some great times.
Yet, like Worldslayer, we had the Fight Club rule in effect. The first rule of magic is never talk about magic. It wasn't until I hit college when I felt I'd passed my awkward stage and realized my friends were mature enough not to consider me a social pariah because of a hobby. After being able to open up to non-magic playing friends it became less of a stigma and just something I do alongside playing basketball or anything else. In regards to women though, I never feel ashamed to tell a girl about my nerdier side, but I do like to wait to get to know someone well enough to know they aren't going to laugh in my face. As comfortable as I may be, and as childish as they may react, it still hurts to open up and get rejected. If I'm going to get rejected over Magic she of course isn't worth the time, my hesitation really stems out of the fact whether or not I think they are worth the time. In every relationship the more you get to know someone the closer you become, magic has been a large part of my life and I don't want to share that with someone who I don't intend to be close with. It's no longer privileged information because I'm ashamed, but because it's a level of information that for me implies more intimacy.
I don't feel I articulated that well, but hopefully you all get my meaning.
Facebook problem solution: do not add people who play Magic onto your Facebook. Simple as that.
No offense, but your friend B is an idiot and a cock block. I am unapologetic about being a nerd, but that doesn't mean I have to be oblivious to or flippant about the fact that there are small minded people who look down on being one. Not feeling nerd shame is different from being unsensitive to the possibility of others nerd shaming (ostracizing) you.
Last edited by funyun45; 09-04-2012 at 03:02 PM.
UR Delver
Dredge
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Deadguy Ale
THIS
It's all about confidence and timing. Finding ways to turn negative situations into positive or humorous ones goes a LONG way when meeting and dating women. Women are very perceptive on attitude, self projection, and demeanor. I am always upfront about playing games when I go on dates now. At first I was unsuccessful with this tactic but I kept at it and learned from my mistakes and missteps. Now it is almost always a successful point I make on blind dates. Most women find intelligence extremely attractive. Confident nerds that can tell a joke are a prime commodity! Practice makes perfect in the dating scene.
Being a nerd is hot, just look at The Big Bang Theory.
I have never had a problem with admitting to people I play Magic (or Blood Bowl, or DnD, or Pokemon for that matter). I've met a lot of friends through my nerdy hobbies, the friends I count as closest. It's not the first thing I bring up when meeting new people, but if asked directly, I've never lied about it.
There is a guy at my MtG club who is in the nerd closet big time. Once when we played a prerelease at a mall, he refused to sit at the table by the window, in fear of some non-MtG friend spotting him. I'd hate to be that insecure about my hobbies.
I agree in pretty much everything in your article, Bryant. Well written indeed, a good read for all nerds, not just MtG ones.
Best thread I have read here, thanks Bryant and you all for sharing your experiences! We grow up with MtG; We grow up in this warm community.
On the Sep 2011 Ban List Updates,
Very insightful article. Definitely some things that hit close to home for me.
On a different note: Anyone want to place bets on his favorite SSBB character? I'm extremely curious to know.
"Swiggety Swagtusk, Here comes the Thragtusk!""The last top 8 slot went to the winner of that Death and Taxes mirror, or as I like to call it, the White Supremacy Mirror.
In response to "What's the best replacement for Force of Will?"
My bets are on any of the Tier 1 ones, Meta Knight, Snake, Falco or Diddy.
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