Oh, absolutely. If it wasn't for a ball not being present, I would not be able to tell the difference between the two. Except one is a sport with set rules and required athletic ability, the other is fucking this: No difference whatsoever.
You can play football without any real athletic ability, especially if you just want to have fun. Like LARPers. So football has structure and codified rules. That makes it cooler somehow than LARPing? Remove any stigma associated with fantasy games, and really you just have a bunch of people in the woods fucking around and having fun. Which might be geeky, but I see nothing wrong with that.
LARP has ludicrously, insanely structured and codified rules. There are variant rule structures (like the difference between Gridiron and Rugby League) - but LARPers will talk your fucking ear off about the rules. And how Grimnash from Grumnellbin (Phil, from the South Side) is a cheating cocksucker who totally ignored the rule when he killed them (with a foam wiffle bat) on the field of Martesh (in the park). I can't really take LARP seriously. But I kind of think there's a fine line between a fun game and losing track of the reality of your own existence through escapism into an alternate persona - and lots of LARP types have no idea where that line is anymore. And while I actually kind of admire people who reinvent themselves, that admiration is diminished when they reinvent themselves as an elf.
This is hardly unique to LARPing. I see it all the time in just about every hobby known to man. Anyway, as I've said before, I LARP. Quite actively. The only reason I don't play Dungeons and Dragons to this day is lack of time and a good group. And I remain endlessly amused by coming here and seeing the same people who glorify the concept of "have passion in your lives" and think writing is an admirable art (which it is) look down on LARPing and the people who do it. Contrary to bad videos, the true draw of LARPing for me is the incredibly interesting and intense storytelling that it makes possible. Rather than writing books, I create environments and situations for people to interact with ongoing and complex stories. I suppose if I stayed home and just wrote everything down myself I'd be more respectable, but I like the fun and excitement and interpersonal activity of a good LARP. One thing that makes it tricky to discuss LARPing is that it's not one thing, it's many different games and subtypes that have very very different sets of expectations, rules, and experiences. "LARP" is a really broad term whose closest analogue in semantics is probably "sports". "Sports" encompasses a range that includes golf, soccer, curling, baseball, and football. There are people who only like one of those sports, or are only good at a couple of them, or only really know the rules to golf. Or whatever. But knowing baseball doesn't help you know golf, they're very different sports, and different LARPs are like that as well. So conversations like this are hard for people who don't get that. Anyway, I was geeky growing up and socially awkward and high school sucked. I'm 31 now and I still play video games and LARP and all the rest, but I find that I don't really encounter people who look down on me for that anymore. Oh sure, you always have one or two narrow minded idiots in any population, but for the most part my experience as a working adult dealing with other people with real responsibilities and judgment is that people don't really care or are mostly just curious about a hobby they don't understand.
LARPers are AWFUL about this. They all think they have the best rule structure and love spending time talking about the little nuances of their system to newbies. And they do that little saliva sucking smile/laugh whenever they get to a part in the rules they think is crazy or something. But there are games with no magic, no monsters, just the physical part. Know who's worse though? Traditional martial artists. I've had the experience of training at 7 different schools (minimum of three months at each school) and was a guest at another five or so. Every single one of them without fail will give you seemingly logical reasons why their style is the best, how there are a million black belt factories out there but their school is different and their style would work on the street. The other big thing they have in common is a complete lack of empirical data, show me the video library of your art working in real life and I'll start believing you, but after going to as many schools as I have, it's difficult for me to suspend my disbelief when you try to tell me an average person can spend a couple months in your school and all of a sudden knock someone out cold with a fucking knife hand strike. Or even better that thumb position is the difference between a light tap and a deadly strike. The character creation and mystical part of LARPing never interested me, mostly because of how it's implemented, not because I think using your imagination is lame. But please don't let them be the face of the entire game family. I think I've said it before here, but watching the video CR posted and making a blanket statement that all LARPers are like that is the exact same thing as me posting a video of fat people playing two hand touch and calling football a pussy sport.
I'm a nerd. I think that the definition between a "good" geeky nature and a "bad" nerdy nature lies in social interaction. If someone is interesting, gets along well with others, and just happens to play D&D, then it's fine. People say "Hey, he does what he's interested in and doesn't care what people think. That's cool." Meanwhile, if the guy in question happens to be a nerd, what ends up happening is that the nerdy activities previously mentioned end up defining the person. Cool person plays D&D? Hey, it's just a hobby. Uncool person plays D&D? He must be a neckbeard weirdo who lives in Mom's basement. I'm really insecure about my nerddom, but that's because I work and live with people who believe that if you didn't play football in high school, don't chase after anything with a vagina, and don't drive a Charger / Mustang / off-roading Jeep / lifted truck, you're a waste of oxygen and a faggot. My interests are strange even by nerd standards - Nethack and Orbiter are my favorite games right now.
Whoa whoa whoa.... The article said you are 'born' into beauty but 'intelligence' requires hard work? This guy must be an ugly retard. You are born into beauty AND you are born into intelligence. It's called genetics, dipshit.
I disagree. Intelligence is gotten through effort, just like everything else. Sure, there are people who have an innate talent for academic subjects, just like there are people with innate talent for sports, art, and music. But unrealized potential is the most common kind. I would get frustrated in high school when people said "Wow, you're good at math. You're so lucky." I generally ignored them, but I felt like saying, "I wish. I'm good at math because I was doing problems while you were chilling with your friends." Saying that I'm lucky for being good at math is like telling the all-star quarterback that he's lucky for being good at football. Of course, there are prodigies just like everywhere else. But what do those prodigies have in common? They worked their asses off. This is the reason why I don't call people lucky (or genetically fortunate) when they're charming and good at social interaction. While I was doing math and reading Latin, they were chilling with their friends and focusing on interacting with others.
If you want to do anything useful with your intelligence, you bet your ass it requires hard work. Doctors don't just become doctors by sitting around and being intelligent.
I typically agree with most of what you say, but this sort of saddens me. After all, what is that loftiest of ambitions, sex with a naughty Catholic schoolgirl, but Imaginationland for adults? (NB: I'm talking about having your of legal age partner dress up in her old outfit, not the molesting of children - although I guess that was somewhat apparent from saying schoolgirls, rather than boys.) Likewise with 'rape' fantasies, bondage, and all manner of glorious kinks. Personally, they aren't my bag - I have trouble with the suspension of disbelief - but I genuinely envy the people who can pull them off. And on the whole, I tend to believe the world needs more imagination in its adults, not less. If kids, or adults, can get it from geeky hobbies, then to my mind that's vastly superior use of their time to watching a rerun of Everyone Loves Stereotypes, or whatever shit is on t.v. this week. I'm fairly geeky - I play computer games, and I read a fuckton of everything, including sci-fi and epic fantasy. That said - a friend of mine owned a gaming cafe until very recently, and the customers - jesus christ, the customers. They conformed to every cliche` you've ever heard. Jobless or working for minimum wage, living in their parent's basements at the age of 24, very limited experience talking to, let alone dating, women, and socially repellent. The sort of people that would walk up to you and launch into a 20 minute description of their last WOW raid, regardless of what you were doing at the time. Interestingly, they all lacked strong male role models. Most of them had divorced parents with non-custodial dads. Correlation != causation and all that, but it was an interesting commonality.
Hold your horses there. It's been argued numerous times that although genetics does have some influence, your environment also has some influence. Let's also not forget just because you're predisposed to something, doesn't mean you necessarily take on those traits. <a class="postlink" href="http://allpsych.com/journal/iq.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://allpsych.com/journal/iq.html</a> You're free to disagree but I'm a firm believer that anyone who doesn't live in Imaginationland at least sometimes is dead inside. I'd just as soon throw myself in front of a fucking bus rather than have no imagination.
I am without question a geek. I love D&D, Whitewolf tabletop, console and PC gaming, and yes, even LARPing sometimes. I have been in LARPs where you are throwing lightning bolts, and I've been in some where it's rock paper scissors. If you have a good group of people it is a blast. I have a bag full of d20s, d10s, etc. and tons of system books, as well as a bunch of consoles (including and Intellivision which was the first system I ever played on.). I was the president of the gaming club at my college for 3 of my 4 years. I don't force my interests on anyone. LordLecter has no loving of tabletop or LARPing and that's fine. I haven't been to a LARP for quite a few years but I wouldn't be against it if there was a good group. I haven't been to a boffer LARP (aka- the lightning bolt youtube stuff) in many years. I may regret this but ... That was me in 2006, the last time I went to that LARP. I was down and waiting to be healed when someone took the picture. Yes those are elf ears. Yes I am a complete, verified geek of the highest order. Kneel before Zod.
I am a geek. I play D&D, Magic, and pretty much any other game you can think of. I played WoW for a few years after it came out and as soon as Diablo 3 comes out you won't see me or my friends for a weekend or two. I love Firefly, Star Wars, and pretty much the whole Fantasy Sci Fi genre in whole. With that being said I like to think of myself as a man of many tastes. Although I'm not athletic I love football, baseball, golf and pretty much any other sport. I have a motorcycle and I love music and going to concerts.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with the field of psychology. Let's remember firstly that intelligence in the scientific community remains an abstraction like "love." It's true definition is very philosophical and although IQ tests claim to measure some aspect/ definition of intelligence, the concept remains an abstraction. Anywho, someone said that there is an "innate potential" of intelligence and that you must work hard to take advantage of your smarts. First of all, I'm arguing that your "potential to learn" in fact IS your intelligence. There is a difference between intelligence ---> your ability and potential to synthesize new information and learn rapidly (well you see, this is just my poor attempt at a definition) and KNOWLEDGE --------> what you do know. Virtually anyone can learn algebra. And I'd even dare say most people can understand Einstein's theory of relativity. But how many people have the potential to innovate in those subjects? Very few. Your 'intelligence' is primarily genetic, I'd say. Yes, any psyc major can tell you that virtually everything about you is a combination of genetics and environment. Hell, you can argue that a woman's beauty has a HUGE environmental factor. Yes, we can throw in silly environmental factors, like your mother drank while pregnant, or you were locked in a closet until you were 15, but all and all, those are nonsense and irrelevant to the average suburban-coddled American. And if you point me to studies on IQ test studies, again, you have to ask what the IQ tests are measuring. Why, just some guy from 30 years ago who created his own operational definition of intelligence, which happened to be sorting shapes spacially. Intelligence is different than knowledge or practice, the latter two which can significantly increase standardized test scores and all that shit. But enough of all that. The article is pretentiously, and sophomorically, I might add, claiming that beauty is "all genetics" but that "intelligence" is a hard-earned, hard-won "trait" to possess. Despite that I still think this guy is patting himself on the back for being Irish or having blue eyes or being born in the 20th Century or any other silly non-accomplishments, the entire point is moot anyway. You could argue that the inclination to work hard or having the resources or willpower to motivate oneself is also a quality endowed to you by genetics or an upbringing largely outside of your control. But that's if you want to get really philosophical. But all in all, geniuses like Einstein or Foucault or whoever the fuck didn't 'earn' their intelligence. They were born with it. And they worked mighty hard to make something of it. To earn knowledge and wisdom and progress.
Don't you watch True Blood? So it's not cool to play D&D, but it is cool to act like a 16 year old girl? Focus: I'm a computer programmer. Most people assume because of this I am a dork. I fucking hate it when people ask me to fix their computer for them. What I do is more closely related to solving math word problems. I hate almost all things dorky, for example: Lord of the Rings? Dragons and wizards and midgets. Woooooo. It is pretty fucking gay if you ask me. I would rather watch those TLC shows about midgets. I do three dorky things: 1. I watch the first ten season of the Simpsons all the time 2. I have a cell phone that I have rooted and modded to my liking. I spent way too much time doing this. 3. I visit this message board. It's sad to say how much of the world and things I enjoy I have discovered through this board.
I am a huge nerd. I grew up playing text-based MUDs/MUSHs and a role-playing message board. I was in marching band. I watched anime, drew anime characters, switched to American comics and started drawing American comic book characters. I learned the furry community will pay you bank if you can draw furry porn well, so I did that too. I spent the better part of my teen years playing StarCraft and Final Fantasy, and my college years playing Xbox. I could build my own computer at 12 and got into modding my box heavily so that I would look cool at LAN parties (which I never did, I was fucking terrible at it). Given a choice between a party and reading high fantasy, I would pick fantasy every time. Luckily I had some friends who were far less nerdy than me that forced me to go out and develop some social skills, or who knows where I would be now. But to be perfectly honest, I prefer nights drinking with buddies and yelling obscenities over a game of CS than I do going to bars. People never believe me when I say these things. I can't count the number of sneers I get from girls who work at comic shops when I walk in wearing a dress. The trouble now is I have so much in common with geeky men, but they don't like me because I don't look like I'm from their world. I need to start a club for reformed nerds who gained social interaction skills but still like to argue retarded minutiae from Martin's novels.
Started reading fantasy/science fiction in 5th grade. Was at a shitty inner-city school and was bored out of my mind, so I would read all day instead of paying attention, at absurd rates. I would check out about 10 books a week, and read about half. Wheel of Time, Dune, Salvatore, Lord of the RIngs, anything I could get my hands on. Surprisingly it didn't get me any shit whatsoever from other kids, or impact my awkward middle-school attempts at talking to girls. Progressed to Warcraft III, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, Dungeons and Dragons (weekly), Magic the Gathering, Warhammer 40k, and online play-by-post rpgs. And then came high school. Started playing sports year-round (swimming, soccer, lacrosse), thought I was hot shit, became a total asshole for a year or two, and abandoned all "geeky" pursuits. Chilled out and became more laid-back and less of a dick by the time I graduated, but my past hobbies remained casualties. However, I still read fantasy/science fiction whenever I can, and still love it. Reading insane quantities of books throughout middle school really helped develop my writing and I still read frequently.
I can safely say I'm a geek. I've collected comics for over 18 years, write fanfiction and have my doctorate in cell and molecular biology because comics really triggered my interest in science from a young age. However, I still keep my fanfiction writing quiet for the most part since people don't quite accept that as much as comics these days.