Dear Closet Nerds,

What the fuck is your problem?

For a long while, the only true closet nerd that I knew was Crap who would twitch and panic if you even hinted at a relationship between him and the Metagamers while in public. He was really ashamed of being a gamer even though he was one of the most involved gamers that I've ever known. After a bit of a snafu with him and I meeting at a What You Will play and me exposing him as a nerd to them and then exposing every other member of the play as a nerd as well, I thought he had gotten better about the whole being a nerd thing. Well, Crap and I had an online interaction last night that proves otherwise.

Crap is no longer the only closet nerd that I know of now though. I have a coworker who is very much the same way except that it goes so far that although he has nerdy impulses and enjoys nerdy things, he is so ashamed of his own nerdiness that he won't even allow himself to indulge in that nerdiness, even in private.

So I want to ask all of you closet nerds out there, what's the big deal? I can see being ashamed of Larping, but only because of its traditional social stimatization, not anything else. After all, Larp is basically expanded improvisational acting with a rule system behind it, acting out a story that cannot be told in only one evening. Sure, it's like a giant game of Make-Believe, but so is any form of acting or writing. Only here, you get a bigger say in what happens with the story while still working with others.

If it was tabletop roleplaying, I would understand being ashamed of easier. After all, the stereotype for tabletop is a goup of nerds sitting around in someone's basement, being slobs, rolling dice, and doing math to pretend that they are wizards, thiefs, and warriors playing out high fantasy. Since a lot of tabletop is DnD, that stereotype is unfortunately fairly accurate. However, it's not always the case.

But I don't see what is so wrong to be a nerd in general. True, a lot of nerds are completely socially inept, but this isn't a product of being a nerd, but rather a seperate trait all in itself. Being a nerd just means that you are intelligent, usually academically. That should be something revered, not scorned. We need more super intelligent people in this world, not less. We should just be encouraging the development of social skills as well. One could argue that Larp does this since the Larp group socializes a ton outside of game. No, it's not very efficient, but its something.

Back in high school, we read a study that wanted to know whether the stereotype about the icompatability of intelligence and social skills was well founded. I don't remember much about the study, but I do remember the general conclusion it had. It said that beauty, brawn, social prowess, and intelligence were often linked togetherand directly proportional instead of inversely so. This seemed to be an obvious thing as all of our best atheletes were also our valadictorians and were friends of mine in my honors classes.

It was only once I reached here that the stereotype seemed to hold up to scrutiny. I was very confused and decided to observe and see if I could determine the reason. What I found out was that the same phenominon that happened in my high school happened to the same extent here, but with one additional factor. Since we were such a high quality school, specialists in a certain field, whether it would be sports or academics, from all over the country would gather together in one place and be more promenant than those who were just fairly good at everything. In fact, since those who weren't quite as good at everything couldn't even get in to this school, it was primarily the specialists and the jack-of-all-trades that made up the student body here. Therefore, those who were fairly good at everything became "average" instead of being praised for excelling as they were used to because no matter what they participated in, there were specialists there who were better at it.

What I'm trying to say is that there's nothing wrong with being a nerd, especially if you are also atheletic and a social butterfly. Why should there be? In fact, it should be a blessing to be a nerd, to be able to think creatively, do math well, and enjoy thinking. It's an advantage that you have over people who are not so blessed. Why shouldn't you revel in it? Why would you be ashamed of it?