If my role-playing groups over the years are any indication, income doesn’t come into it. All you needed was a free evening and a few quid for some cheap snacks. You could borrow everything else, so you just needed one guy with a second-hand source book and a handful of dice. Ars Magica 4th edition is free online, now that 5th is out, so you could feasibly play an RPG with an initial outlay of zero dollars (use a dice roller program and you don’t even need dice).
When I was in university, I was pretty poor, but still had video games to play. It’s a high initial expenditure, but once you’ve got a few games with high replay value, you’re set for several months. There’s also the option of swapping with friends.
And that’s not even getting into the buttload of free games online. Roguelikes, MUDs, free clones of popular games… if there’s a group of people that like free stuff, it’s gamers.
I’d also argue that any hobby is as expensive as you make it. Bargain shopping for haute coture, cooking fancy meals, and buying high-tech running shoes and jogging gear all adds up. My colleague does a cooking course which is paid for by work as part of an initiative, and she’s always going on about the cost of ingredients.
Again, it is not the cost of raw materials, but rather the mindset.
I’d venture if you were in one of those “we always had books around” families, you probably did not grow up in the sort of entrenched poverty you would expect to find in something like an inner city. There is a difference between a family that has fallen on hard times, and a family that has always been poor and surrounded by poverty.
As for the OP, I bet “immigrant” has as much to do with it as “poor.” Different American cultures have different values, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the clientele at game shops is overwhelmingly white.
I don’t think that’s always true if you go back a generation or two. My dad’s family have always been dirt poor–like backwoods Arkansas poor–but there was a lot of value put on books and learning in those communities. My husband grew up in inner city Chicago in a family of rural Alabama hillbillies, and again there was a lot of emphasis put on books and reading. And going back a little further, look what happened at emancipation: schools for and by freedmen sprang up everywhere. Getting access to education was the first priority for a lot of people. In all these groups, the “smart kid” in the family–the one with what we would today call a geeky bent–was groomed to pursue and education and often received a disproportionate amount of the family’s resources to pursue it. It wasn’t that people didn’t think education was valuable. It was that they literally couldn’t afford it, or afford much of it. Up until WWII, it was perfectly normal for a family to only be able to afford to have one kid go to high school, or none.
There are certainly groups with a strong anti-intellectual tendencies in America, but I think the correlation between those groups and even generational poverty is weaker than you suggest.
Again, if gaming/geekiness is associated with the upper middle class today, I think that’s an artifact of the fact that kids with a geeky bent tend to go into white collar fields. It doesn’t have as much to do with where they started.
I grew up poor in America. Literally: trailer trash. Single, welfare mom. Despite that, I’ve managed to own some type of compter – personally, not familiarly – since the age of 12 in 1983. All but the first, were earned by working (starting with a paper route). We had Sears-branded Atari 2600, but once I moved into a C=128 and had access to pirated C=64 games, I pretty much lost interest in console games for the rest of my life. And then there was D&D. Those were books. My relatives (especially the degreed librarian) had no problem making me literate, and thus I always had access to D&D and AD&D. And for Christmas (mostly from relatives), I always asked for (and received) Erector sets*, microscopes, telescopes, chemistry sets, and electronic project kits. My geek childhood cred was pretty well developed despite living in American “poverty.”
I know Legos are the cool thing today, but back then, they were just blocks.
But that too, is a generalization. I wasn’t poor, but my family owned FIVE books other than children’s books - a decorative set of three leather bound classics, a Bible, and Dr. Spock’s baby book. Neither of my parents is a reader.
I have friends that were poor and are nerds - some of them DID grow up in households of books. But some of them didn’t. Some of them ate government cheese and lived with parents who didn’t read in not nice areas of South Minneapolis.
I think that some people have a natural aptitude and drive for some things. A born reader will read regardless of if his family is poor and regardless of whether anyone in his house reads. Maybe you don’t start reading seriously until one day you find a book in a school library that grabs you, but from then on - regardless of your family, the library is there for you. We - as a family - are neither outdoorsy or athletic. But my son just CAME that way. I couldn’t stop him from being able to shoot a basketball if I wanted to. He seems to instinctively understand how to pitch a tent.
There is a lot to nurture, but nature weighs in heavily on this stuff as well. As parents, we’d like to believe that if we value reading, all we need to do is read to a child. Or if we don’t like sports, simply limiting exposure will keep our kid from being a jock. But it doesn’t really work that way.
Video games are mainstream, if your kid is going to do them, he (or she) will find them - whether you support the hobby or not. But tabletop gaming isn’t mainstream, so you have to have opportunity for exposure.
Not all nerdy adults started out that way. My family was poor growing up, we got a cd player 5 years after all my friends had one and I had to visit my friends houses to play video games. We did finally get a secondhand nintendo system (many years after it had been out), and I had a lot of fun playing Megaman and Mario while my friends had playstations and segas. I never played a computer game while living in my parents’ home. We eventually got a very old computer but it couldn’t have handled any games. I did play some computer games in school computer labs though, like Oregon Trail. My computer gaming habit was adult-onset. I got into WoW just after my 20th birthday and I’m still playing it today.
As far as your fiancee is concerned, I think nerdery is something that she’s not going to be into at this stage of the game. And the fact that you cannot compromise on your interests isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless you have NOTHING at ALL in common. Do you? It’s cool to have downtime from your girlfriend. Play games while she knits or reads or whatever. But if you “cannot compromise” on something before you’re even married, that doesn’t spell a happy future for the relationship. This is a very minor thing. What happens when you disagree on things in the future like how many kids to have, what religion to raise them, or how much to spend on food versus clothing?
As a female gamer myself, I have long since decided that I don’t want anything to do with non-nerdy guys. They just never get me, and gaming makes up such a huge portion of my life that I can’t see dating someone who didn’t do it as much as I do. It’s up to you if you want to impose a similar restriction on your potential dating pool or not; I know that there are way more nerdy guys for me to choose from than there are nerdy girls for you to choose from, so that’s not necessarily an easy choice to make. But if you do decide to date non-nerds, don’t try to shove your nerdery down their throat if they’re truly not interested. Relationships have enough tribulations as it is without shoving another wedge between yourselves.
OH I skimmed the OP and I misread it. You are just trying to stave off a situation where you are old and have nothing in common and fight about it, I read that as you were already fighting about having nothing in common.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Couples need individual interests too because you get really sick of seeing someone if your entire life revolves around doing things with them. So maybe just accept that gaming is an issue where your relationship will have to diversify. It’s fine, as long as you have other things in common too. But as far as ignorance-fighting goes, I think it’s silly to assume that gamers have to be from a privileged background. I certainly wasn’t a rich kid but I am still a nerdy adult.
I would suggest starting by simply saying “Role-playing games and computers seem to be a middle-class hobby” which can at least be supported (or denied) on factual grounds rather than using loaded terms like “privilege” which don’t do much but create a sense of superiority.
Without going into a game of background wars, let me just say that my upbringing was not one I’d define as “privileged” and I managed to pursue “geek” hobbies. From where I stood, “privilege” meant a big house and new cars and owning a VCR & cable TV. Point being that “privilege” is a worthless term and only serves to cloud the discussion.
As for time, it takes time to play baseball or watch a football game or fix up an old dirt bike or car but no one calls these privileged hobbies. Spending time on drawing a dungeon map or copying code from library back issues of Compute! instead of working on an old Chevy Nova or pickup basketball doesn’t suddenly elevate one’s economic status.
My roommate (well, tennant) grew up pretty poor but he’s in to Warhammer, M:TG and D&D. I think part of the reason he was able to get into those sorts of things is that he grew up poor and never learned good money management and thought nothing of throwing all his spare cash into those games (they are not free). Does that make sense?
He did have friends who could indulge him, especially with M:TG (it came out when we were the target age). But as soon as he had his own disposable income, down the gaming hole it went.
He’s 32 and completely broke, BTW. That’s why he lives in my basement for free. Surrounded by all of his cards, playsets and NiB characters. sigh
The kid is NOT good with computers tho, and I think there might be some truth to the assertion that at least being computer-nerdy, you need some bucks. I didn’t get to be computer nerdy until my dad’s work situation changed and we were solidly middle-class. Before that we were just slightly interested in poking around our super-second-hand Commodore 64. Once we were allowed a real PC and some sort of modem, we were off into computer nerd-ville.
ETA: Console gamers…they are not nerdy IMHO. The last loser who lived with me had few possessions beyond his PS3 and cell phone. This kid is as far from nerd and as far from privileged as one could get.
God yes. I’m so sick of hearing my wife’s side of the family talk about how much more “pure” the people of Iron County are because they’re poor. Never mind that my wife’s side of the family is solidly middle class.
FWIW, I grew up poor and in a ghetto and I’m a nerdy gamer.
My soon-to-be ex-SIL is a gamer and a leech. He was 32 and living at home when my daughter made the mistake of marrying him. They moved in with us, supposedly to permit him to go to college and make something of himself, but he chose to stick with gaming and have my daughter (and us) support him. She tossed him out before 2 years was up, and he moved in with a friend who supported his ass for 7 months. Now he’s 35 and back at mommy’s house, working part time at a job teenagers normally do, still gaming.
Privileged? No. Lazy? You bet. I know he’s not typical, but he’s my experience.
She’s putting the cart before the horse. While I had a rather poor upbringing, random people kept giving me stuff because they thought I was smart. I was a geek before I got my stuff.
The only way her argument makes sense is if she’s saying that all hobbies require privilege. Being a geek doesn’t take any higher level of time or money than any other hobby.
That’s a good way to put it. It is hard for some people not to get emotional about it, because the fact is that there are some very unfair inequalities in this society, and being on the wrong end of some of them are going to make your angry at times. Some people got more of what they needed growing up than others, and that’s never going to really settle with the people who got the short end. I’m calling on all of us to examine our knee-jerk responses and to consider where the other side is coming from.
Playing baseball and football has the advantage of improving your strength (useful in fighting, working, etc.), and often the out-there dream of doing it professionally one day. Fixing up old cars and dirt bikes has the advantage of giving you a useful car or dirt bike at the end, and is a directly vocational skill.
Drawing dungeon maps or copying code do not directly map onto professions that many (but not all) poor families see in their children’s future.
I grew up in a family that barely tolerated my hobbies.
My parents were both sports mad: tennis, badminton, squash, cricket, rugby… having a geeky son who’d rather read SF & Fantasy and play with toy soldiers and paper & dice RPGs did not find great favour.
At the same time my family wasn’t terribly well off… they had their house (well, the bank owned most of it) and sometimes struggled to pay the mortgage. There wasn’t a lot of extra money sloshing around – I got part time jobs from 14 years old on and my hobbies were self-funded.
So… privileged background? I guess that depends on your yardstick. I would have said lower-middle class at best – neither of parents had a university education but Dad worked white-collar clerical jobs. My Mum was a typist before getting married. In later years she was a paper-hanger and interior decorator. I was the first in the immediate family to go to university.
Technical Business Analyst (ex-Programmer) whose house is stuffed with gaming models, paints, etc, and a cubic ass-load of Lego? Yeah…
While I happened to bump into my future wife the day we were both signing up for first year university courses the next time I saw here was at an SF convention.
After we started going out she got into RPGs and we met a lot of friends through that. She’s mad keen on certain tabletop gaming figures… despite having actually *played *less than a handful of times she has large GW Warhammer armies of Wood Elves, High Elves, Lizardmen, Tomb Kings, Goblins, and Slaan… and 40K Eldar. :eek: Recently she’s joined me in playing WoW.
But at the same time her interest in the SCA well outlasted mine, and I’ve never got into her knitting, embroidery, and sewing. (She has made some kick-ass SCA garb and SF/Fantasy costumes).
Hehe… yeah. Photocopied rules were more common than originals in my experience.
In '79 I started gaming with a photocopied set of Empire of the Petal Throne, and then got a photocopied set of The Fantasy Trip.
In '80 after I started working weekends I sent to the UK for a set of original Traveller and Chivalry & Sorcery from ads in the back of Military Modeling magazine. At the time the only way to buy from the UK was to purchase £2 postal notes from a post-office… and you could only buy one note per post-office per day. (There were strict import restrictions in force in NZ at the time).
IIRC 1982 was the first year that Whitcoulls brought in D&D and it was possible to buy an RPG in an NZ shop.
I’m confused by the claim that immigrant kids and/or kids of immigrants aren’t into nerdy stuff. My admittedly subjective experience indicates that kids of immigrants from China, India, Russia (and other eastern European countries) are all very much overrepresented in nerdy pursuits vs the overall population. Or does the use of “immigrant” here mean something other that “people moving here from other countries”? People from specific originating countries or socio-economic situations?
Another good point. My father’s family were a single-income family whose sole wage-earner was a labourer. My father’s parents and sister were all from Russia.
Now, they all had an arts background: painting, dancing, etc. And my father was given a home education in the arts and the history of art in Europe, such that a good deal of his time was spent drawing, designing, etc.
The arts may not be “nerdy”, but the point stands: you can be quite poor and still interested in stereotypical “middle-class” pursuits. Again, it’s about whether you value the more intellectual side of life or not.
The real problem is that the lower classes tend to adopt a culture of anti-intellectualism. But it needn’t be so.
Yeah I got lucky and family friends had travelled to Canada and bought the Basic D&D box, the one with the dragon on front, didnt like it and gave it to the nerdy kid.
Took quite a while before we could get anything else. We played Chivalry and Sorcery for years when I got older, my friends in NZ still do as far as I know.
Whereas laying out dungeon floor plans and programming computers have infinitely more application towards real-world advancement and vocational skills than hours spent watching football or NASCAR but no one says “Those poor lower-class people just couldn’t afford the time to spend all Sunday drinking beer and watching the game, what with how poor they are and all.”
I’m saying the “time” argument is a cop-out. You make time for what you want to do and the lower-class manage to “waste” plenty of it.
