I don’t know. Is a guy who creates a rail line and travel scenario or a guy who creates the modeling for a digital engine that fits the specs of the real thing in the game digitally any less interested in trains than someone who glues a bunch of little fake trees to a fake mountainside? Is getting a digital engine something less impressive than buying one in a box from the hobby shop?
Some people like trains but don’t have the real estate to devote to a physical set-up. Some people don’t have the money to spend on all the physical supplies. Seems to me that loving trains via a digital medium is no less “sad” than doing so via a physical medium and allows a lot more people to, well, love trains.
There is a space program simulator, Kerbal Space Program. You can build rockets, space stations, Mun rovers, etc.
Sure its just a computer simulator, but its less pathetic than building little model spaceships and going FFFFFFWOOOOSHHH!!! SSHHHEEEEOWWW!!! “Oh no, structural failure on engine 3! We won’t have enough Delta-V to maintain orbit!”
Also an embarassing conversation trying to get my wife into this game:
Me: “Its so much fun, I’ve been into space travel since the Challenger Shuttle exploded!”
Wife: “I was sleeping on a dirt floor in Mexico when the Challenger exploded. And when we immigrated here, I was in an elementary school that thought we were too stupid to bother teaching us space and stuff.”
Interesting, but not unique – picture I get, is that South America’s railways are mostly, horribly on the skids – the less they have, the more attention they pay to it…
I would say that they are really two very different activities.
Part of the fun of having a physical model, is dealing with physical problems and experiencing physical rewards. I’m sure that the folks who are devotees of the is train simulator love trains as much (or more) than people who build models, but that’s not really my issue. I don’t consider the train simulator a “hobby.” Maybe it’s my (arbitrary) bias, but I think of hobbies as requiring some sort of manual input - glueing, cutting, painting, sanding, etc, etc. You know - craftsmanship.
Doing all of this on a computer might require skill and experience, but it’s just not the same thing.
We had a thread about this once but I don’t think it necessarily washes. There may be some connection between “privileged” and geeky hobbies but I’m not sure if the causation is there. There’s a lot of inexpensive ways to enjoy “geeky” hobbies.
Admittedly there’s also a lot of ways to spend a lot of money on geeky hobbies but that’s true of anything, isn’t it? My wife (who also has a non-white rural Latin American upbringing) loves to dance. I’m sure she could tell you “Well, in my village we would dance every weekend and…” and so on. But these days she’s into belly dancing and between classes and workshops and costuming and three-day retreats, etc I guarantee you she spends more than I spend on “privileged” computer gaming. She also crochets and she can make some nice stuff although any amateur crochet/knitting enthusiast can tell you that for materials and time, it’s not an economic winner. The net result of having socks or a scarf you made in the color you want is great but economically, you’d have been better off spending $10 at Target. It’s a luxury hobby here in the first world where consumer goods are cheap and plentiful. You can spend a ton of money on Nascar tickets and paraphernalia or the same for any sport. You can spend a ton on the blue collar hobby of fixing up cars. Which if you’re making a business out of it and selling at a profit is great but I think many of us know someone who has had a “hobby” car sitting around forever.
I do suspect that people are only really aware of the expensive tier of geek hobbies and thus assume it takes an upper-middle class or better lifestyle to get into them. They wouldn’t know about open source role playing games available for free or PC game bundles where you’re getting ten games for five bucks or that you can buy someone else’s cast off lot of 1,000 Magic: the Gathering cards for $20 and play for ages so long as you don’t care about it being “tournament legal” – or go to a tournament at a game shop and buy a ready-to-play deck for $10 that could last you the better part of a year, assuming you’re playing for fun and not to be Number One.
It’s not the same. It’s not “sad” either, though. If someone is into it for the cutting and gluing, the trains aspect is secondary. They could be making model cars or airplanes or Civil War dioramas. If your hobby is “trains” and not “X-Acto knives and glue” then a digital simulator seems like an excellent and affordable way to enjoy your interest.
I beg to differ - if you can find something original to say (or talk about), and say it reasonably well, people won’t necessarily be indifferent. As a hobbyist-blogger (well, more or less) myself, I get almost exclusively enthusiastic feedback. It is possible.
I don’t see any particular reason why, say, 3D modeling couldn’t be considered a form of craftsmanship. A computer is as much of a tool as a handsaw. And I’m not sure how you think computer graphics are made, if you think they don’t require manual input.
I think some of these hobbies are disappearing because society no longer values the things they’re based on as much as it used to.
Stamps, for example. It used to be that the post office was your best (if not only) connection to the wider world beyond your hometown. Nowadays, for most people it’s primarily a conduit for bills and advertising. If you want to talk to your family, you call them on the phone, and if you want to communicate with someone in a foreign country, you go to an internet chat room. People don’t have the initial positive experience with stamps that engenders an interest in them as a hobby.
Likewise, coins. It’s been a long time since finding a coin on the sidewalk meant an appreciable increase in your spending power. When people don’t care about regular coins, they’re never going to grow an interest in rare ones.
Sure, sure.
But, typing PU0,0; PD 1000,1500 into a CNC machine is not the same as spending all afternoon using a file, and bluing to make a flat surface.
They are different skills, and once again, even though simulating everything may be fun, it’s not the same experience as making a physical model (just like playing a computer war game isn’t the same as playing paintball, even though both are simulations).
No one is arguing that they’re the same experience, just that they’re equally valid experiences as hobbies. In fact, I’d argue that physical modeling may be a better way to experience holding a file and a crafting knife but playing a good simulator is a better way to experience an actual train. Model HO train controls can’t hold a candle to simulated train controls and experiences in the major train simulators.
The thing is, to even be into the more ‘affordable’ geeky hobbies, you were likely raised in at least somewhat of a privleged background. When I was a kid, my friends and I would play homegrown pen-and-paper role playing games. But it was because I had played more expensive board games, watched fantasy movies and played Nintendo that fostered the interest. When my wife was growing up she wasn’t exposed to these other things. There’s also another issue I mentioned in the ‘class indicators’ thread: Time. I had a lot more leisure time growing up than my wife did. She was expected to do much more around the house, and having a lot of time to herself wasn’t as emphasized as it was in my household.
Sure, growing up she and her friends could have been LARPing and arguing how many hitpoints La Chupacabra has, and it wouldn’t have cost her anything. But that would assume she was familiar with LARPing, role playing, etc. Keep in mind when we were dating, her mom asked what I was like. She (affectionately) described me as a ‘nerd’ but her mom didn’t even know what it was. Not just the word in English, but the concept of someone who is a nerd was completely foreign. So its unlikely she’s going to see a starter deck of Magic The Gathering for $10.00 at Target and think, “Hey, that card game is pretty inexpensive, I think I’ll get into it.” when she has already been playing card games like Lotteria and Con Quien with her family.
While you point out your wife’s current hobby is more expensive than your own, consider that it grew out of a hobby she did when she was young. That’s my whole point. My wife probably spends a helluva lot more on shoes than she did when she was younger, but it is still an extension of something that meant a lot to her.
A lot of ‘nerdy’ hobbies are heavily marketed toward the male 18-35 crowd. Why do you think the majority of people who engage them are white?
We could spend all day getting into anecdotal evidence but suffice to say that my upbringing wasn’t exceptionally privileged. More so than that of an Ethiopian kid, sure, but to call us “middle class” during the time I decided that dragons and wizards were pretty cool and saved up enough for my first D&D “Red Box” set would have been giving us a lot of unwarranted credit.
I see “hobbies” as requiring two finite resources; money and time both of which are in short supply for most working people these days.
Another factor one of the biggest uses of most people’s leisure time has moved away from specific activities, cooking, motorbikes, stamp collecting to non-specific “reading stuff on internet.”
Another vote that for the hobbies have changed. Less collecting and more fitness, more kids programming, building bots, hacking, more people doing DIY projects as a hobby, some managing their FB page as a hobby, so on.
My grandson plays “Minecraft” (I think that’s what it’s called) frequently. This is some sort of competitive computer game, but it happens in a space of buildings and terrains that the player can build. And, in fact, that’s what grandson spends his time doing: building (and not having battles or whatever it is). He’s got big islands just packed with buildings that have towering walkways and deep dungeons and huge banquet halls and everything else imaginable. He’s 9 years old.
It is intriguing to watch. The construction method is to move around and touch locations thereby causing a cubic block to appear. The blocks are all the same size but have selectable textures. He can also erase them. And that’s it, that’s the only construction method (I think). It is coarse and crude, just single size cubes, but still his little worlds are impressive. Not bad for a 9 year old hobby.
I think computers lend themselves to rendering spaces, and humans have significant hardwired abilities with spaces. The fact that there’s no physical skill in the construction just means the hobby is about different skills, not that it’s sad.
I humbly submit that saying model railroading in a virtual world is sad is like saying you can’t be a great novelist with a word processor, like saying it has to be pen and paper as the classics often were.
I have several hobbies, and am involved with them at different levels and in different ways.
Pocketknives - I pretty much collect canoe and congress style knives that are under 3 ¾ inch folded length. From my first Schrade “stockman” until the present (60+ years), I’ve collected and almost always have one on my person.
I also collect watches, and do light repairs. So my friends bring their watches to me for batteries and simple fixes. In the past I did more in the way of more complicated repairs.
I sing bass in a barbershop group. We have weekly practices and fairly frequent public performances.
A lifetime interest in Xerophytic plants - plants that are adapted to dry climates - Started collecting as a very young boy in Southern California, and have been doing so continuously all my life. I do collect a few genera seriously (Ferocactus, Mammillaria, Astrophytum are examples) but I also grow species in other genera for nursery stock, which I trade for plants. I enjoy growing and giving away plants to friends, give workshops on cacti, write articles, host garden tours, and am in the process of developing new varieties of Adenium, AKA Desert Rose. My wife has wanted to have me go into the business, but I resist, since I grow to please myself, and don’t have any obligations.
There are not very many people who are as deeply involved in plants as I am…but I like to share and help folks get started with plants that require little in the way of resources…water is getting less and less available.
Reinforcing what middlemarch has said, I think nerdy hobbies are an intersection between money, time, and culture. Which is why I think they are so heavily biased toward white privlege; white people (particularly in the US) have the time, the money, the cultural background that fosters the development of these types of hobbies. To the person into computer gaming/RPGs/model trains/etc it might not be so obvious to them. But to a person who didn’t grow up in that cultural background, it definitely is.
Nowadays, women and people of color are gradually becoming a part of these types of hobbies. But its a gradual progression, in part because they are marketed toward white men so heavily they often alienate women and people of color. More and more I see blogs about problems with sexism/bigotry in geek circles; its like the elephant in room. But for people growing up as the target audience, its hard to see it “Samus was a female protanonist!” “Video games aren’t racist!” “I call lots of cis opponents faggot on Counterstrike too!”
Well, the sexism debate is a separate one. And while there’s a cultural component to it, I think people just look at “geek hobbies” and see them mainly pursued by white males and assume “Well, it must be white privilege” rather than it simply being a hobby that gets picked up by white kids for different reasons that have nothing to do with too much time and money. For example, most of the fantasy people are familiar with is based off northern European myths. It’s no real mystery to me why a poor white kid might check out a library book with a European knight rescuing a blonde princess on the cover and a poor black kid might not. Or be more interested in watching Jason & the Argonauts on a Saturday morning while kids of other American subcultures watch something different regardless of “privilege” (or old Dr. Who episodes on a Sunday night).
I think the “white privilege” excuse for demographics is more confirmation bias and back-figuring than the real root of it.
I got pulled away with incomplete thoughts there but also meant to add that while many “geek hobbies” may potentially consume a good deal of income (again, so can many other hobbies though), I think people tend to look at that fact and back figure it as “white privilege”. “Oh, this guy spent $50 on a rare comic book and that guy has $500 in war gaming miniatures. Must be rich people hobbies.”
I think though that people are getting interested for reasons beyond “too much time and money, must be nice” and rather get marketed to because many of them do have money. But that money wasn’t what made them daydream as a five year old watching Jason fight the skeleton army and then grabbing a broomstick and pot lid to fight their own imaginary skeletons.
