Is it cool to be a geek?

Can you remember the time that you talked about other things than talking about movies, games or music? Actually anything you can now easily look up on the internet, because about twenty years ago I didn´t really have that. I think I only had one other friend who also had a console, a NES, just like me. But because hardly any of my other friends had a console there wasn´t much you could talk about it and since we had no pc in our house there wasn´t much else I could talk about when it came to gaming. If I wanted to talk with my friends I called them with a phone, you know the type with a cord and that´s used by everyone else in the house. If I played with a friend then we wouldn´t sit behind the tv playing games, nope we would go outside and play some old fashioned games. A funny thing is that this often also resulted into violence, because one kid got hurt and then the other kids would pick sides which would then result in some fighting. Now when you ´fight´ it´s usually with words and then it comes down to who can be the most hurtful with words, which actually means nothing compared to what you could be facing twenty years ago.

The point is that kids then didn´t play a lot of games, at least nobody really seemed to be talking about it. Maybe because playing games wasn´t really considered cool? Which makes it weird that people would now make fun of you if you haven´t played a certain game, oh how the times have changed. It wasn´t until halfway in the nineties that I met other kids that also played games, we also talked about it openly on school which was also new for me. But this would sometimes mean that we were labeled as nerds, because only nerds play video games. At first that actually bothered me, which often lead to fights and then people would stop calling me a nerd but instead they called me a lunatic (well behind my back). Hm this might actually prove that games make me violent, oh wait no annoying kids made me violent in those days! The term geek was an insult in those days as well, but now more than fifteen years later people are proud to be geeks. Even people who don´t have any interest in games, science fiction or anything else geek related.

Some of the original geeks are actually quite offended by people who call themselves geeks but don´t really fit in, but this behaviour kind of makes you like people who didn´t allow you to hang out with them because you played games. If someone wants to call himself or herself a geek isn´t it that his or her right to do so? There isn´t really a test you must pass to be considered a geek, so if you don´t know that Darth Vader is Luke´s father then that´s not a mortal sin in the world of geeks. Ok people will probably laugh at you but when you´re new in the world of geeks then it´s not like you know everything in a day or two. Even if you only enjoy playing games then that doesn´t make you less than someone that likes to play games and has all this knowledge about geek interests. This whole I´m more of a geek than you thing is childish and not what being a geek stands for, why are some people always so obsessed with having a private group? So it´s cool to be a geek now? Playing games is considered to be cool? Well what about people who actually come from a time when it wasn´t cool? For me it´s simple, if someone wants to call himself or herself a geek then by all means do it. If you have no interest in games, comics, science fiction or anything else geek related then I´m not offended by that. Who knows you better than yourself? A geek at heart is ok in my book, that doesn´t mean you have to live up to a stereotype. Just be yourself and hopefully that will lead to something good in your life!