I am having a Moment of Mania.
On the bus home today I returned to a book I picked up around the time I was reading Lyotard — Matt Hills’s Fan Cultures. I had a hunch an idea that had been plaguing me — that fantasy fans are considered nerds because their interest in magical possibilities contradicts capitalist rationalism — had surely been covered by someone else, and I was right. Today I went back to see if Hills had anything to say about spaces, as I have a final on them due Tuesday, and found he does. It’s something on fan tourism, in which the author talks about going to Vancouver to be closer to X Files zeitgeist.
In it there is, among other things, a funny little passage where Hills calls other scholars on the mat for belittling fan tourism as not even seeking to visit something “real,” as opposed to, say, the general, highly mediated tourist fantasy practice of seeing pictures of the Pyramids in a travel agent’s office, going to visit them, and taking pictures to bring back to others to prove they’d been there.
All of it got me thinking about how geeks are the ones who supposedly don’t understand where the bounds of the “magic circles” of play and fantasy are drawn, and how this has come up prominently as I have begun to ask kids who plays which games, specifically fantasy and sci-fi complex computer games (as opposed to games for the Playstation, XBox, etc).
I promptly concluded that
1) at minimum, I need to present this final wearing my Star Trek uniform jacket, and
2) preferably I should give the listeners a spatialized sense of geekdom.
Initial idea: the Geek Hat, a box lined with geekinalia to be placed over one’s head to give one the sense of a cozy geek mindspace. Rejected for reasons of claustrophobia, and also the only things I have which would fit in a head-sized box are Pokemon.
Subsequent idea: Hauling a bunch of geek paraphernalia down to the lab and setting up a simulated Nerd Room. It would have portals to the outside world, from which would issue unkind words about the things within this space. Rejected because aside from the things I could bring into the space, the situation — the comments in particular — would have to be simulated, and I’d like this to feel slightly less like installation art.
Current working idea: Set up game playing stations around the EGGPLANT Lab where classmates could play games particular to each group of participants I spoke with. This would mean having a sports-gamer space, a casual-gamer space, and a nongamer space, and having the spaces not meet. Perhaps I could still populate the geek gamer space with my own geek items in an attempt to indicate that a LOT of academic work so far has focused on geek games and geek players, to the detriment of an understanding of the other groups. It’s really not ideal to be trying to represent your population with materials from your own life, but there’s a little something to it here; I honestly feel like researchers are each blinded by our own perspectives, and the least we can do is explain them as far as we can so people know our shortcomings.
Then I got obsessed with the idea of trying to map out who was popular and who was not in my high school class using Friendster, which proves impossible.
and now I really ought to sleep.
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