Geekdom’s desperate need for belonging

How media fans pour an excessive and spiritually-damaging love on the wrong things

One of the main concerns of this blog, as you may have understood already, regards the social dynamics forming around the common enjoyment of entertainment and the large process of culture-making that ensues when this enjoyment is shared. Inevitably, we have to reserve a special look, or focus, on pop culture, for reason which are both clear and that also have been already described. That, sometimes unfortunately, includes fandom.

For our perspective the past year has offered an interesting phenomenon which in fact seemed to be a quite big one for a while, and that is the mass emigration of many World of Warcraft players from their beloved Blizzard franchise to other online games (particularly Final Fantasy XIV Online, as it seems), in the wake of the scandals plaguing the American company. A bad workplace, bad PR, and low-quality releases all combined to frustrate the core Blizzard audience that at some point just decided they had had enough. As the online discourse has now placated enough to have a lucid reflection on this event, it seems that although part of the Blizzard audience has returned to the coop, some of it will never come back.

What matters to us is not this mass move in itself, though. What sparked this reflection is a this one single case, whom I do not mean to personally attack in any way, but whose behavior, though exaggerated for the purpose of entertainment, betrays what is going wrong within genuine fans of Brand X.

“Goodbye and never see you again!” he thought as he cast all his WoW-themed memorabilia into the big carton box at his feet. Just now he realized how many books and posters and gadgets he had hoarded in all those years, and how many thousands of dollars he had spent to signal his love for the game. Some of the books he had bought had never been read, not even unwrapped from their plastic wrap. Others had been bought TWICE just because he had forgotten that he had already bought them.

He stopped to look at the content inside the box, sighing with a mixture of sadness and relief, the webcam recording him live as he seemed to hold back tears for a millisecond. Raising his gaze to the now empty walls of his studio, and then at the camera, he smiled nostalgically as the live comments flickered on the PC screen. His viewers were not unlike him, he thought, they felt the same way as him. They, too, had spent a big part of their lives burning with passion for that game; they, too, had given that game lots of money and attention, but what they had really left in it was an all too big piece of their heart. And all they got in return were scandals, lies, and scams. Hate and deceit in exchange for love and support.

The feeling crossed his mind that something was off about all of this. Since his now famous rant went live, and he had vented his pent-up feeling in front of hundreds of people, he believe he was now free. Free to move on, but to reflect as well.

Maybe his passion for a game had been too much. Maybe no game deserved such a big place inside his heart, and other things he had neglected did. Maybe all this buying of themed regalia, and all the time spent trying to make sense of WoW’s lore, and all the passion he felt he had to show for the game… maybe they had sucked him in a toxic relation with a brand that could never reciprocate such love. Maybe those feelings had to be directed elsewhere.

All of this he thought on in an instant. He gave a quick look at the comment section, making the same smile as before. It was not a fake one, he just felt like smiling that way; the way when you say farewell to a dear friend. Could a videogame be friends with a human being?

“No time to think about it” he said to himself. “The brand new Final Fantasy posters won’t hang themselves to the wall.”

As you may know, to this blog geekdom in itself is a problem. Not necessarily the people within it are, because I recognize that most people who calls themselves “geeks” or “fans” do so with ingenuity, and because of an affirmed habit, and that they just want to mean they are very passionate about their favorite things. This is one of the things that make geekdom a negative in my eyes: these products and brands have become a source of belonging that replaces things which are more suited to be, and that are healthier to belong to.

Every man needs to belong, be it a cause, or a set of ideals and values, or a social group, and in the current social environment very few can say with certainty that they belong to something, but I believe that most of all the geek suffers the absence of belonging. Since he has been convinced that he has never been part of the larger normie society, the geek feels his isolation more acutely than the average Joe; and though the average Joe can surely be as childish and excessive in trying to fulfill this need (yes, sportsball fans), I believe the geek feels more emotional pressure in trying to mitigate it.

Gaming franchises, as any other franchise out there, will never be able to fulfill THAT one need. Being part of a tight group of bros who like a particular game can do that, but considering yourself part of the general idea of “Brand X players” and rocking your Brand X regalia does not give you the social and cultural roots everyone needs as a foundation for their daily lives.

Geekdom, fandom, franchises. These work as a simulation, a surrogate of the bonds that the people within them are seeking. Often today, geek franchises are described as religions by both proponents and critics of this treatment they increasingly receive by the general populace. And all of this is true: cultish behavior has indeed become a thing in all facets of media. Fans need a proper religion with the proper values and aspirations to look forward to, but what they strongly need in order to start placing the right feelings, and the right amount of passion, toward hobbies is a place in a Mannerbund, a gathering of men bound by ideals, proximity, and need. So many people get obsessed about communities because the band of brothers, the group of friends, have been pressured into disarray by the social engineers of our time, and they must replace them.

There is no such thing as a gaming community. First and foremost, everyone plays games, and you have no bond with the greatest majority of those (billions of) people. And even if we restrict the definition of gamer like some have always done, reality stays the same. There are people whose language and references you can easily understand, and maybe that will help you form a bond with them, but that’s all. I have my friends whom I play or talk about games with. Even if we keep gaming as the starting common ground, that is not enough to form a bond. More and greater things must be shared in order to create a Mannerbund.

I can have no community. I can have my family, my friends, my neighborhood, my town. I can have the people who go to Mass in the same church as me. These are people that can form a bond with me, by interacting with me in a deeper way than “Man, Brand Y is so fucking awesome!”.

Geekdom fails to understand it, and that is why it can be so frustrated and mentally unstable, and it usually is these days. Clearly, the pervasive infiltration of radical elements has made life harder for the more genuine and ingenuous kind of fan. His once peaceful hobby has been made into a battlefield of political propaganda, and that is part of the cause of all of geekdom’s sorrow. What I hope geeks will get to understand is that if we had deeper bonds, and several groups united by a common purpose, the crazies would have been kept at bay way more easily and far longer. Maybe the crazies would not exist at all, since they take advantage of our isolation!

And maybe, the crazies will at last sound the retreat and leave our entertainment alone if our social gatherings formed deeper bonds, and we could say “Enough with your bullshit!” in ways that are more powerful than tweets and video rants.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

S.R.

P.S. I do realize that I may have already said the same, though in different forms, but I know it actually does help repeating. Since this post introduces a new season of (hopefully more serious) posting, I figured the theme of this article was fit to be its starting point.