In the first post, I said that I was going to write about Game Development in Winnipeg. Yet you cannot have Game Development without Nerdism (defined as the behavior and practices of Nerds). So this post will investigate the term ‘Nerd’ and its related terms such as Geek and such and explain why it is needed to for Game Development.
So what is a Nerd and how is that different from Geek or other similar words? I believe that definitions are the first step to outline and guide one’s written (and coding) work.
I am reusing the definitions from this comprehensive Gizmodo article.
Nerd
The word nerd was first used in the 1950 Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo, in which a nerd was one one of the many oddly named creatures in the titular zoo. According to Ben Zimmer of Vocabulary.com, a 1951 Newsweek article mentioned it as one of the new terms being used by teenagers. It seems unlikely for teens to have latched on to a single proper noun in a Dr. Seuss book so quickly, but there is no recorded source of the word being used previously. It’s possible that it was based on the 1940s slang word “nert,” which referred to a stupid or crazy person. It’s certainly easy to see how teens of the ’50s might co-opt the adults’ term for morons and use it to mean “squares” and people who didn’t understand their culture.
Geek
Geek is actually an old English word meaning freak, imported via the German word “geck,” which could also mean fool. Circuses in 18th century Austro-Hungary used to advertise their “geeks” as their weirdest human attractions, and the word was often used to refer specifically to those whose act consisted specifically of biting the heads off of live animals. The word had its resurgence when it was used in the popular 1941 book Nightmare Alley and its equally popular movie adaptation, to refer to such. Calling someone a person who bites the head off of live chicken’s is a pretty potent way to tell someone they’re weird.
Dork
Most etymologists think that dork is an alteration of the word dick, perhaps coming out of the Midwest, and thus originally meant penis, too. It was certainly used to mean a penis in the 1961 novel Valhalla, although it was spelled “dorque”; a 1964 article in American Speech confirmed its phallic meaning and spelled the word as “dork.” It was also used by Charles Schmid, a serial killer known as “The Pied Piper of Tuscon,” who was interviewed in the (then obviously extremely prevalent) Life magazine, in which he was quoted saying “I didn’t have any clothes and I had short hair and looked like a dork. Girls wouldn’t go out with me.” Schmid almost certainly meant “penis” when he said “dork,” but as the word caught on in pop culture it more commonly came to mean people who look uncool and/or odd.
Dweeb
The origin of the word dweeb is actually a mystery. The Oxford English Dictionary thinks it’s a modern slang term derived from “dwarf” and “feeb” as in feeble, but it also says the word was coined in the ’80s and other etymologists feel dweeb was a college slang word of the ’60s. So… moving on.
There are also a few other terms like Pointdexter, Egghead, etc. but I don’t think they are as relevant. Sometimes a picture can tell a better story than a bunch of sentences. This image is perfect and summarizes why Computer Game Development is primarily an act of Nerdism.
So why does Game Development need Nerds? Nerds and other passionate techy types love exploring the limits of technology, particularly computers. Nerds tick off three of the domains: Intelligence, Obsessiveness, and Social Awkwardness. You have to be smart to create video games, be super keen about details and precision, and not really care if you’re part of the cool-kids club. Soon after Nerds created the first computers were created, it was those same Nerds who helped create the first computer games.
I’d speculate that Geeks would be the next group that would be drawn to and be successful at Game Development, followed by Dorks and finally Dweebs. Obsessiveness is key as Game Development is so difficult you must have passion to keep at it.
Winnipeg as a community would be just like other cities in North America, having its share of Nerds, Geeks, Dorks, and Dweebs. It has a engineering history in Aerospace but Game Development came much later and required layers of expertise and the boldness of leaders to be established elsewhere before arriving in Winnipeg. Those layers and leaders will be subjects of the next batch of blogs posts to follow.
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