ConGregate 10

nut -> nert -> nerd

This will be a short one, folks, since I posted early to make the deadline for the Lunar Awards, Season 7, and because I spent the weekend at our local science fiction convention.

Cold Feet

The Bottom of the Basement Barrel

According to Etymonline,

also nurd, 1951, "a person lacking in social skills, fashion sense or both" (Partridge Dictionary of Slang). U.S. student slang, probably an alteration of 1940s slang nert "stupid or crazy person," itself an alteration of nut. The word turns up in a Dr. Seuss book from 1950 ("If I Ran the Zoo"), which may have contributed to its rise.

It was not a compliment. Though as seems to be the case with such things, let the outcasts find one another, reach some critical mass, and they become a community of their own. They co-opt the insults and turn them into badges of honor, inside that community.

I did not grow up in that community like Chris Offutt did. In the extended book version of this article, he describes how his parents would leave him and his siblings in the hotel room for a whole weekend while they were off swinging with the other nerd-couples (it was the 70s, y’all). I came of age in the AIDS-conscious 80s, the era of Just Say No to Drugs and the Satanic Panic. Until college, my only exposure to fandom was passive consumption of mass media and private scribblings and scrawls.

YIL: D&D prehistory

Yesterday I learned that Dungeons & Dragons started as a spy module supplement to the miniatures-based wargames that Gygax and friends were already playing. According to Bill Fawcett, the owners of two armies preparing to battle would sit in two separate rooms with a runner going back and forth. Each “general” would send a spy or a team of spies into the other’s castle. That’s where the obsession with blind mapping came from; it started as a player-vs-player mechanic, a way of extending and complexifying the preliminaries.

Whoever penetrated to the center first (like a capture-the-flag scenario) would get to see the other’s army list. Anyone who has played mini wargames knows that each mini has a point cost. This was originally developed as a way to keep people with more money from “cheating” by simply buying bigger armies (which is exactly what does happen in real life). The point totals for a specific battle are always too low, to force players into trade-offs, and knowing which trade-offs your opponent has made is a major advantage in optimizing your own trade-offs.

I wanted to ask the panel about TSR’s Marvel Superheroes system, but there wasn’t time.

TDBIL: LitRPG

One reason I wanted to ask about that game (other than the fact that I love it) is that the day before, I went to a panel with Matt Dinniman and Nancy Dunne, who write in a hybrid genre that I knew only from animes like Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? In this sub-sub-subgenre the characters know that they are characters, in the sense that they know they have stats, and those stats can go up and down, and more experience makes them go up.

From the article at tv.tropes:

The narration in a LitRPG work must abide by the rules of a game while filling it with conflict and drama. The important part is describing for readers the experience of playing that game and its associated mechanics as if the reader could play it themselves.

It’s optimized on both sides. Actual video games involve repetitive bullshit (aka “grinding”), which an author / anime can finesse as highlights, to give the flavor without actually having to experience the boredom. The gamers get just enough “crunch,” the feeling that they are embedded in a game with rules that they could win without the time commitment and frustration of actually playing a game that they could lose. And the more narrative types can just skip over the gamey commentary if they want to — at least in print. According to the authors, these things are really popular as audiobooks, including the power-up pings and (shocking to me) the verbatim reading of stat blocks.

The dopamine hit of leveling up is really important in this genre, as is the comparing of stats that drove so many discussions of sports and superhero comics in earlier eras of nerdity.

How many times have we seen this match-up? More than 17, I’m sure.

Like Star Trek characters, superheroes usually start out exceptional. What the LitRPG folks called “progression fantasy” is compressed into their origin story, and their ongoing adventures don’t generally involve a steady increase in power. So it might be interesting to see how that would play out. Which set of conventions and tropes would dominate?

As I write that, I’m realizing it’s a more meta version of the exact same “who would win?” arguments that always annoyed the crap out of me as a comics fan.

Anyway, it occurred to me that it might be fun to use that ruleset to moderate some superhero short stories. I have many, many notes from previous campaigns. Let me know if you would like to see any of those spilled out onto the electronic page.

I also just submitted a brand-new thing to Raconteur Press’s Super Generation anthology.

As a quick reminder, Storyletter’s Take Me There Anthology will be out later this week.

Anthology + Anniversary Incoming!!