“And you call yourself a geek.”

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do, and I don’t need your permission to do so, no matter how many movie quotes I fail to recognize, or what my geek number is (pretty low, actually).

The thing is, no one can tell you what you are or aren’t.

For years, I didn’t consider myself a gamer, even though I spent a significant amount of my free time playing computer games. But I wasn’t a gamer the way my brother was a gamer; I played a combination of casual games and more “hardcore” games, and never played the newest games, because my computer was always too outdated for them (still is). I’ve always been more than a casual gamer, but less than a hardcore gamer, and I didn’t/don’t have a good name for what kind of gamer I was, so I didn’t make it part of my identity. Then I had a friend in college who found out I liked computer/video games, and insisted that I was, in fact, a gamer. I immediately resisted the label (labels are dumb, anyway), explaining all the above reasons ad nauseum, but he didn’t care.

I now occasionally call myself a gamer, but I still don’t really think of myself as a gamer. Gaming is an important part of my geek identity, but it’s not an identity I claim in its own right; it’s more like a convenient shorthand (which is really what a lot of labels boil down to in the end, isn’t it?). But what’s crucial here is not whether I meet some sort of gamer qualification, or whether merely playing games, of any type, regularly as a hobby makes me a gamer, it’s whether I choose that identity for myself. My college friend couldn’t force it on me, however hard he tried, though he did make me think more about how and why I choose my identities, and that's a valuable thing.

So, I’m a geek, right? At least, I claim a geek identity. To a certain extent, contrary to what I just said, this was initially forced on me. I was a nerd because my classmates said so, because I liked weird things, and I wasn’t very good at social interaction. But now there’s a whole community of people who not only have a shared experience of *cough* mean kids looking down at them for liking sci-fi, or Dungeons and Dragons, or whatever. They also have those interests in common that were once so different.

I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, especially fantasy. But it took me something like five years to finish the Lord of the Rings because it bored me to tears. I’m not especially into superhero comics. I didn’t get into D&D until adulthood, but I love it now. I cut my teeth on Star Trek: TOS reruns. I’ve never watched the updated Battlestar Galactica.

I’m not trying to board the Geek Train because it’s suddenly become cool to be a geek. I genuinely like a lot of geeky things. Not all of them, and I make no bones about that. My brother (who frequently questions my Geek Cred) and I had a discussion about the aforementioned “geek number” thing and its limitations. If you take the quiz, it asks things like (I’m paraphrasing, forgive me) “Have you seen all of [insert Geeky TV Show here].” What, because I kind of lost interest in Star Trek: DS9 after a few seasons, I’m not geeky enough? I actually enjoyed Voyager a lot, but I still didn’t see all of it. While we’re at it, a lot (A LOT) of Star Trek fans disliked Voyager, and look down on fans who like it.

Whose standards shall we judge by?