My bank account is used for two separate commodities. The first half for groceries, ideally avocados and kale but usually Sweet and Spicy Doritoes and Ham and Cheese Lean Pockets. (At least I can pretend to be healthy.) The other half is a monthly spending of 100 dollars on Criterion Collection Blu-Rays, Nintendo 64 video games, complete anime boxsets (if you can find one under 250 dollars) posters of Raven from “Teen Titans,” and Junot Diaz and Margaret Atwood books. Most of my free-nights are spent shoving silver swords through the jugulars of griffins with intestinal tracts dangling from their beaks in “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt,” or reading Inio Asano’s “Oyasumi Punpun (Goodnight Punpun)” a manga series about a literal bird boy fluttering through adolescence on the website KissManga. With nerdism coming back into the mainstream via the cultural phenomenon of the fantasy epic/soft core porno “Game of Thrones” and the capabilities of catching the poison gas Pokémon Koffing at the Holocaust Museum some may actually start wearing the caveat of “nerd” proudly. It is as if having typically sup-par social skills and an affinity for backpacks in the shape of blue cartoon unicorns with rainbows tattooed on their ass have now become sources of bragging rights. While there is nothing detrimental in being a fan of certain movies, books, TV shows, video games, maybe owning a figurine or two of an anime schoolgirl with an affinity for killing alien fascists with a katana, it does become highly corrosive to your being once these commodities start becoming your sole sources of validation.
The embodiment of nerd culture taking over one’s selfhood is found in the Japanese term “otaku” which means a young person who is obsessed with computers or particular aspects of popular culture to the detriment of their social skills. Otaku’s are infamous for being shut-ins with barely a sliver of a social life who prefer to spend as much time as possible cultivating their collection of various pop-commodities such as manga, video games, anime etc., going to internet forums such as reddit or 4chan to argue how their opinion on the final season of “Fate Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works” is far superior to BigBuffyTeef845’s, or generally saturating themselves in nightlong benders of “Overwatch” playing or “Hunter X Hunter” binging. Again, moderately engaging in these aforementioned activities is not necessarily a virulent choice in lifestyle. It only becomes destructive once these “nerdisms” become one’s sole reason for existence. In Japan for example, a good deal of unemployed men in their 20s and 30s have a tendency to spend a disproportionate amount of their government welfare checks on “entertainment products” including an individual who spent almost 20,000 yen (256 dollars) of his welfare on mobile games, instead of food and water.
Spending your money and time on primarily “entertainment” pursuits can not only stifle your opportunities for professional/creative growth, but also stifle you from engaging in diverse and fulfilling social interactions such as dating, job connections and friendship cultivation. Famed animator Hayao Miyakzaki said on the subject of otakus, that they “don’t spend time watching real people”, characterizing them as “humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.” He also laments at how the Japanese Anime industry panders almost exclusively to otakus, churning out series with repetitive themes of excess such as zombie slaying and giant robot fighting, crafting characters with the same stale elements of nobility, bad-assery, self-insertism, and women characters who rather than having arcs of their own spend much of their screen time shoving their gargantuan cartoon breasts into the faces of their male protagonists. These formulas pandering to the isolationist and creatively bankrupt otaku have created what many have considered a “void” in terms of anime development, wherein every other series tends to be a carbon copy of established tropes and norms rather than paving its own directions.
Most mainstream video games follow similar formulas that pander to a select, mostly-male audience. They tend to be about macho buzzcutted white men or the rare-muscle bound woman (who may or may not use a bikini as battle armor) murdering hordes of Russians, robots or reptiles in succession on distant planets or Los Angeles. Video games have the addictive property of helping players embody someone much more elaborate than their real life selves. Instead of a Cocoa Puffs stacker at Wal-Mart, you are Commander Shepard, savior of the Milky Way galaxy. Instead of a college student with a biochemistry major that you were forced into because of your efforts to please your over-bearing father, you are the Dragonborn, the hero with the blood of dragons who will save the world from the Dark Worm. It can be obvious to see how oversaturation in these digital landscapes can border on the same level of psychedelic immersion as meeting a 12-armed blue God via your third eye after taking a hit of Dimethyltryptamine. So many find Skyrim or Azeroth more engaging than the real world, to the point that entire detox clinics have been set up to combat such prospects. Dr. Kimberly Young, Clinical Director for the Center of On-Line Addiction and author of “Caught in the Net: How to Recognize the Signs of Internet Addiction-And a Winning Strategy for Recovery” states that video game addiction is a “clinical impulse disorder” akin to gambling addictions, and that when video game addicts experience withdrawal from their gaming treks, they become “angry, violent, or depressed, refuse to eat, sleep or do anything.” Furthermore, Young adds that, like alcoholism, there is a “psychological component” to video game addiction, “knowing that I can escape or feel good about my life” thanks to these digital escapisms.
A subsequent consequence of gaming or any other entertainment hobby having a substantial grip on your life is an increased aggression towards those who would dare criticize it in any way. Case in point, the online harassment of Anita Sarkessian, creator of the web series Feminist Frequency. Her web series Tropes vs. Women focuses on critiquing various sexist video game tropes which include the over sexualization of female characters such as Ivy from “Soul Caliber” who fights in pieces of string flimsily squeezed solely onto her breast and crotch area, and the tendency to portray women as “background objects” ala stripper, prostitutes, bikini-models etc. in games such as “Grand Theft Auto,” “Far Cry,” and “Deus Ex: Human Revolution.” In response to her series, a group of gamers banding together under the flag of “gaming journalism reform and anti-censorship” known as GamerGate, began a stream of online harassment which included rape, death and mass-shooting threats towards Sarkeesian and other women in the game industry including Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, Leigh Alexander and Alisson Rapp. Sarkeesian stated on the subject of GamerGate and other internet harassers that “there’s a toxicity within gaming culture, and also in tech culture, that drives this misogynistic hatred, this reactionary backlash against women who have anything to say, especially those who have critiques and are feminists.”
Much of what drives this vitriolic response towards gaming criticisms sometimes simply asking to have greater female representation beyond just unautonomous sex objects in dingy nightclubs, may have to do with the video game obsessed internet harasser’s sense of detriment to their self-worth. In other words, when someone criticizes their favorite video games, they take it as an affront to themselves due to the fact that they have very little, if any, additional sources of identity. Because their selfhood depends so strongly on gaming with all of its tropes and standards intact, the harasser feels “victimized” and “attacked” whenever someone decides to take these elements of games apart. Therefore their only line of defense is to take to the keyboards and spam the “attacker” with threats of violence, virus attacks or SWATting, wherein a harasser calls in SWAT teams to their targets locations. Much of these factors can be correlated with political extremists, who are willing to enact scores of damage for the sake of protecting their ideals/identity since very little if anything else grounds them to the outside world.
However, like most religions and ideologies, simply partaking in hobbies such as video games, movies or anime does not necessarily entail putting yourself into the same categories of game addicts, internet harassers or jobless otakus. Yet the addiction to escapism is very much a real issue that has only been accentuated with the instant-gratification of internet accessibility. Considering that such escapist saturations have led to depression, directionlessness and at times, even rage/vitriol directed at others, a diversification for other life prospects is needed if one wishes to avoid these spiritual ruts. It is tempting to efface all of my external and internal struggles by hooking myself to a computer system filled with endless dragon-slaying, space-flying, and superhero sexcapades to my heart’s content. However the consequence of having my muscles atrophy and my mind congealing to a husk that can only process information with Spider Man trivia may prompt me to return the aforementioned Matrix to Best Buy.
